On stage at its flagship developer conference, Unite Boston, a slew of eight Unity executives revealed their roadmap for the next six to nine months.

Led by Unity's technical director, Lucas Meijer, the group lifted the lid on exactly where Unity is investing its effort and research for the forseeable future.

The idea is that by equipping Unity developers with this knowledge, they can begin a project with some assurance that a required Unity feature or functionality is on the horizon - and plan accordingly.

Version 5.3

For version 5.3, which is set for release on 8 December this year, besides more bug fixing the Unity team promise a new 2D physics effector that will provide 2D bouyancy and fluid-flow forces.

A new 2D placeholder asset creation tool will allow easy creation of primitives like diamonds and n-sided polygons for 2D game prototyping.

In animation, 5.3 will include workflow improvements where developers can specify a reference frame for additive animation, alongside authoring for additive animation clips.

There will also be support for direct import and evaluation of Euler rotation curves, and the ability to map the pose of a humainoid avatar into another avatar.

Version 5.4

Further on the horizon, Unity 5.4 is set for release on 16 March 2016. This will include 9-slice sprites for 2D games, as well as a new editor window to replace the sprite packer window that will "provide an interfact to ease the workflow of tagging sprites into different atlases."

There will also be a new cinematic sequencer tool to allow the authoring and playback of sequences of animation and audio clips, plus an IMGUI debugger.

To read the full roadmap in detail, you can find it on Unity's official website.