Many, many years ago…10! It was TEN years ago! :gasp: I wanted to create a space in our Burning Man camp to play Go. I wrote a little about it way back then.
Loosely inspired by Asian architecture it made for an interesting place to play with whoever might wander by.
The structure was designed to sort of slot together without nails or screws. It mostly worked but it was not built for a long life under the best of conditions let alone the brutality of the desert and thus it had to be burned.
It was disassembled, hauled to the still burning embers of the Man, and tossed to the flames. That felt like a complete and satisfying lifecycle.
But now…
It lives again! Through the magic of webGL and three.js (and our friend Claude) you can visit and play Go with whoever else may be visiting right in your browser. https://vaughnhannon.com/pagoda/
This became a great test subject for a few things.
- Building a world in VRChat
- Building a sufficient copy of that world in webGL
- Use Claude Code to not only program that game of Go but also help with Unity and three.js
I first modeled all of the assets in Blender and then set the project up in Unity. From there Claude wrote the game logic and the player interaction code to suit VRChat. (Pagoda is available in VRChat but it’s invite only until I’m able to publish public worlds).
Once it was working there I (well, Claude) set to translate it to three.js so I could host it myself. It’s become glaringly obvious that we must build on platforms that we control in addition to providing content elsewhere. Too many platforms (3D or otherwise) have disappeared or mistreated creators.
The process has been pretty smooth and I’m looking forward to building more worlds and adding more complicated elements to interact with.
Now, who wants to play?
