Category: Unity
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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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Mobile Artillery: Controls
With a little bit of hacky Photon experience under my belt, I was keen to do something a little more involved than just replicating the movement of some colored pills on an open plane. I fumbled my way toward a third person artillery mechanic where swiping left/right changes the tank’s facing, swiping up/down changes the…
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Multiplayer on Mobile
It’s been a long while since I’ve last built something in Unity so I decided to jump back in and try and learn more about real-time networking. Turns out, Unity doesn’t yet have a native solution that’s battle hardened in 2021 (surprisingly!) but there are good third party alternatives – Mirror and Photon Pun seem…
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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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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…
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Connect Four!
For this next test, I wanted to try and tackle a grid-based puzzle game. My previous tests have mostly involved individual elements reacting relative to each other, but in a puzzle game, every asset must be accounted for in a larger system to determine a win. I chose to try and recreate the classic board…
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Unity3D: Getting My Feet Wet
Before life as an Animator, I once worked as a Web Developer. What I miss most about that life was the ability to single handedly create an experience from start to finish. I’d start with the conceptual task of designing the experiential flow, move to the artistic task of constructing its visual manifestation + flavor,…
Yanman! 