Greetings, conquerors!

It wasn't long ago that we celebrated the great rebirth of SpaceWar. The client-server architecture was stable, the AI, "Al," had its own wallets and was learning to save up, Galactic Hubs were creating dynamic starlanes, and advisors were chiming in. I had just gotten the game into the exact state I had dreamed of.

So naturally, the only logical next step was to declare the whole thing "a good prototype," toss it in the bin, and start completely from scratch.

This time, with the Unity game engine.

Why? What earthly reason could there be for this?

Let's be honest, there isn't much sense to it. But if I have to find reasons, they are these: a browser has its limits. Even with all the InstancedMesh magic I could conjure, I knew that truly massive fleets and spectacular effects would require the raw power of a dedicated game engine. Furthermore, the dream of a smooth, player-hosted multiplayer experience via Steamworks felt much more tangible with Unity's tools.

And then there's the fact that I don't really know Unity. And what better way to learn than to take your own, complete, and complex project and try to teach all its old tricks to a brand new platform? (Don't do this at home. Or do, I'm not your boss.)

Where Are We Now?

Right now, SpaceWar in Unity is a ghost. The engine is running, but the shell is missing. I can watch the Unity console and see the AI spring to life: it splits its starting funds into wallets, calculates the best spot for its first mine, and queues up a fighter. I've successfully transplanted the game's brain into a new body.

But visually? It's a universe of minimalist, multi-colored spheres and silent console text. The ships are capsules that don't yet move, and the UI is... well, we'll talk about the UI once I've recovered from the existential crisis that materials and shaders have induced.

So here I am, painstakingly teaching Unity in excruciating detail all the tricks my JavaScript code already knew. It's slow, it's occasionally infuriating, and it's absolutely fantastic.

In the next update, I hope to show you something that doesn't require imagination to look like a space battle. Until then, send virtual coffee.

Yours,
Pecatus (a developer-in-making whose sanity has once again been officially audited and found lacking.)