First Steps is a tutorial project I worked on while at coherence, at the end of 2022. For context, coherence is a networking engine to create multiplayer games, and I joined the company in September 2022 as game developer in charge of samples and tutorial content.

This small Unity project breaks down most of coherence’s basic functionality into 6 individual scenes, that the user can explore in isolation to learn all the basics of networking. In the project we show syncing of states, network commands (RPCs), how to parent networking entities, plus some coherence-specific features: persistence, spatial queries, and so on.

The project is available on Github, and within the coherence docs, and on itch.io. It is also directly playable in WebGL on coherence’s cloud!

Here are a bunch of beauty shots, which really show the great work Theo has done on the characters and environment:

My role

I was in charge of programming the whole project (including networking), and setting up scene flow. I created a simple character controller for it, with some additional programming by Mattias “Ditto” Dittrich. Art is by Theodor Waern, with animations by Oswin Neumann.

Being the one designing the learning process, I also wrote extensive step-by-step documentation to the project, to guide the user through the various sample scenes.

I’m very proud of what we managed to achieve in such a short time, and I really believe the project turned out to be a great learning resource, while being very pleasant to go through.

I also built the project for phones, complete with a custom UI:

Also quite happy with this “authority overlay”, a feature to switch the rendering of the whole scene to visualise who of the different network Clients has authority on which object. This will probably be featured in other coherence tutorials: