On a lovely Friday two weeks ago I took off work and sat down to make the intro level of seidt.quest and write about it.

Don’t go looking for that post. I never wrote it. Unfortunately I had made some bad choices and the whole thing didn’t go anywhere 🥲 But today, I tried again and succeeded!

Let me tell you how it all went down.

Choosing a web-compatible Game Engine

There are a couple of choices:

• ❌ Unreal Engine has ditched web support

• ✅ Unity has first party WebGL2 support

• ✅ Babylon.js is the most JavaScripty and has an impressive Minecraft demo

• ❌ bevy is out because my Rust is rusty

At first, I made the sensible choice 😉

And we’re sailing!—into an iceberg.

I chose Babylon because of JavaScript.

That in itself is just not a good reason. The docs start off configuring webpack. I quickly found the right piece of documentation (it’s a lot) and knew what to install and how to import it so it would work with my simple esbuild setup. I followed the tutorial and got some things on screen, but eventually gave up after a few hours.

I had almost nothing to show, all fun and motivation was gone by this point.

Back to step 0

I decided on a proven commercial game engine: Unity.

Within 2 hours, all this happened:

1. Installed Unity Hub via homebrew

2. Installed Unity for M1 and the WebGL plugin

3. Watched random tutorials at 1.5x speed

4. Created a simple plane with a player and obstacles

5. Added scripts for controlling the player with keyboard or gamepad

6. Exported my scene for web

7. Played the scene at 60fps with a gamepad in Safari on my MacBook Air

8. Picked up my jaw from the floor

Wow. I’m seriously impressed how well this worked.

HOLY SHIT! Using the right tool made all the difference!

Compared two 2 weeks ago, I’m so happy to have something resembling a video game on my screen. Now, I’m energized to focus on the actual gameplay. But that’s for another post!

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