Click Me

Background

After a long, day job induced, hiatus from Unity 3D, I wanted to put my first unity project to bed before moving onto my next project (a facebook unity integration). After much clean up and fuss it stabilized and has bee posted to it’s own web page. I wanted the game to look clean, which meant I wanted the following:

• The player’s score should be displayed in the web page, not within the unity client
• Starting a new game should be done from buttons on the web page
• Controlling the “view” (rotation & zoom)

So this meant that I needed to post data from Unity to the web page, and call functions within unity from the web page.

Putting out

The first thing to do was figure out how to get player’s score to be displayed on the web page itself. This turned out to be fairly simple. You need 2 basic things

• A function defined in the web page for Unity to call
• use the “Application.ExternalCall” function from within your unity projects

Well, you also need to know how to change text in a web page, which it turns out to be pretty simple.

Changing IDentities

Some fantasy series I once read used a plot device whereby if you knew a things name you could control it. Well, in the web, if you give a thing a name, you can do all sorts of strange and wonderful things to it.

In the web page, giving something a name, is done by using the id tag. The official definition of ID is found here.

This may be best explined in an example. In my game page I have a “Red player score” and a “Blue player score”. In the web page I highlight each score by bolding it.

<b id="RPSScoreTxt">Blue Player Score</b>

Just a rule in the fantasy land that is HTML, if you know the name of something you can completely change it. Everything in an HTML page is an object, or more specifically, and html page is represented programmatically within the web browser as an object hierarchy, or Document Object Model (DOM for short).

When the page loads (remember this detail)  the text “Blue Player Score” will be displayed in it’s location within the page.

if you know an object’s name you can get a handle to that object within the DOM. Once you have the handle to an object you can  fiddle with the attributes and data attached to that object.

Will it come when I call it?

Having an element with a named ID allows you to get a reference to that object within scripts. Within javascript the object “document” represents the web page within the javascript is running. getElementByID is a function attached to the document object.

What is all powerful in a name?

The next trick is know what to change.

In HTML there is an attribute to every object that is nearly all powerful. The innerHTML attribute allows you to modify or replace the contents of an object. In this the inner HTML of is just some text. (But I did an experiment where unity replaced a simple text entry with an entire table).

function SetRPScore(arg){
 document.getElementById('RPSScoreTxt').innerHTML = ' ' + arg;
 }

So, if you make the call

SetRPScore("i did i bla bla");

The text “Blue Player Score” would be changed to ” i did i bla bla”

Remember the above function needs to be defined within <script> </script> block.

<script language="javascript1.1" type="text/javascript">

function SetRPScore(arg){
 document.getElementById('RPSScoreTxt').innerHTML = ' ' + arg;
 }
</script>

That was the hard part

now you have an object with a name you can use to get a handle to. You have a way to change that object, you have a function that takes an argument. The only thing you need to know is the Application.ExternalCall.  That function takes 2 parameters, the name of the function, and a parameter to pass to the function.

Application.ExternalCall("SetRPScore", 22 );

Bottom line (of code)

so if you want your unity game to make a change, such as set score, in the web page just do the following

• In your HTML page, give a chunk of text (or anything else) an ID
• Create a function(again in your html plage) that changes the innerHTML of that ID
• Call that function from within your unity plug-in via Application.ExternalCall

And that’s how it is done. To see the full details look at the source of my Aqueme game

Come back later and read my next segment, which go through the more terror prone activity of making a call into the unity plugin from the web page.

Where to Developers get their info?

You can take official courses in universities, and from organizations like Full Sail and Digipen (and LA Film School, and Art Institute, and check your local university).  Or you can get a traditional degree in computer science, graphic design, and make sure to pick up classes on game development and interactive design.This is a great way to go if you are nearing, or just finished high school.

What if you already way beyond that?

What if you have heard how easy tools like Flash, Unity3D and Torque are to use, and you want to know more.

What if you are just curious?

What if you just need to do some research, but don’t really need a working knowledge?

Well, guess what, you have arrived at a time just when a golden era of community supported development is on the rise. or if you like sound bytes

Let google be your guide, teacher and mentor

In other words “If you want to do something with a technology, someone somewhere has likely done it already and  have bogged about it, and likely shot a video tutorial posted on youtube and vimo”.

Instructing you : opposite directions

Over the past 2 years there have been two completely divergent trends: 1 away from centralized sites with specific topics, and 2, seemly contrary, the emergence of generalized sites with tons of information on how to do everything.

For developers, or the developer curious, or the would-be developer, improvements in google allow anyone to  find whatever they are looking for, no mater wherever it is. Why is this earth shattering? well, in the stone age, before google (like 1998), if you wanted to know how to do something, you likely had to physcially travel to a centralized repository of information, and manually search through physical materials(it was called a LIBRARY). Interesting thing, there is a branch of science, and at least 2 industries and business models that exist to support that method of finding out how to do something.

But now it is the 21st century, and thank the internet we don’t have to do THAT anymore. As liberating as libraries where, free internet search engines are a tru quantum leap.  Now most info comes from individual sites, found through specific google searches. If we want to know something, we google it. If an individual wants to know ANYTHING, all they have to do is google it. (Sidebar, there are some interesting behavior shifts going on. Now you do not need to understand, or know how to do something before embarking on that thing, you can just google as you go. Think of it as Just-in-time-Know-How).

Back in the library days, information had to be researched, gathered, co-lated, and organized in a manner that made it easy to search by humans. Developers of technology spent large portions of their budget on documentation and training. Now with internet search technology, as soon as someone learns how to do something they can post it on their blog, or create a youtube video. Anyone anywhere on the internet can find that tasty tidbit of information. (assuming the author uses good keywords, and the searcher does to)

It takes a community to raise a game developer

How does this notion applyto game development? Most organizations that make technology for game development now-a-days rely on “their community” for a large poart of information, education and training materials. For a given technology there will be a main wiki, a primary forum, but then also dozens to thousands of individual blogs and websites. Excellent examples are the communities that support the Unity 3D , and Flash (action script) technologies. The best way to find out anything about these technologies is to start with google. Of course there are some basic tutorials provided by the purveyors of each respective technology, but the tutorials found on the web are specific to each individual goal.

Is it all coming back together?

The flip side of this is the emergence of websites like ehow, howstuffworks.com, soyouwanna.com, etc.. A few years ago people started to notice that the ad revenue for youtube videos that provided tutorials was very different than the rest of the whole site. Ad sellers, and buyers, learned that you where much more likely to sell something to someone asking the question “how do I”. This has coincided with a re-emergence of the  good old yankee inclination to tinker, referred to in it’s current incarnation as “the Maker Movement”.

Both of these methods of learneing are supported by a growing internet culture of “learn & teach”. When people learn something, figure out how to do something, they blog it, tweet it, shoot videos of it.. These blogs, tweets and videos feed both the individuals, and the big web sites like ehow.

Another emerging trend: professional Micro “how to videos”:

There is a small community of videographers and writers, mostly in and around Hollywood, that shoot short video tutorials. “Microproductions” I think they are called. The deal is, when a website like ehow encounters a prospectively profitable set of “how to” queries, they will contract a videographer to go film a bunch of very short how to videos. A videographer that specialises in this, is often a TV or Cinema camera opertor between jobs. They will get hired to shoot several dozen how to videos each day. Each individual video might only net 20 bucks or so from the site (like ehow). The production quality does not have to be high, and they can be done in masse. So a single day’s shooting can net a few hundred bucks, if the videographer is efficient and can direct the subject well.

Also some technical writers are turning to this business model. LearnMeSilly.com is a successful example of how technical instruction may be done from now on. One of that web site’s principals created some,  tutorials for Unity 3D. Now the author is publishing  a book.

The book will get published and find its way into Libraries.

I coined this phrase a year or so ago “Welcome to Early 21st century pop culture, now with video tutorials!”. (reference to www.knowyourmeme.com).

An interesting new title is starting to show up in game companies. Chief Economist.

Virtual economies are becoming a foundational component of game design. Like when Storytelling and Music where added to games, virtual economies are expanding the appeal of games to broader audiences.

Games make strange cubefellows

Ok, that was a terrible play on Charls Dudly Warner’s quote “Politics makes strange bedfellows”, The point I’d like to make is that modern games draw from a very wide verity of skills and backgrounds. In a game company boardroom, if you don’t see a fohawk in tattered denim next to a receding hairline in a finely pressed business suit something is wrong. The diversity allows for the creation of experiences that appeal to a broad audience. Sometimes through depth, sometimes through simplicity.

It’s not like we haven’t done this before

Every time the industry adds a discipline to the standard game development team, the market for games expands. The experiences provided by games become more engaging, and meaningful.
The first computer games where created mostly by programmers and games appealed to a base audience.

