Local Multiplayer Rules Summer / New AR Project

The Arcade 3000 recap is coming soon (after the article on it is published). Till then, here's some gamey news.

GAMES! 

•I played God of War 3 on the projector, which is a tight epic classic. The “making of” films that are unlocked when you complete the game are excellent. 
•On iOS I played Ridiculous Fishing until I reached the credits, then continued to play until I unlocked more fish. Very addictive - I’m going to play until I unlock em’ all. Can’t wait till my next subway ride! 
•Played a couple wicked 4 player OUYA exclusives: Duck Game and Toto Temple Deluxe (from Juicy Beast). 

Wasn’t long before we went back to the perfect-in-every-way Towerfall. Did I hear a rumor that Towerfall: Ascension comes to OUYA later this month?

The biggest treat has been Broken Age on my OUYA. This is what all art should strive to do - present truths about our world in a  fun and interesting way. When I play the games of Edmund McMillen I think “this is how I feel”. Broken Age has these moments while shifting through levels of meaning. And in the spirit of Double-Fine's nothing-to-hide look at their creative processes, there's a "making of" documentary. Everyone interested in game creation should watch the Amnesia Fortnight series.

In other news - Where’s my Rift Dev kit 2?! “ships in July", right? Oh wait - it’s August. Does this mean I won't get mine?

I’ve also been working on a secret project with an app developer here in Bushwick Brooklyn. It’s a location based game that utilizes augmented reality in the gameplay. Very exciting stuff and will write more about it in the future. No, it doesn't play on Google Cardboard.

Artcade 3000 is #137 on BOS Map

The Bushwick Open Studios directory is up, and Artcade 3000 will be #137 on the map.

The hours will be:

May 30   4p-10p
May 31   11a-10p
June 1    12p-8p

So come by!

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: