The first meetup of the year will be lead by Michael C. Neel covering extending Unity with custom editors and file format support:

Over the holiday break I worked on a TMX map importer for Unity, called UTiled.  This session will cover the basics of extending Unity to add support for a custom file format, creating specialized editors for native and custom components, and some general tips on dealing with serialization issues in Unity.

I’ll also go into UTiled and the basics of rendering a tile map in Unity, both as a collection of 2D sprites and as a 3D mesh, and the pros / cons of each approach.

UTiled is available as an open source project, and can be downloaded from the Bitbucket UTiled Project page.  There isn’t much documentation yet, but Mike and Dylan created an overview video on using UTiled with Unity:

The meetup will be held at the Technology Cooperative located in the Knoxville Old City at 130 W. Jackson Ave.  As always we will start at 2PM and open with a Show ‘n Tell where everyone can show a bit of their in progress game, favorite tool, mechanic they love in another game, or anything they find helpful and want to share with the group.