Submit your game by May 1st!

I'll be hosting another Artcade 3000 for Bushwick Open Studios May 30-June 1st. I want to show your game! If you have a project that is weird / "artistic", I'd like to have a look. Maybe we can hook up an alternate controller with Makey Makey.

Last year the event was a huge success. Here is the postmortem for it.

Shoot me a message if you'd like to submit something.

Play The White Rooms in your web browser!

Here is the link to play The White Rooms. You may have to download the Unity player. 

Here are the controls:

WASD - move
IJKL - look
Spacebar or O - jump
Y - Menu

ENJOY!

The first 20 days

The first 20 days that The White Rooms has been on OUYA it has:
-Gotten out of the Sandbox category and into the FPS / Shooter and Meditative categories
-3 out of 5 stars (20ppl voted)
-328 downloads and 18 likes
-been compared to Antichamber
-had it's flaws pointed out on the forums
-been called an "interesting concept"

All in all a fun experiment for me to get started with Unity and try my hand at exposure even if the game could have used more vigorous testing.

Now I'm adding touch controls for an attempt at my first Android launch. Wish me luck.

Submitted to OUYA on Schedule!

My first Unity video game, made from scratch in 3 months, has been submitted for OUYA review on January 31st as per my schedule.

This was easier said than done. I felt like I was taking a computer science exam during every step of the lengthy, confusing and sparsely documented process. After some back & forth for a couple days I signed and built my .apk after several rounds of testing on the OUYA console.

I had to set the screen resolution for my scenes to: screen.resolution(1280, 720, true, 60); because the game ran choppy on OUYA (but runs great on my Galaxy Note 10.1). There was also a process of importing an OUYA package into Unity that was a surprise that messed up my input settings.

But I persevered in the face of great adversity.

Ta-Daaaaah!

[Applause]

*UPDATE*

Four hours later, I get an email that it was approved! I quickly hit publish on the dev portal and the status changed to Published. 

I don't see the game appearing on the Discover menu on the console, so I'll be checking back to see how long that process takes. Feedback from the reviewer "Real cool submission! The only thing that we wanted to note was that there was lots of controller locking and stiff character movement. If this could be optimized for a future update that would be awesome! Other than that everything looks good to go!"

Final hurdles

My new retina screened MacBook Pro can run Steam games well so I’m playing Amnesia through the HDMI to flatscreen with headphones. I do this in the dark, of course.

My first simple Unity 3D game project, The White Rooms, has entered the playtesting phase. It doesn't work as well on OUYA as it does on the Galaxy Note 10.1. A friend came over and played it last night. Now I have a list of changes + sounds to add. The biggest hurdles being - how to stop the player from slowing when it touches the walls, and how to perform a music fade with code.

Here is a still with the Dreamcatcher my friend made:

Fades

The internet is my school. One quickly discovers that people on community forums are not teachers. They want to help, but there can be long threads of pure confusion when the answer can be quickly listed in a few steps. Some programmers read the question and write "learn programming before asking a question." Yes, there is such a thing as a stupid question so I carefully research before posting one.

Patience and persistence are key here. With these skills I recently discovered how to create fade in / out effects and animations. I made a heavenly gate in Blender from scratch also. I'm still figuring out vertex painting.

It's very neat that I downloaded Unity 3D less than 3 months ago and now I have a 9 level "escape the rooms" game that plays smoothly.

I made some sound effects and music in Garage Band and Final Cut Pro. Fun times.

Yes, that's The Pod which I can apply effects to voice and guitar.

My friend is a talented artist and working on the Dreamcatcher for the game. I told her January 30th deadline, which is when I want to be submitting the game to OUYA. The playtesting / debugging race is on!

Glowing figures and a knife

The deep freeze of Winter is upon me, and work on The White Rooms Rooms has escalated! Yesterday I created a couple eerie figures using Make Human and brought them into Blender then Unity (with much difficulty after making some tweaks to a hole in the devils head in Blender - Unity didn't like the changed .fbx). These things animate spookily behind their halo lighting effects:

I had to make sure in the preferences that Unity was able to import the Make Human files. Then I made a knife model from scratch in Blender and attempted to vertex paint it. I couldn't get the brushes to paint correctly even after watching a couple Youtube tutorials so I ended up unwrapping it and painting it in Photoshop. There appeared to be some weird pixels on the blade but it was a happy accident - they made it look rusty and used.

Now that I look at it, the colors are somehow reversed - I wanted the handle brown. What the heck?

I shifted level to to level 1 and remade level 2 from scratch in Blender then added it to the scene (scaling it to 3500 as always). Today I go through all the levels adding the new enemies and making tweaks to the levels.