I somehow managed to drag the entire PickaBoog rig to the local game dev community event GDL, Game developers’ lounge, carrying it and taking a ferry to the venue. While it was it was a bit awkward to brave a tight bar queue with three something huge plastic bags, it was well worth it. Super fun to see everyone and have people play my game. Also fun to have Valve sponsor me with two hotdogs and beers, cheers!

Had a ton of things done today, mostly on the cabinet. Firstly I finally had the materials and design to make it look much more like a nose with minimum effort and a robust build. Secondly I found some great fans and hooked them up and finally I spray painted the nose parts. There is an event called GDL, game developers lounge coming up this week and I’d love to test and showcase PickaBoog. Then, next weekend, it’s showtime…. RSM, the retro game fair. Hype!

So I have taken a few steps back regarding the nose look of the cabinet and realized that human snots look nothing like what I have been doing so far. So for this weekends build evening I did a bit more of body storming, trying different looks for the cabinet. I think I’m onto something now, but I realized first after having cut up most of the boxes I had stashed so far. I’ll have to hog some more boxes before I can continue on what seems to be the right track. Looking very promising though, and more cardboard box and less hacks with duct tape and hot glue and what not.

I have done it before, but I did recall there were some issues. This time it went fairly smooth however. I’m talking, of course, about hooking up a micro controller of the popular Arduino type to a Unity 3D game running on a PC. Because this worked out so well I’m positive that the built in sneezing will become reality. I even picked out some fans, though I might have to do some digging in finding some fairly powerful ones. Fun, nevertheless.

And do you find your way around the insides of his nose?

Making a nose out of cardboard isn’t as easy as one (I) may have thought. I have done some somewhat thorough studies on low-ploy noses now and still can’t quite wrap my head around the perfect compromise between an easy-build banana box construction and what truly looks like a nose. I have been given all sorts of tips, “make it out of paper mache”, “make it out of plasti dip”, I even thought of making it out of plastic foam. In the end though, I feel that making it out of cardboard is a challenge worth sticking up for, other materials have already had their days of glory. : )

Tweaked the sprites of the fingers, the layout of the level and added some boogers. More importantly solved some really icky issues with collision detection and rotation of certain things. Works really well now and the code got a neat refactoring as well.