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.

I have a game on the way for the RSM 2018 (retrospelsmässan or retro game fair) and I call it “PickaBoog”. So the jam theme is “traffic jam”, ideated from the fact that the fair will be in an old go cart hall/track and that there is a fair bit of trafficy things in many retro games. As one does I wanted to take a somewhat novel take on the theme and landed in many fingers picking the same nose causing a traffic jam in there. The cabinet will be a large nose for two competing players, each controlling their avatar, a finger, with a joystick hidden in their respective side’s nostril. Blends really well thematically and makes great use of the cabinet format if I may say so myself. : ) The game will be something of a competitive snake, though the fingers will be able to extend from and retract to a static point on the screen and you pick boogers and not apples. I have ideas for tactile feedback for when the nose is “irritated” and eventually “sneezes”, but one step at a time. This weekend I did a bit of body storming on the great material that cardboard boxes, specifically banana boxes, are and came up with something that looks vaguely like a nose. Progress, progress! : )

Now there are two players, zero noses and full weirdness. : )

… happy to see me? : )

It’s the latter half of April and about a month left to the annual traditional retro game fair in Gothenburg, Sweden. We, as the local game dev community, has once again been asked to come up with some creations and they will supply us with some space to showcase it. There is more than a month to work on the games, but people are looking into doing a lot of other things during the period so it might be necessary. Extra much so because we’ll try and continue with last year’s concept; cardboard cabinets. A perfect solution to arcades cabinets being cool but most game developers mostly being into the software and digital arts of games; make the cabs out of accessible materials. I have what I believe to be a great idea for a game, so really looking forward to this. : )