Then came Writers, authors, storytellers. Text stories where adaped easily to the primitive computer systems used to develop and play computer games. Games started telling compelling stories and their appeal expanded (Zork). People who enjoyed an engaging story found a new medium, and the market for games

Visual artists entered games, and we got graphics. Games became visually appealing, then as graphics got better, visually compelling. Musicians entered games and we got sound and music. Recently community, social networks, and sociologists, in the form of community managers, have entered the industry. Games are creating tight feedback systems between players and developers (many times erasing the lines between the two). Games are appealing to a very broad market base (farmville? zynga’s games)

Each time the games industry adds a new discipline, the appeal of games broadens.

Hot Game executive title: Chief Economist

Companies like imvu and linden labs live and die on their virtual economy, it just makes sense that they have economists on staff. Only these folks don’t (or shouldn’t) work for the CFO (although the CFO may be the only one on staff who can comprehend much of their jargon). A chief economist has a lot to contribute to game design (also an economist can talk to a VC in ways that will nearly guarantee extra funding

Wait, something is not right here

Games have constantly challenged every new entrant discipline: Challenged their fundamentals. [editors note: English just does not have a comfortable, or elegant, way of dealing with the relations between compound, nested, or unbounded sets. I site as examples of my frustration the invention of "all y'all" and the use of "dudes"  in the US west or "y'all" in the US south]

Each time a discipline is added to games, a fundamental assumption about that discipline is discovered, sometimes painfully, to be invalid.  Games are non-linear, temporal, real time, collaborative, experiences, often involving not just an individual but groups of people large and small.

Writers entering the game industry encountered interactivity. Players play games. They are players are not a reader, listener, or viewer. And, unfortunately for the screenwriter, players are not actors.  Players (gleefully) refuse to respond to direction or do what they are told.  Interaction, choices, break the linearity many storytelling mediums are based on.Writers have learned to break stories up into little bytes that can be broken up into “missions”, “quests” or “levels”. Writers have learned to let stories unfold out of order, from multiple viewpoints, and write several alternate sequences that go beyond simple branching. Story telling games have become rich, and can appeal to both broad and narrow audiences.

Some may argue that good story tellers jump back and forth in time, but the reader will still turn to page 56 when they finish page 55.  The live theater goer will still see act 3 right after act 2. One of my favorite debates still rage: are games a story telling form or a sport (with no real story context). There are those that will argue that sports are a form of story telling. (personally: those folks need some mind expanding experiences)

Music encountered similar challenges when added to games. The time it takes a player to do something is unknown. “How many measures does that combat sequence take” is not a question a composer can ask in a game setting.  For a composer this represents a huge challenge, how long do you know how long your score is supposed to be? When is it exciting? when is it contemplative? How much time to I have to transition? If I make loops, short loops become irritating, long loops never get heard and get cut off in awkward and jarring manners.  Musicians have  very little information up front, they don’t even known when the mood in a game is going to change. An exciting combat situation is often defined by the mood changing from dire to victorious in an instant.

Music systems have been created that can help dynamically compose and change the mood of music during game play. With the application of these technologies games became more fun, and music games became an audience expanding genre unto themselves. Games gained a richness and depth that added mood and tone.

Enter the Economists

So enter the dire breach my dear, the unsuspecting economists.

Lionel Robbins in his  1932 essay he defines economics as:

“the science which studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.”^[3] Scarcity means that available resources are insufficient to satisfy all wants and needs.  The subject thus defined involves the study of choices as they are affected by incentives and resources.

In virtual economies there is no scarcity. Alternative uses are often a null concept. Lionel Robbins concludes that

Absent scarcity and alternative uses of available resources, there is no economic problem.

There is no relevant cost of goods within virtual economies. Virtual items do not “wear out” so there is no loss of value of an item over time due to diminished capacity. There is an excellent article in venture beat about this.

I find I must take issue with one point repeatedly brought up(this was also mentioned in the VGS09 summit). A point keeps being made that “real” economies do not have sinks and sources. I postulate that real economies DO have sinks and sources. In a real economy a source would be the controlled addition of new resources, or the ability to exchange currency. That is, if I go out and dig up some gold, I have a choice of exchanging that gold for US dollars, Euros, rupees or what have you. I am adding a new resource to that economy. If I play the part of a government, as such I have the ability to print money, and have the ability to take money out of circulation.

