Excited ! Dolly and I just finished and submitted Verdant Valley to the Unity Asset Store.
Verdant Valley is a cartoon, stylized game world or Virtual Un-Reality world Dev Kit. There is so much talk in VR about reproducing the real world, real people, real plants, real places. Personally I see no point in that. If I want to see reality I open my eyes and use my organic, in-built, default, occular, head mounted display system.
What excites me about game worlds and virtual reality is seeing things that have never been seen, going to places that have never existed. Seeing people's imagination come to life.
Virtual reality should be about magic and fantasy not merely about reproducing the real world.
Recently I have been quite obsessed with Unity and it's Asset Store. It's an astonishing ecosystem of developer tools, editor extensions, particle systems, visual scripting tools, weather systems, animations systems, water tools, spline tools, templates and frameworks and 3D assets of all kinds ..... Did I say visual scripting tools ? Yes I did ! because they are amazing and they open up game development to artists and creatives instead of just coders. There is an almost unbelievable array of tools and assets that can make game development and virtual world development a reality, easier, faster and more enjoyable for indie devs and AAA teams. I am going to blog more about the Unity Asset store and it's open API because it's just so awesome and it makes it possible for third party developers to nourish the content ecosystem in a special way, a way that produces serendipity and let's remember that we all need more serendipity, it's important stuff.
On a separate note I am fretting about Linden Lab's Project Sansar because in the last Lab Chat, when questioned about an open API and visual scripting tools, Ebbe said it was unlikey to be in the first release and sounded like it was NOT on the to do list. Where is the Project Sansar To Do List / Road Map ?
It's interesting to note that Amazon's Lumberyard team have already released their initial ideas for their road map only a week after the Beta release of Lumberyard, mainly based on user feedback.
It would be great if Linden Lab released their road map for Sansar.
More blogging coming soon about the wonderful Unity Asset Store ecosystem and comments on Amazon Lumberyard NOT yet having an asset store on their road map. Why, oh why Amazon ?
No Lumberyard Asset Store = No future for Lumberyard
No API in project Sansar = No fully developed content ecosystem
That's my immediate blogging road map !
