Vidar, who is ideating and experimenting with the soundtrack for Stricod, is making great progress. It aches me that I cannot keep up in terms of graphics and gameplay due to other work. Nevertheless, making some progress with applying the holographic effecting in building some fundamental systems for visual cues and narrative.

I have started to figure out how I could implement a holographic material which I would like to feature for in-world UI and helpful visualizations.

Today I drew some space scrap in order to start experimenting with environmental looks ans effects. Really fun drawing stuff!

The game has, thus far, had a distinct lack of polish. I started to add some of the essentials, and just with a bit of rocket fire, it looks so much better and conveys actions so much clearer.

Added so-called elastic collisions for asteroids and other things today. This is a pretty big deal because collisions and reliable collisions was one of the main issues with developing in Multimedia Fusion. This is the first official feature (except maybe for the eight player support) that goes beyond the state of the original project.

Powerups which refilled your ammo, adding a satellite gun with some ammo which also acts as a shield was a key feature back in the original project. Now it’s added, in addition to a marker system indicating where things are located outside of the current field of view.

Today I decided on adding eight player support, because why would you limit local gameplay to just four? Also, that seemed to have been my 2016 ambition, although I don’t clearly remember my motivation for having that then.

Today I got around to create basic UI and state machines for being able to making a choice on what type of game to play and which players will participate. This involved quite a lot of thinking in regards to how player input will be read and mapped to various, local players.

A virus pandemic, small child and heaps of saved up vacation somehow landed me in the conclusion of taking an epic seven week summer vacation. While I’m spending most of it going to local playgrounds and gobbling through the flavours of the local ice cream bar, there have been some time for project reflection.

So, I decided on picking up an old project, and the pick landed on StriCOD. I got half-way there, porting it form Unity from Multimedia Fusion four years ago. Since then there have been lots of interesting new features added to Unity. As a matter of fact, picking up the basics from where I left up was a rather smooth process. I’m looking forward into working a more long-term project again. : )

Furthermore, I have employed the talents of Vidar Mårtensson whom I have worked together with on some secret projects and TP Wars to help me make some music for StriCOD. Nice!

Back in 2016 I was inspired by Pokemon GO to go for geo-location as a means of mapping the game world onto the real world. This idea was not new to me as it was part of my master thesis work back in 2012.

At the time I instead wanted to go for physical RFID tags and AR markers, thinking GPS to be too rough and inaccurate at the time. Then I reconsidered and found the project MapzenGo by brnkhy. This was really fun to play around in, but the project was halted due to the developer being hired by a company providing this type of service commercially, MapBox.

Recently I have played around a bit with the free license of this, more polished tool. We’ll see when I find the time to really pick up this project…