Blog: Game Development

I competed in the 2014 GD.SE Anniversary Game Jam and created Traces, a top-down pseudo-3D shooter. In Traces, the goal is to power each building with a laser beam in sequential order all while killing or avoiding the enemy blobs. Activate the first building in sight and find the next building at the end of laser beam. Eat meat to restore your health. Play Now (online) I decided to make a web canvas game this time because I had a huge barrier to entry problem in my last game jam game, Super Bounce (you had to download the executable and then register the UI system I was using). For this game, I used CraftyJS, a JavaScript canvas game engine library which worked great. I

I discovered Render Components from Guy Bedford in an email exchange where he laid out some basic code for the concept. Bedford has a small writeup on the ZestJS site, but this guide will cover all the same points. Because there is no written spec for Render Components, this guide covers one way of implementing this concept/idea. Details like naming conventions might not be the exact same as someone else. This guide will go over building a pseudo-YouTube video site and workflow setup to start using Render Components. Render components are applicable in many situations, including game UI. Game UI is just like a single page web app. I used render components in Unity with Coherent UI for my games, Radius and

I recently participated in the 3 day 2014 GDSE Game Jam and created a fairly solid result: Super Bounce. You can download it for Windows and Mac at superbouncegame.com . Also, as per the open source guideline of the game jam, the game's source code is available on GitHub. Play Now The journey Super Bounce is based on the super bouncing physics bug from Halo 2. To do a super bounce: just land on a mesh edge with a "crouch" and a relatively high velocity to soar to the sky. I did a lot of super bouncing back in the Halo 2, original Xbox days and even had my own bouncing clan. You can find a lot of super bouncing montages on YouTube

Say you want to create a ground plane that can be scaled to any size and maintain the same texture size on the surface without having to change the material tiling every time. Since this is not default functionality or some setting you can turn on, how can this be accomplished? I had this exact same question about a year ago when messing with Unity. DaveA answered a bit vaguely and re-reading his answer now, I implemented exactly what he suggested. You can see how to create both ideas he suggested in this article. There are two methods to achieve texture tiling based on size. The first way is adjusting actual texture tiling property whenever a change is detected in scale.

With Unity 5, there is no difference in terms of engine features between Personal/Free and Professional editions. This means that "Native Code Plugin Support" is not a problem anymore and there are no restrictions with DLLs and C++(unmanaged) code. This guide really only applies to Unity 4 and below When dealing with unmanaged and managed code, verbiage like P/Invoke, marshaling, interoperability get thrown around. The whole ordeal can be a bit daunting. This guide will go over dealing with DLLs in Unity Free/Standard and Unity Pro. Even with the native(unmanaged) code barrier in Unity Free, it is still possible to use unmanaged code. Overview Specifically, we will be making a C# managed DLL which relies on/references a C++ unmanaged DLL and then use those functions

Just finished the classic tennis game Pong for my Basys 2 FPGA (built from scratch). The project is written in VHDL and is played on a VGA monitor. You can see a video of it in action at the bottom of this article. Features: Multiplayer: Battle against your friend Play against the AI. Or AI vs AI battles Score Keeping Hidden Mode / Easter Egg (see below) Source: Just visit the GitHub Repo. Controls: ActionControlPlayer Left/1 Paddle movementbtn2 and btn3Player Right/2 Paddle movementbtn0 and btn1Resetswitch0Player Left/1 AI Enableswitch7Player Right/2 AI Enableswitch6 Technology: A small list of things implemented in this design: Collision Detection and Resolution VGA Output, game video Text display on VGA which includes a ram arbiter (uses my other project FP-V-GA Text) Basic AI for the paddles Button and Switch Input Seven-segment driver (BCD converter) Other: I

Coherent UI developed by Coherent Labs is a fully featured GUI system for any Unity (or .NET) game that utilizes the power of HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Use any bleeding edge HTML5, CSS3 features that run on WebKit and any JavaScript libraries you need. It is literally as easy as making a web page on Chrome. It also utilizes the WebKit debugger (just like Chrome) so it is easy find the root cause of any problem. The video explains the whole process but this blog post contains some nice references (see video description for timestamps). Play video