I just did a very successful test of Unity WebGL with one of the Synty Studios asset packs used for the Hidden Secrets game with first person movement added. The in browser rendering was a lot smoother than with PlayCanvas and the Unity editor and development pipeline is immeasureably better than the basic online PlayCanvas editor. The size of the scene rendered in Unity was similar to the Hidden Secrets game world but the in-browser size was less than 10%. Unity WebGL makes heavy use of WebAssembly in the production build which will most likely mean longer before the game will work on mobile devices – however even in PlayCanvas the game would not have run well on mobile devices just now due to WebGL support being patchy.

The time and effort involved in creating the current Hidden Secrets game world was not reflected in the quality or quantity of the results and due to rendering and performance issues much of this work needs to be redone with some level of procedural generation.

After this successful test I have removed our game from the PlayCanvas servers and will be doing the re-write that is needed using Unity 3D rather than PlayCanvas. All the third party assets I’m using are in native Unity format which will save time messing around patching up the converted models with missing materials and some layout issues.

At least one thing did not work in the Unity build to HTML5 WebGL – the particle emitters for a campfire, so there will be some challenges, but most of the challenge will be in building the game not wrestling with the clunky PlayCanvas editor ( although very impressive considering it’s browser based ) and struggling with first principles coding with limited examples – there is a wealth of learning resources and examples for Unity so a much better platform to build on at this point for our browser adventure game despite it not being natively targeted to browser development like the PlayCanvas engine.

There may be some challenges ahead with debugging any browser issues for the Unity WebGL version of the game, however it’s clear that the barrier to making most of the game has been greatly lowered by moving development over to the Unity platform.