I learned at a very tender age that money is not real, it not even a measure, it is merely a means of standardizing units of work to allow for and easy and uniform exchange of goods and services. (there is a certain type of genius when a mother can make a concept like this obvious to a 5 year old. If your curious, ask and I’ll tell you the anecdote she used)

Most governments have fairly broad simple mechanisms to source and synch money into and out of the economy, and these mechanisms are balanced by some very subtle and complex mechanisms to measure and control the value of that money when compared to goods and services.

This exactly the role a game 0perator takes on when running their own virtual economy.

Real economists are green, with envy

A huge benefit economists have in virtual economies, as pointed out by Bill Grosso, is that virtual economists can see EVERYTHING. Every transaction in a virtual economy is known, and all the meta data about that transaction is also known. Bill calls it “perfect knowledge”. Virtual economists are the envy of “real” economists. In reality we can not know fundamental facts about what is being spent on what by whom, we can only really guess.

New shiny thing: same old shiny result

Now we have games that have virtual economies as a fundamental part of game play. What has the industry gained from it?

A whole lot.

Some of the fastest growing games of 2009, and some of the more profitable new game companies <zynga> use virtual economies.

Virtual economies are used to lower the barrier to entry into games, and to allow players, community members, to spend as much as they want.

So when games added Music, Physics, Graphics their appeal broadened to new audiences, economics in games is expanding the appeal and relevance of games to more and broader audiences.

Some References:

How to do that in Unity3d? well the unity 3d web forums gave me a hint.

Bottom line is to use the Coroutine function yeild, and the Lerp function off of Vector3D.

what I do is instantiate an object from a prefab, then call a function called growObj.

Here is my GrowObj function (NOTE: I leave off the type of the first parameter so it could be called with any object that contains a .transform member)

/* groObj function, grow an object fom nothing  to some destination size over a period of time
    go is an object to grow
    toScale is the destination scale preferably the object's original local scale
*/
function growObj( go, toScale: Vector3)
{
	var i = 0.0;
	var rate = 1.0 / GrowTime;
	var StartScale = Vector3.zero;
	while ( i <= 1.0)
	{
		i += Time.deltaTime * rate;
		go.transform.localScale = Vector3.Lerp(StartScale, toScale, i);
		yield;
	}
}

Objects grow one at a time

	 for (var z = zStart ; z < zEnd; z++ ){
	    var pos = Vector3 (0, 0, z) * 4;
	    var clone;
	    clone = Instantiate(prefab, pos, Quaternion.identity);
	    var DestScale : Vector3 = clone.transform.localScale; // capture the original size of the object
	    yield growObj(clone,DestScale);
	}

all objects appear and grow together

	 for (var z = zStart ; z < zEnd; z++ ){
	    var pos = Vector3 (0, 0, z) * 4;
	    var clone;
	    clone = Instantiate(prefab, pos, Quaternion.identity);
	    var DestScale : Vector3 = clone.transform.localScale; // capture the original size of the object
	    growObj(clone,DestScale);
	}

Yup the only difference in the two loops is the yield statement in front of growObj.

That’s all for now. I hope to make a “bubble” grow function some time, where the object will overshoot destination scale once, then undershoot the destination scale once

What we have here on tis page was developed in 14 evenings (non consecutive), 2 maby 3 hours a night. It is a simple turn based 3d board game, very similar to “Go” or “Reversi”. In this version you play against a computer AI (a really dumb one). I plan on posting a dev blog showing how the game progressed at the end of each evening, with code snips, but honestly I’d rather work on the last few milestones, like get save games, network play, and facebook integration all completed.

Unity3D is a developers dream

From the perspective of an experienced software engineer, this is one very powerful tool. The power comes from how producetive any individual can be, how “open” it is, in supporting lots of different media. Personally I have to give a big hats off to the scripting reference. Every function has at least one example. As an old unix hack who grew up on the original BSD “man” pages, code snippits are like O2, without them you can’t breathe, having lots of them makes you giddy and energized.

But you can’t say enough about the community.

Unity developers blog, they youtube, they twitter, they IRC. Specificlly Will Goldstone, and his video tutorials at learnmesilly.com.

Give it a whirl:

To Play:
Goal: “AQueme-ulate” as many purple cubes as you can. While the red cube player does the same.

How:

• You can “take” red cubes and turn then purple by “trapping” them between two of your purple cubes.
• Simply click a green blob to turn cubes purple (and place a new purple cube in the grid).  The green blobs show you places where you can “trap” red cubes. Any red cubes trapped by that new purple cube, in any direction, will turn purple.
• The red player (A really simple computer AI) will then take his turn. You will briefly see his moves, then it will be your turn again.
• The game starts with 8 cubes placed in the center of a floating play field. Purple player gets to start.

Notes:

• This play field is a 4 by 4 by 4 grid. (the playfield can be as big as I want, bigger boards are really boring)
• The game is over when one of the players can no longer move.
• You can rotate the grid using the A S D W keys, the arrow keys and by holding down the right mouse button
• you can zoom in and out using the Z X keys, or the mouse wheel.
• There is an extra thing you can do in the game, it is a bit of an easter egg. Take a good look above the game grid. No, the button on the table does not do a thing.
• For some reason this particular build will crash google when ran chrome on Vista

Credits:

• All programming, original art, and production by Talon
• Non original art thanks to the Unity3D dev team
• Sound design: Dugan Dolbier

But not all is roses

One thing I will say, as much as I enjoy using Unity3d, geeze it needs a debugger. 90% of the content in this game is generated on the fly from 3 or 4 base objects. Placing the orbs for the user to click on uses a very rudimentary  variant of the A* algorithm in 3 space (did I say Very rudimentary). I blew 3 evenings (that’s just about 20% of dev time for you producers out there keeping track)  just in debugging, finding things that would have taken a few min with a normal debugger.

There are lots of tricks you can do in Unity to use the editor as a debugger, but there is still no call stack viewer, runtime object browser, breakpoint setter etc. etc. Unity 3D does have a debug class that lets you print out stuff and set breakpoints, but as I had to explaine to  my wife:

it’s like wood schulpting,

only with a chainsaw,

at night,

in a dark room,

with only one window.

But you are wearing safety glasses,

and thick leather gloves

and a facemask, helmet,

nice comfie Dr. Martin’s workboots

but  the safety glasses are yellow tinted

So Hopefully the mono team, and/or the unity team will provide us all with some good debugging tools (gotta run on windows and MAC not just linux), or let us use the free MS Dev Studio tools or something like that.

I feel OK complaining about a tool I’ve been using for free, because I’m sold. I’m buying my copy tomorrow morning, and Hey, I still have 15 days left on my trial.

Another option is to upload the web page that Unity 3d creates when you build a web project. If you upload both the file and the page. you can insert the web page as a link into your blog using the wordpress “Add Media” feature

Now That is Slick

And here is how you do it.

First you need to collect some things.

1. make a picture of your project. Run your project in Unity, alt+printscreen to capture an image of the project. Paste that into your favorite image editor. Even use Paint if you have to (yuck).
2. After you do a web build in Unity you’ll need to upload BOTH the web page Unity creates, as well as the .unity3d file
3. So that’s 3 uploads total

Here is why I upload them into the WordPress media library rather than directly into the post. You need the file URL for the web page. You’ll need to feed that as a link in your post.

Now assuming you have the shadowbox plugin installed simply do the following:

1. Insert picture into your blog using WordPress’s “Add an Image” or “Add Media” feature
2. Open the media library Either by clicking on the star icon, or opening the media library link in a new tab.  NOT by clicking on the media link on wordpress menu. we just need a link from the media library, not actual media.
3. “show” the .html page you uploaded, then select and copy the file URL for your media. If you used the “insert media” function, simply click the show link, then click the “file url” button, select and copy the URL.
4. Now go back to your blog post,  click on the picture you uploaded
5. hit the “link” button
6. In the URL text entry box, paste the URL you selected
7. Close the link box
8. Now switch over to HTML view because you need to add the tag rel=”shadowbox” to the URL
9. In HTML view go find the code for the link in the image, just after the opening “<a” insert the following: rel="shadowbox"
10. Preview your post,  make some other additions and publish your work!

Hats off to Will Goldstone and his learn unity 3d site

When you build a project in Unity3d, select the web build, and pick a seporate folder for unity to put the output file into.

In Wordpress, in Site Admin, click the media link, and upload new media, browse to directory you told unity to dump the files. Select and upload the “.unity3d” file

When you downloaded the Wordpress plugin from the Unity support site there is a readme file. That readme file contains examples on the tags you need to place in your blog posts.

here are the instructions from the readme.txt file that comes with the plugin

=== Usage Instructions ===

With the plugin installed and activated as part of your WordPress blog you can start embedding Unity Web Player content in your posts. Embedding content within your post is done by using a simple tag structure:

Please view the full post to see the Unity content.

