I'm sure by now all of you are tired of the same old Flash games, and I know I'm very tired of using same old Flash for any of my online projects! Finally, at the turn of the decade we have a few new options on the horizon.
The first and most notable is the Unity3D Web Player which allows for the hosting of full 3D games on the web. I'm quite impressed with the demo, which runs great even on sluggish school computers and looks better than many 3D console games. Unfortunately this option comes at a rather hefty fee which I won't be able to afford for quite some time now, but let us hope that many a developer bites and we see some rich new 3D web experiences within the next few years.
Another interesting project is called SilverSprite. This nifty little collection of dll files allows you to port any 2D XNA game using SpriteBatch based graphics into a Silverlight application capable of running in a browser page. I found this a most ironic turn of events, because I was already in the process of moving from Flash to C#/XNA as my language of choice for rapid prototyping, mostly due to my frustration with Flash's performance. My discovery of this also came at the perfect time of need when my team needed a new browser game technology for the Westwood College 2010 2D game competition. This project is much more appealing than Unity because of its incredible price point of $0. There is already a Kongregate-ish website built for showcasing these games at SilverArcade. All this after I thought Silverlight would never amount to anything more than a cheap Flash knockoff :)
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