Category: Game Development
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Toying with an MP Monster Battler
I picked up the new Pokemon Legends: Arceus last week and my boys and I are really enjoying passing the controller around to take turns roaming the open regions of Hisui in search of new pocket monsters to nab. It’s inspired me to prototype a monster battler of sorts – but built specifically for multiplayer!…
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Mobile Artillery: Bots
With the player prefab mostly in place, I duped it and wrote a special controller script to drive it around autonomously as a bot. I sketched out an initial plan for its search and destroy behavior flow. I gave this new prefab a big, green, cone collider attached to the end of its nose. They…
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Mobile Artillery: Multiplayer
With the core shooting mechanic mostly in place, I took this little prototype a few steps further by building out several new systems. First priority was to write the sign in flow and lobby to match players together for a game. Once in a room, the server randomly generates an arena and replicates it for…
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Arduino + Dualshock2
I’m working on a new project that could use some kind of game controller. I’ve got a few old PS2 controllers lying around so I got really excited when I stumbled on Bill Porter’s PS2X library. It looked pretty straight forward, and I was itching for excuses to practice soldering so I took apart an old PS2 adapter for…
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Yanimator: An AR Character Creator
(Update 1/28/20: This technology is now described under Patent US10546406B2) I’ve made an experimental AR app that turns drawings on paper into a controllable 2D game character. It is able to recognize a blank worksheet. In this prototype, it is trained to look for this one: The worksheet can be printed at any size. There are 12…
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Augmented Toys
The augmented reality SDK Vuforia has a lesser known feature that is able to recognize pre-selected three dimensional objects as-is without calibration ornaments like QR codes. I built a very simple app in Unity to test this functionality. The app uses the device’s camera (in this case an iPhone 6S Plus) to recognize a Skylander toy in real-time. Once the app recognizes…
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A VR Cycling Experience for $40
I’ve made an Arduino thing that can wirelessly talk to a mobile device over BLE and can now meter the revolutions of a wheel with an optical tachometer. I’m using these two hardware features to make a virtual reality (VR) cycling experience and I’ve got a working demo to share! Here’s how this works: First, the Arduino thing is positioned to point at the back tires…
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Multiplayer Chat
After spending months pouring over books and tutorials on game networking, I jumped into what (I thought) would be a simple first exercise: a 3D chat room. I’m here to say that the warnings are very much true: multiplayer is crazy hard!! In this test, I built an eight player lobby that synchronizes avatar movement,…
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Lock Master (Part 2)
I’ve been having a blast recreating this Skylander mini-game, so I’ve decided to build it out a little further than I had originally planned. Besides for fleshing out additional mechanics, like teleportation and death, and implementing the actual character model + animations, I also wanted to 1) fully utilize the canvas and 2) try to…
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Lock Master
For this next test, I’ve decided to try and recreate the Lock Master mini games found in both Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure and Skylanders: Giants. Because the game relies on gravity to navigate the character, it really lends itself well to mobile devices. In this test, I learned how to: Utilize screen orientation Manage and limit…
Yanman! 