2D Port

Published August 29, 2015
Advertisement
So, I was really looking forward to export to WebGL, but it appears they call it a Beta for a reason!
Turns out Unity's WebGL exporter is not where it needs to be just yet, so I'll give this one a pass, for now.

That being said, here's something that's been lurking in the back of my mind for a bit.
At the end of WoA II, I had realized that my idea would've probably worked best using 3D instead of 2D, so I set out to do WoA III using 3D, but I'm having second thoughts about this.

Throughout the production, I felt I had much less of a grasp over 3D than I would hope for, and more importantly, that my game wasn't really a 3D game. Sure, cubes fall to their doom, but couldn't this just be closing walls?

After receiving today's scores (and being disappointed with mine for a number of reasons), I've started reading through the judges' comments, and a few of them listed items that were caused by 3D issues that annoyed me too during production. Add to this that I feel 3D really didn't add much to the game and you end up with a somewhat angry me trying to figure it all out.

In an effort to verify my claims, I've toyed with the idea of 'porting' the game as a 2D game instead. 2 hours in, I ended up with this:



Apologies for the accidental soundtrack, although kudos to whoever figures out the artist!

So, I can live with the low art score, I'm really not much of an artist sadly, and I chose to go at it alone, so shame on me!
To a degree, I guess I can live with the theme score, though I didn't feel like I had cheated the theme.

What I'm trying to figure out is really these small points here and there that were lost either in gameplay or user experience because of poor controls. Jumping, for example, didn't add much depth to the game, but it being enabled, and the funky 3D collisions used by Unity ended up pushing the player way higher than it should, so I axed that by turning it 2D.

There's still a lot of tweaking and re-implementation to do, but I'm confident this will make for a better game in the end, and who knows, maybe 2D rendering will dodge most of the WebGL exporter's issues?
Previous Entry WebGL Port
3 likes 2 comments

Comments

tnovelli
2D's great but in WebGL it's handled almost exactly like 3D, so don't get your hopes up for that export. Could be problems with Unity's exporter or JS code, or WebGL/driver/browser issues. Browsers are getting buggier too. This stuff looked promising about 3 years ago; now it doesn't.


HTML5 Canvas is reliable for 2D graphics but it's 5-10x slower than WebGL and 10-100x slower than native OpenGL 2D. You'd have to use a different engine than Unity too. So IMHO unless you're specifically making a browser game, it isn't worth the trouble.
September 01, 2015 01:22 PM
Orymus3

Well, so far, it's looking good as a WebGL export, so I'm guessing some stuff in the Unity exported is wrong specifically with regards to 3D texturing and sounds. Since I'm having success with sprites (no texturing involves as the object is the texture), I'll stick to that for now and see.

Hoping to push a first version on Kongregate soon-ish.

September 01, 2015 04:17 PM
You must log in to join the conversation.
Don't have a GameDev.net account? Sign up!
Profile
Author
Advertisement
Advertisement