Over the Christmas holidays I did a lot of research into different ways of getting the games to the kids. At the moment downloading from Google isn't a great strategy as it's a little awkward and the PC and Mac playables can be 200 MBs in size. This should only be used for interactives we plan on installing on the school computers.
In 2015 most browsers stopped allowing many of the complex plugins and Unity games could no longer be played online. The same went for Shockwave and Flash and therefore killed off my entire online legacy of work. However with a lot of work the Unity team created a WEBGL exporter.
This takes a Unity game and all its complexity and rewrites it to fit into the WEBGL format. The version they just released it fantastic. I was able to throw relatively complex 3D experiments and wordsearching games at it and it played them almost perfectly.
So basically it means we may be able to deliver the learning aids as simply as giving a weblink.
I am currently checking to see if I can talk to a server for scoring, logins, records, databases and such and it seem like it's all possible. It will just take a little extra optimisation and care. And we can still create the super duper (bells and whistles) versions for the school machines.
One amazing thing, which was totally unexpected, is that the WEBGL experiments run in a browser on an iphone or ipad! I'm assuming later androids too.
If Apple don't squish this (they might) then we have a rock solid way to not only get the kids playing the games easily but on mobile too!
I will update more as soon as I finish with my testings.
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