I shot a video of the first race with external users. It was fun to see how they each took on their own unique style to riding the chair and also to see how the game barley held together. The victor (it was not super evident due to several bugs : P) won a golden (chocolate coin) that we bought on our beer and burger resupply earlier the same day.
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Solid Porting
So, as I have become more and more accustomed to Unity, I have begun to realize that there is not future for my projects in my old trusty Clickteam Fusion engine. So it’s about time that I started portin things to Unity. This is also true for Solid Climber, and so far I’m pretty happy with the result. Fun story, I built a editor rotation script to help me rotate things for my Stricod project. In that case I’m using it to create rooms of a circular space station. For Solid Climber I’m reusing that script but for creating a round tower as well as clouds and grass around it.
Sort of works so far, but it will be a little while before it gets to the same readiness as my original project.
Unity dogfights
In addition to taking a new trajectory of the project, I’m also porting the old gameplay from Multimedia Fusion to Unity. The new engine have clear advantages in code and overall structure, but it’s quite lacking in terms of pixel graphics support. However, there is always a way when you have somewhat deep code access.
New Direction
I have come to the conclusion that I would like to continue on my pervasive game ideas. So I looked at my collection of semi-started projects and decided that I should try and merge some of them into one, more fleshed out, idea. As a result, Stricod i no longer just a small local vs SHMUP but will expand to be that as well as absorb gameplay that I designed for my old TREC submission for the NASA hackathon in 213 (moved it’s post to this project) and ideas I had for my old browser game back in high school.
I found this open project called MazenGo and started working on a prototype.
A major reason for me to look into this project again is also that some old friends got interested in it after I unintentionally pitched the idea. They want to work on the back-end, works for me. :)
Teaching teachers 3D!
Second installment of MakerDays is over. While it’s been a stressful period in general, things may have calmed down temporarily and the workshop I held was super chill. First of, we were two, me and a colleague who is really good with the subject. Secondly, we had a very solid setup and many of the things we brought to our space were show and tell props which sold themselves, like an HTC Vive rig, an Ultimaker 3D printer and a structure sensor 3D scanner. The rest of the workshop was us talking about 3D as a material from many aspects including tools and technology. We also showed them how to use the simplistic, online CADing tool TinkerCAD. Good times, back to reality, waiting for the next opportunity to wear my olive green suit! :)
Pressure off
I turns out I won’t have to do much administrative work at all on the webpage this year. A colleague is taking over organizational tasks as well as updating the contents of the webpage. I have walked her through my solution and it seems to be useful, which makes me happy. For an interaction designer, usefulness i determined by the user and not the creator. Another colleague is taking the lead on graphical design, so I don’t have to worry about that neither!
2016 Iteration
Just wanted to take a moment to sit down and write something for myself. Recently I have been quite stressed out with writing formal reports. I lost half of the Swedish summer days (which are not very common) being the one to prematurely stay on the ship as the rest of the world went on vacation to attend some pressing deadlines. The result is that I did some work that I’m not very proud of, felt stressed all the time (even during the occasional beach & beer sessions) and did no game developing what so ever. That’s why it feels kind of good to do a little bit of brain breezing web development, iterating on an old project.
We are launching the next issue of the MakerDays conference, and the website requires updating. I like this project, because it’s all about the minimalist design, keeping it neat but simple, less is more and all that. At one point I was hoping that I would have gotten so far with my zTinker tool at this point that I could have used it to make the new webpage. I haven’t, however, the underlying design is sort of there. Only issue with the content management is that it appears scary to anyone I’m supposed to work with in order to update the content (it’s old school HTML and such). Anyway, feels good to have written something. I submitted the most stressing reports today, so now there is only everything else to attend to… Here is a link to the webpage again, because why not:
Conference web: MakerDays
Looks for cooks
We recently got some reinforcement working on implementing the environments and it really shows. I built the game to a phone so that I could see how well it would perform and I must say that it looks pretty sweet, graphically. Looking forward to where this will lead.
Dice and Sprites
It’s been a while since my last update but there has been progress. A friend who is looking for something to do this summer is considering doing a bit of game development. We had some drinks and pitched ideas to each other, then we worked a bit on our projects. He is getting into Famitracker and I made an avatar for the player in S&D. I have been approaching some friends regarding desiging music and audio for the game, since I’m not very skilled at this myself, however if he has the time I think some 8-bit chiptune could fit the game.
After that session I also made some new dice for the game, d1 to d6. I tried using Blender but I still can’t get my head around its interface. After a die or two I went back to my old favorite, SketchUp. I have tried TinkerCAD and 123D as well, but online tools just aren’t that reliable and 123D still seems like a poor man’s SketchUp to me.
Further Dungeon Generation
Another week, another game dev Friday. I have worked a bit more on the dungeon generation both in terms of implementation and design. The idea is to be able to generate a basic dungeon and then add a few special places with their own generated shapes and content. The image above shows a generated dungeon and the UI surrounding the part, a room, visible to the player. Dice for generating content of the rooms, thrown as they are entered, are also placed on the map.