After deciding to move on from Phaser, I looked around for other game engines to generate web games. I came across Unity again and again. Unity is not new to me, but I also knew their web support was via the Unity web player browser plug-in. This is a problem, as browser plug-ins have fallen into disfavor. All the major desktop browsers Firefox / Chrome / IE, are moving away from plug-ins.

So... dead end (or at least dying). Plug-ins are not the future of the web.

Because of the web player, I dismissed every mention of Unity for web development I encountered, until I came across information that slapped me upside the head and woke me up. The web player is not the only Unity web target: Unity now has another web-friendly build target: WebGL, no plug-in required! Wow!

This warrants a closer look. While WebGL might be immature and inconsistent across browsers, it is a shared goal of many interests to evolve and mature the platform and I share their high hopes. The browser plug-in model is going away. WebGL may or may not take off but all the signs today look promising.

Unity had been on my to-do list of research topics, but it ranked lower than HTML-related technologies. (This is why I started with HTML, JavaScript, Node.JS, etc.) There are many interesting areas of development I can explore with Unity. Graphics, networking, user interface design, virtual reality, Android development, iOS development, the list goes on.

And now I learned that I can even explore some parts of the web world with Unity. It is quite the Swiss Army Knife of software development. With this latest discovery, Unity has moved to the top of my to-do list. It is time to roll up my sleeves and dig in.

This should be fun.