Year: 2015
Adding Character
We have a room, props, game mechanics. Now we need characters. Luckily there is the incredible Mixamo Fuse (now Adobe Fuse)that spits out ready to use Unity characters. They also have many animations available for free currently, including many zombie animations, what a coincidence. First of all we need zombies. And for our tutorial we […]
Interaction Design
Having only your hands puts quite some challenges on the interaction with the environment. The player starts the exe file, puts on the Oculus and then does not see the keyboard anymore. That is important to realize. He probably can still use easy to find keys like space and escape, but moving with aswd is […]
A giant leap for… your arms
Where are we now. We have an idea. We have many openings. These need to be barricaded. First question: What is the easiest way forward? I imported my beloved ProBuilder and created a first rough level and placed an awesome free zombie from the Asset Store in there. After a first texturing iteration and some decals we end […]
Ideation
Three basic boundary conditions were there: Must not be published before Utilize Leap Motion Virtual Reality The last one was not in the rules but by me since I do own a DK2 and there was a VR track. Keep the door shut Earlier this year I had an idea for a kind of endless-runner game: […]
What a Rush – 4 Minute Walk-through
Around 6 weeks ago I saw Leap Motion doing a VR jam. They had some nice prizes but honestly I really love jams for a much different reason: a deadline. It forces one to work on a minimum viable prototype, get it running and enhance as much as possible until the deadline arrives. I had some Sundays to […]
Life is Strange – Adventures are Great
So in March this year it happened. A game called Life is Strange suddenly popped up on my Steam account. I checked out what it’s all about, looked at the mechanics and thought: Shit. Shit. Shit. Why the response? The game is really well-crafted. And it features a mechanic that is really intriguing: Time travel. And […]
Adventures don’t need graphics
Due to the superb reviews I decided to buy Lifeline some days ago for my S4 phone. I honestly did not expect much. But. What a ride! For those who don’t know it: you are contacted by someone stranded on a far-away planet and get presented with a number of binary choices as you guide him […]
Graphics Downgrade – Game Upgrade
So I had to learn some hard lessons with Rush ‘n’ Roll. I developed on the PC and used nice shadows, forward rendering and HD textures and all was nice and cosy. Of course I did lots of profiling, optimizations and object pooling to get it to run nicely on my Samsung S4 and S2 as well. […]
Unity Asset Management
I went shopping yesterday and bought around 15 asset packs for interior design, props, furniture, electronics etc. That means I now own 344 asset packages (which I typically buy on sale/summer/winter specials). Since I expect to need many of the ones containing useful models I always import them into my project. That makes the project […]
Inventory Inspector
Ethan Carter Yesterday I played through the quite amazing The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. It is an exciting expertly crafted open world exploration adventure game with an interesting story (a bit of a let-down at the end but forgiven). What really makes it stand out is its use of a technique called photogrammetry. With that they are […]