I’ve now spent a few days rebuilding my web game TaylorTurret in the public game engine Unity. As always, when you finally find the right tool for something, you spend a lot of time wondering why you didn’t do it this way in the first place. This thing is really amazing! It does all the lighting, rendering, model management, sound, level building and so forth from what’s really a pretty decent GUI. And then you can code the parts that actually need to be coded in a few different languages, including the (evil) JavaScript, but more promisingly C# and a weird python derivative called Boo.
Plus, I found something truly great, which is the ADL 3D repository. This is a repo of really good 3d models for simulation environments collected across government (seems like mostly DoD) projects and available to YOU for FREE. This is run by the Advanced DIstributed Learning labs, which is a DoD project that I wasn’t aware of before, but seems to be quietly making a serious run at the kind of computer-enabled education tech which I’m completely fascinated by and is being done with infinitely more PR heat (but I seriously doubt better actual results) by the MOOC community.
So I’ve got a game design, some models, and I’m following along happily with the Space Shooter tutorial series at Unity. Seems like a good day to me!