One of the highlights at GDC 2017 was the Timeline demo.

Timeline is a powerful new visual tool that allows you to create gorgeous cinematic content, cut scenes and gameplay sequences using your game objects, animations, sounds and scenes. It allows artists to focus on storytelling and cinematics, as opposed to coding.

Timeline’s track-based sequencing tool applies a “drag and drop” approach to choreographing animations, sounds, events, videos and more. This makes it faster to create beautiful cut-scenes and procedural content. It also has features for animation and audio, auto-keying and a multi-track interface with the ability to lock and mute tracks. What’s more, Timeline is extensible enabling you to create your own tracks to drive whatever systems you have in your game. You can make a Timeline clip to represent practically anything – and have those clips repeat, scale and blend together, all taking advantage of what you get with the Timeline interface.

Timeline is one of the many new features that will be available in the 2017.1 release, and you can among the first to try it.

How to join?

To get access, simply sign up to our open beta test. By joining our open beta, you won’t just get access to all the new features. You will also help us find bugs ensuring the highest quality software.

As a starting point, we’ve also provided a guide to being an effective beta tester for easy reference.