All posts by admin

A night at the museum

Today I went to the museum where the escape room will be part of an exhibition. It’s in a nearby town, one hour single trip by bus which goes every ten minutes or so. While there are a lot of issues with the software still, the physical installation comes with its own challenges.

So I spent this day installing computers and software, with really poor Internet (ofc) either using the city grid which could only be accessed in a separate room for the exhibition and using little WiFi dongles, using my phone hot spot and some municipal wired grid which kicked me out after a little while. We were also missing necessary video cables, but I managed to work around it with adapters I usually bring wherever I go and sharing a screen between two computers.

Everything is still not set up after having worked quite a few hours after the museum personnel left the building. At least I got to hang out with their headless, swamp buried corpse thought to have been a witch… I’m not even really complaining, in the end it’s all kind of fun. : )

RSM 2019

The jam, exhibition and fair were all complete successes! I had a great evening at this year’s retro game fair. We had lots of players, both on the first, more intense day, but also on the second one. I solved a bunch of design flaws ahead of the second day. Lots of people showed up and did their part as well as helped each other out letting everyone have a chill time. Pretty much all setup and practicalities were super smooth. Not all cabinets made it all the way, but to me that’s just part of being experimental (which is good).

Thanks everyone for a great event!

Nose picked at local newspaper!

Today concluded our annual game jam for the annual, local retro game fair. Brought the old PickaBoog to this year’s fair (made it for last year’s). It made it into the local newspaper through an interview with some of the other jammers. : )

Final evening & move to site

Today was the final day to prepare ahead of the fair. Josef had made a super cool intro image which I added and animated. I manage to tie the game loop together somewhat. People were great at building their stuff and we moved pretty much all the cabinets to the venue. Me and another guy organizing the thing will be here early tomorrow to move some more stuff before the fair opens though. Really looking forward. : )

Bonus third build evening

It’s the workers holiday today in Sweden which is a red day. I had promised to babysit my kids cousin today, but I managed to haggle my way into getting the family to attend our workshop as a type of kindergarten, allowing me to host builders during the day.

Not the same presence as the last evening, but really good nevertheless. Also managed to get hold of the fair organizers and clear up all details surrounding the actual event where we will showcase our creations.

Second build evening

We had a second build evening today and while the fair is coming up quickly, we had great attendance today. There is much to do, but it’s great to see all the enthusiasm and skill going into this jam! : )

For my own part, the time consuming aspect of being a parent is really coming into play. Between helping others and watching my kid I really didn’t get that much done personally. But there are always the nights. ; )

Unity HLAPI Shitstorm

A few days ago I thought I had the multiplayer, multi scene escape room solution in the basket. How wrong was I. While I suspected that Unity wouldn’t have a working, simple solution for networked change of scene (you can change the scene but it won’t do anything else so it’s not really useful, like I suspected) I would have preferred it to be somewhat less tricky.

First, I tried using the networked scene change function, this just changed the scene for all players. No avatar prefabs or networked objects would spawn.

Second, I tried additive scene change, keeping track of when the old scene was unloaded and the new one loaded. This solved the issue of having to keep track of volatile data, but meant that I couldn’t have all components needed to run the game in each scene as it would lead to duplicates.

The whole thing suddenly got very experimental, so the result probably won’t look as polished as intended towards the end. On the bright side, when this works it could be very useful for my other prototypes with several needs. On the other hand, Unity HLAPI isn’t exactly the perfect solution to begin with. It’s even deprecated as is, it’s just that the replacement is very vague.