👋 Hi, I Am Simon "Darkside" Jackson I am a developer focusing on Mixed Reality Solutions and the Spatial Internet/MetaVerse working at Ethar, the premier XR Expereince Platform providers. I have published several Unity titles, including Mastering Unity 2D Game Development and Unity UI Essentials, more to come in 2023!! New automation title for 2023 Accelerating Unity Through Automation I am currently focused on building the Reality Toolkit which is a cross-platform Mixed Reality framework for building XR apps in Unity for a majority of platforms, including: Quest, Pico, HoloLens, Magic Leap, Mobile and more. The Framework is built from the foundation I developed for Microsoft's Mixed Reality Toolkit V2 which evolved into the XRTK and has now advanced even further with the Reality Collective. I also maintain and publish the Service Framework (in the Reality Collective) which is the best and most performant way to build projects in Unity. I have been a Microsoft Mixed Reality MVP since 2014 (Since 2004 with the change in programs) I am honored to be one of the first Microsoft Game Development Ambassadors since the program launched in 2021, helping devs with the MS Game Dev stack. For several years I have been an Xbox MVP helping the dev community get up and running with publishing to Xbox/Windows. Which has now been merged with the Microsoft Xbox Ambassadors program where I continue to engage with the Xbox team. I publish and maintain the Unity UI Extensions project, packaging up the best the community has to offer for Unity UI components, utilities and "stuff". I blog "fairly" regularly on my Personal blog about all things game development related or just cool tech. Amongst the various public projects I have worked on (sooo many) the one I was most proud of is the Fizzyo project, making games and a game framework to gamify the treatment of Cystic Fibrosis for kids, so much fun.

🖥️ Fav Tech Stack C# Unity MonoGame Mixed Reality (AR/VR/XR) Game Development Xbox Development / ID@Xbox Asset development Unreal (in progress)

  

My YouTube channels Unity UI Extensions - dedicated channel for all things Unity UI Extensions based. The Darkside of MonoGame - lots of MonoGame helper videos, tutorials, demos and more. The Darkside of VR - support channel for the Microsoft Mixed Reality Toolkit (kinda deprecated now) SimonDarksideJ - My personal channel for random shares

DarkGenesis blog posts The Automation series - for getting to grips with GitHub Actions and Azure Pipelines. Creating your own blog on GitHub Pages Series - How to build your own free blog on GitHub. All the MonoGame content - Everything you wanted to know about MonoGame and more. All the Unity blogs - Sooo much Unity.