Play, ech.OS in the twiny jam!

When reading Neuromancer, one of the things that stayed with me was Gibson’s description of Dixie Flatline’s saved consciousness. The consciousness was saved as ROM (Read only memory) which meant that while it could interact with the protagonist, and offer advice, it could never generate new associations or memories. If the unit was ever reset, or if the unit lost power, the consciousness would return to the state it was in when it was first created. Creepy.

Do not read the following if you still want to solve the login puzzle.

***SPOILERS***

Here are the credentials.

Username: Molly.gm
Password: not forgotten

The password is case sensitive so that might have gotten some people. I’d love to hear your interpretations of the game, so please comment with them.

Play Extinction Event

Sometimes making a game is easy, other times I don’t really have a good idea of what I want to make. This game is a result of not having an idea. Rather than trying to brainstorm ideas on paper, I decided to make a toy in unity and see what ideas followed as a result.

My first toy was an Ocean wave sim where objects floated around. It was interesting to watch, but difficult to control and I didn’t really have a mechanic that I was digging. The second toy was a gravity sim recycled from my previous game Mental Block. The basic idea was to move a ball around with gravity points that players could turn on and off. The toy was fun, so I decided work on it some more.

Night Watch 3d!

At GDC I was lucky enough to play around with google cardboard, and loved it. I had been eying an Oculus devkit, but didn’t pull the trigger because of the cost. But at $20 I had no excuse to delay vr dev on cardboard. Google has a really helpful page about developing in unity which sped up the progress.

After a couple hours of hacking I was able to create a 3d version of my last game Night Watch. To be fair, I designed Night Watch with cardboard in mind, so I didn’t have to modify the gameplay much, but the process of porting was much easier than I expected. The most difficult part of the process was recreating the GUI to work with the stereo cameras. I wasn’t able to use the CardboardGUI script provided, so I ended up using Unity’s new 3d UI system. There are some parts of the game that are still buggy (the game loop doesn’t restart correctly in the cardboard version when you die), but It’s almost to the point where I can put it up on the Android App Store. I’ll update this post when that happens.

Play Night Watch!

This was a fun one. I’ve been thinking about games that only use gyroscopic controls, and Night Watch came out of that brainstorm. I tried to think of reasons why you wouldn’t be able to move and I thought of being scared stiff, or being dared to not move for a specific period of time. My mind then drifted to old shows like “Are you Afraid of the Dark?” and being dared to stay in a cemetery by yourself at midnight. That idea then spawned the flashlight mechanic to fend off the ghosts.

There were a lot of cool technical things I had to do in this project, like figure out how to make the ghosts vulnerable to the flashlight, all while keeping in mind that I’ll port this to google cardboard as soon as possible. Google’s provided code uses raycasting, but I thought it would be too expensive for each ghost to be making this call during the update cycle (are those calls still costly? I have no idea, but I bet they are). The solution I came up with was to create a hitbox that enabled/disabled when the flashlight toggles.

I also tried to make sound a bigger part of the experience because I felt 3d sound would play a bigger role in vr. As a player, you can tell if the ghosts are approaching and from where because you hear them and orient yourself without light. I felt like this made the game too easy so I added some random sound makers to occasionally mislead players.

**Update**
Since the initial release, I’ve gone back and updated the game to focus on the gamefeel. I tried to think about actually being in the graveyard and what I could do to foster that feeling. One of the coolest additions (I’m totally biased on this) was adding a heartbeat that slowly grew louder as your flashlight’s battery decreased. I felt like this really helped to build the atmosphere because it kept with the metaphor of the flashlight providing safety. When you know you have a full battery you feel safe, but as the battery decreases and time goes on you start to freak out. I also added an exploding animation for the ghosts, but I’m not quite happy with it. I feel like it makes too much of a commotion, and I should probably replace it with a more gradual fade out (A shader that turns a mesh to dust, or has them dissolve might work better here). The addition did seem to resonate with players, though, so maybe I’ll keep it.

I’ve successfully ported the game to google cardboard, so keep an eye open for that release.

I’ve uploaded the game to gamejolt, so if you want an achievement for making it to 1am, or want to support me with some ad revenue feel free to play it here.

Play Bots

Over half way done!

Bots has been in development of a while, so making the remake of it in a week went much smoother. Bots started out as a control the area game, but evolved to include some programming aspects.

Play The Z-Files

I always wanted to do an X-Files inspired game. Instead of being Mulder or Scully, I wanted to create an experience where you were part of the conspiracy. The result is a game where you actively try to omit facts reported on a field report leaving the notes that cast doubt, so it’s more of a smoking man simulator I suppose.

Play Candy Sort

I was under a bit of a time crunch this week, but since it’s still (sort of) the Halloween season I decided to borrow the code base for shamrocks and build a game about sorting candy. The game is a bit cheesy, but I like some cheese with my Halloween. It brings back fun memories.