The outer tag declares the existence of Unity Web Player content, the name/value pairs you provide then determine what content is displayed and how. There is only one required parameter, the src URL for the content to be displayed, all other parameters are optional and if not provided default values will be used instead.

When adding any of the optional parameters please note that the order you list them is not important. Simply provide each parameter in name=”value” format, there should be no spaces before or after the equals sign and the value provided should always be wrapped in double-quotes (the ” character). Additionally you need to separate each of the name/value pairs with an empty space. For example, here is a tag set where the src, height and width are all specified:

Please view the full post to see the Unity content.

=== Usage Instructions ===

With the plugin installed and activated as part of your WordPress blog you can start embedding Unity Web Player content in your posts. Embedding content within your post is done by using a simple tag structure:

\[WP_UnityObject src="http://www.yourdomain.com/yourfile.unity3d" \/\]

The outer tag declares the existence of Unity Web Player content, the name/value pairs you provide then determine what content is displayed and how. There is only one required parameter, the src URL for the content to be displayed, all other parameters are optional and if not provided default values will be used instead.

When adding any of the optional parameters please note that the order you list them is not important. Simply provide each parameter in name=”value” format, there should be no spaces before or after the equals sign and the value provided should always be wrapped in double-quotes (the ” character). Additionally you need to separate each of the name/value pairs with an empty space.

When you upload content into the WordPress Media library, it will give you the URL to your content.

Soo…. let’s see how it works

Please view the full post to see the Unity content.

Did it work?

Well, unfortunately more often than not you’ll get an error downloading the file.
Reading the developer’s  unity 3d blog it seems some people have had success others may be having the same problem as here.

Well, here is one way to do it. The Devs at Unity3D created a word press plugin.

Unfortunately you can’t just download the plugin and installit straight away. You have to unpack the file you get from Here, then unzip that file locally, then re zip the WP_UnityObject directory.

Once you have done that, you need to upload and install the plugin into your wordpress siet. That’s fairly easy.

Enter WordPress site admin, like you normally would to add a new post.  Open the “Appearance” options if not already open, then click on the “Plugins” link

Click the “Add New” link that just appeared

now click on the “Upload” link that is at the top of the “Install Plugins” page that just loaded.

A new page is loaded, on that page will be a “Choose File” button. Click it

A windows file browser window will come up, go forth and find the zip file you created from above, click OK.

Then back at the “Install Plugin” click Install Now

You _should_ see a new page come up with happy messages about the plugin being installed.

Then click the “activate plugin” link

And there you are.

NOTE: if things get hozed up. you’ll need to go into the WordPress directory and delete the plugin directory and files, and start over.

For me, I’m hosting at GoDaddy. You log into to the hosting manager site. Got to file manager, browse around to where you installed word press, find the directory titled “wp_content” It will have the “plugins” directory in it.  If installing the plugin fails, you’ll need to go into the plugins directory and delete the “WP_Unityobject” directory, and everyting in it.

That is the Theory anyway. In part 2 we find out that it does not work…

Sure it has it’s bugs, and problems like any software, but they are few and far between.

One huge advantage Unity has is the sheer number of blogs and posts and information for developers. I have to say Will Goldstone’s posts at LearnMeSilly.com are some of the best “Zero to Hero” tutorials I have ever seen. He is writing a book about Unity I hope he is able to make a comfortable living doing what he has been doing. I know the unity community owes him a lot.

I was able to learn everything I needed to know about Unity in 3 days to start development on a game. What was amazing to me, is that I started this project with a sketch and a plan. and after 15 days. I had a playable game that acutally looked a lot like my sketch.

Part was because Unity is so easy to use, and in my mind that makes it powerful, but also in part due to the sheer amount of content that can be absorbed and used by unity.

But now I need to figure out how to get a unity build to display in a wordpress post. Stay Tuned

Alas it is just another opportunity to

Make a fool out of myself

by “predicting” some future elements of MMOs. And since I orignally developed this presentation in 2008, it is waaaayy out of date.

Anatomy of the MMO 1.7.6 Futures

If you read this series, I hope you found it worth reading. I would be excited if you found it interesting, and even comment worthy.