Some of you may know I am an indie game developer among many other things. I occasionally post tutorials or blogs about Unity, and sometimes other game engines like Unreal. I own a vast amount of assets for Unity so that is where I tend to focus, and that collection of assets has only steadily grown thanks to steemit.
So what if steemit had games?
Could this potentially be a huge draw for steemit?
Well, Unity by default has a pipeline for building WebGL based builds of games made with it. It is VERY easy to do this. Build your game, or whatever you made in Unity. When you build it target it to WebGL. Upload it to a hosting site (it'd be nice if we had something for this for Steemit based games as well) and then you just link to it.
I have made some simple demos for my Son's Ants that he sells on the asset store. It demonstrates how you can make things work from an embedded game play object.
here.My son is @theanubisrider here on Steemit and he sells that product and some smaller individual versions of those ants on the asset store
There are a lot of older Unity Web projects that don't work as the older versions required NAPI which Chrome, FireFox and others have been removing support for. The WebGL version works great though.
Here is the structure for what that ant demo looks like on Godaddy
index.html
Release folder
TempData folder
Find a way to embed these in our posts
If we can find a way to embed these in our post or if Steemit, Inc. or Busy.org adds support for it then making games for steemit becomes an instant possibility.
You can also make a lot more than just games, that is simply what Unity was designed for.
What we would need to know is what the maximum resolution we are allowed to use in order to have it show up properly within the post? 1024x768, etc. As the game needs to be designed with that resolution in mind.
Here is an actual Game
I just went and modified my game I made as a Demo for my Steam Greenlight after it didn't succeed on Kickstarter years ago. This is a fully playable single player game. It has no tutorial other than the pop up help manuals in game. It plays in some ways similar to the old game M.U.L.E. (MULE) though it is also very different.
I have been working on the next version we plan to sell on Valve's Steam Platform, but it is a lot more complex an ambitious than this playable version. This single player version here can be pretty fun once you have a clue what is going on. Really the goal is simply to have the best score at the end of the game, and preferably have the people in this part of space living comfortably.
Now I took the time to convert it to WebGL for YOU TO USE to test making things embeddable in steemit, busy.org, or eSteem. The resolution for the game is currently 1024x768. I had to strip out my file method for languages to make it portable to WebGL so this version only has English despite the language list. It does support me adding other languages so I won't rule out doing that later if there was interest.
Click this image to go play the game
It takes a little bit for the page to load.
There is no master volume control, though options does have a music volume setting. If you want to set the sound lower you'll need to use your sound mixer and set the volume lower.
It is currently hosted on my Godaddy account and is a little over 38 MB in size. If any of you wish to host it somewhere else let me know and I'll package it up. I realize that might be useful for helping people determine how to embed these things if they have control over the index file.
Security is hard, yo. Remember when Steemit got hacked because a sql injection vulnerability and some JavaScript funkiness? Something like this won't happen any time soon, I think...
That said, Facebook has games, so maybe some day the security will be vetted enough per game to allow for it. Cool idea though, for sure.
A very interesting proposition - could games draw people to steemit.
I would probably be on the cautions side of no.
It is also worth noting you can build a lot of things using Unity, not just games. You could make interactive anything, you could make graphs, videos, tutorials, and all manner of interactive content.
While I agree with @gaming-trail that games would most likely not bring people to steemit, being able to use a subset of javascript with html5 would allow for creative and interesting interactive posts.
This is a really good idea. I hope this is just the start of something much bigger. Earned a follow.
I will check it out tonight and comment some more back to you. Good ideas here. I really like the web gl build mode for testing like this but the thought of using Steemit as a component and as a delivery platform is also interesting.
Well that is my really old build we made back when we were starting Greenlight it is not my current one which is quite different, very different UI, and a lot of other things. That was one we made so we would have a working demo for Greenlight, during a time when many of them didn't have a working demo.
I was just wondering about games on Steemit myself. Can I contribute to this being a thing?
upvoted and resteemed!
Hey, great post! I was going to ask if your RPG rule set was for p&p or digital, guess I know the answer now! :D
I was always interested in making my own game, but too lazy to actually educate myself about the necessary assets... I also never had a good mentor ;3
Wormhole Venutres looks interesting, I like these Master of Orion kind of games. I only managed to find out how to claim territory and bid on the ressource sale at the end of the year. ^^
It originally was for PnP but it will likely only be used for digital now. We had one iteration where the combat was really realistic, but it was too calculation intensive for PnP. That'd be perfect for computer RPG though. We replaced it with a simplified combat system for PnP.
Mine was similar to GURPS in some ways though still had a bunch of attributes. The magic system though is second to none, though the coolest aspects of the magic system can't really be computerized they require a creative GM to take full advantage of them.
The Age of Decadence http://store.steampowered.com/app/230070/ was a pretty interesting indie rpg i played recently. It has a great lore/world in an age where our civiliation is long forgotten and people are back to a Roman Empire Age when it comes to technology. You have many, many different ways to complete the game also in non-violent ways.
BUT it also had the problem that playing the non-violent way didnt "feel good" because you either had enough skill to do something like talking your way out of a situation or you dont have enough skill. Dice-Rolls wouldnt really solve the issue since you can save&load until you succeed.
Goes to show you need a Game Master to have none combat skills and magic implemented well in a game ;).
Yeah... the UI as far as the buttons is not super easy to use in that build. The official version I will sell I replaced all of that with RADIAL UI that only shows commands that are relevant.
As far as how to play that build... I realized the web version the buttons for the help manual don't work... so I may fix that in the future.
In the meantime... here is the Greenlight page... http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=338504721
I made some tutorial vids for that which will work for the WebGL.
My version I'll sell will do a number of things differently focused on making it easier.
Tutorial - Single Player Setup
Tutorial - Colony Management and Space Scene
Tutorial - Score, Trade, and End of Game
Well, I have work experience as game tester and in the QA of a software company. So I will try to give you a wholesome feedback, once I find the time to have a deeper look into it. :D
Oh don't worry about doing so in that one... that one is a couple of years old. So the testing in that would not be particularly valuable since I've changed the build we are working on so substantially.