Today me, two friends from the local game dev community and one of the organizers of the annual retro game fair met and discussed our collaboration for this year. I really like the fair and the game jam that we usually organize for it, so it feels good to have kicked off the event event though it’s still another two months until it happens.
This year it’s going to be a two-day (it’s usually one) event with a party for organizers in between so I’m hyped.
Finally, I got around to visit the project since I pretty much passed it over to the park as we entered the new year. I was really pleased and impressed to find that my colleagues at the park had expanded a lot on it since my last visit. The physical installation is getting along and looks amazing, and they have really started to make the software their own.
There are still a few things they may need my help with, and I’ll gladly oblige. For one, this project is something of my baby and secondly, I really like it. : )
So a friend of mine made a showreel for the games we made two years ago for the local retro game fair.
This weekend me and other members of the game culture organization Automat arranged a jam ahead of the game party Tidsvåg. The plan is that the games made during this jam will be exhibited during Tidsvåg.
We managed to attract a lot of new jammers which was great. However, this meant that I had to spend more time mentoring the participants through workshops and guidance and didn’t really have any time left to make any games myself. That’s fine though, I’m going to exhibit PickaBoog and Enbarr mac Lir anyhow, and they are hopefully somewhat functional since last I used them. : P
Never worked with avatars in VR before. Man… that shit is crazy, and I love it! : )
Today I browsed the asset store and my old projects to see what kind of scene I could quickly set up for our prehistoric VR escape room. When thinking of natural features which could frame the physical play area I landed in forest, a steep cliff towards the ocean and a cave.
Finally discovered the official “pixel camera” which was released in Unity´s package manager last year. From the top of my mind this will be useful for five of my projects: PickaBoog, Fagerman, Slice n Dice and Stricod and Gr3at M4gician. I don’t have that much time over for my projects at the moment, but this is at least something!
Whenever one stands before a complex task, it’s a good idea to try and break the task down into more manageable chunks. We wish to create a multiuser VR escape room, but if we were to wait with all game design until the technology was in place with would have a huge bottleneck to deal with before we could even validate the concept.
So how can one prototype a multiuser VR escape room with minimal effort? Simple, just fake it! Today we role played being gatherers, hunters and shamans as well as the occasional, wild animal. Our tools and materials of trade were, obviously, foam with labels taped to them.
I forgot to post about this but something really fun came up towards the end of last year. Elisabeth Tegner, pioneer in creating game education and legend, have moved back to town after many years of adding to the game scene in other places. She is going to arrange a multi culture game party at the annual science festival in town and I was recommended as a participant somewhere along the way.
Now we’ve been in touch quite a lot and the plan is for me to showcase the old Enbarr and PickaBoog once again at the event. I think it’s going to be great! : )
Today I finally managed to arrange a meeting between the park Liseberg, a motion tracking firm called Qualisys and a app developing form called Atvis. There is a potential collaboration which would be super cool if it happened, so I’m holding my thumbs. ; )
This meeting also allowed me to meet the people from the park as well as other people I have worked with previously as well, bonus.