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Porting from Unity to PlayCanvas - Developer Spotlight with Christina Kaliora

· 5 min read
Steven Yau
Steven Yau
Partner Relations Manager

Welcome to Developer Spotlight! A new series of blog articles where we talk to developers about how they use PlayCanvas and showcase the fantastic work they are doing on the Web.

Today we are excited to be joined by Christina Kaliora, a freelance web and games developer for Solar Games.

She will showing us the how she recently ported the John Lemon's Haunted Jaunt Unity project to PlayCanvas in the video presentation below covering areas:

  • Exporting the scene from Unity
  • Performance concerns
  • Use of shaders and effects
  • And more!

Presentation Slides

Hi Christina, welcome to Developer Spotlight! Tell us about yourself and your studio​

Hello! My name is Christina Kaliora and I’m a Games Programmer. I wrote my first line of code in September of 2016 inside PlayCanvas! I still remember that excitement when I saw my cube rotating! That’s when I said "This is what I wanna do!".

After that, I started learning more about PlayCanvas and experimenting with other Game Engines, like Unity. Later, I attended an online coding bootcamp about web development, and since then, I work as a freelancer both for Web Development projects and web based games (using PlayCanvas).

Also, together with my husband and some friends we run a company called Solar Games, where we develop tools and projects for PlayCanvas.

Why did you choose PlayCanvas?​

PlayCanvas caught my attention from the very beginning! Some of the main reasons me and my team choose PlayCanvas:

  • PlayCanvas is one of the most powerful web based game engines out there.
  • It is the only web based game engine that has such a powerful and collaborative editor.
  • It has amazing support in the forums and discord and also, a great team to back it up!
  • It has very good performance!

What were the initial challenges and how did the team overcome them?​

Personally, when I started, I had a very hard time getting a good grasp of PlayCanvas. There weren’t that many tutorial projects back then and since I was pretty much a newbie in coding, I had a very hard time understanding the coding concepts of game development.

What helped me there, was building smaller projects focused on specific areas, for example physics, player movement, raycast, UI, shaders etc. That way, I learned how to work with the API and I was able to start building larger projects/games.

Also, studying the engine’s code is something that any aspiring PlayCanvas developer should get into and helped me personally! Learning the inside and out of the game engine you're using will help you tremendously!

How is building an HTML5 game/experience different from a native game/experience?​

It is quite different in my opinion. Since things on the web work a bit differently, there are also different things that need to be taken into consideration. For example, loading times and download size are some very important things that web game devs need to pay attention to.

No one wants to wait over 30 seconds for a web page to load, right?

What are the team's favorite features of PlayCanvas?​

Favorite feature is the editor, by far. The fact that it is collaborative in real time, makes PlayCanvas the best tool for teams to work together. Also, the fact that PlayCanvas has version control integrated, is pretty cool! Something else I would add, is that PlayCanvas provides a very clean API to work with.

What is on the feature wishlist for PlayCanvas this year?​

Oh, there are so many things, but I will short down my list down to three:

  • More starter templates!
  • I would love to see the list of post processing effects growing! There isn’t something better than a web based game with nice graphics and effects. It would be great to provide developers with the tools to do so.
  • Better particle editor. We need more VFX artists in PlayCanvas!

How do you see HTML5 games/experiences evolve over the next few years?​

I think that, since the devices are becoming more and more powerful and with the webGPU on the way, web games will become more and more popular.

Imagine, being able to play your game both on any web browser, phone, tv without the need of downloading and installing anything? It’s mind blowing to me!

And now with all the Metaverse buzz I see that web based experiences are gaining more and more attention.

Thank you very much for your time and we look forward to your presentation​

Thank you very much for inviting me!

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Stay tuned for more Developer Spotlights in the future!