I am convinced now more than ever that devices like the Rift are the future. Actually being inside the Half-Life 2 world is both mesmerizing and frightening. Nothing like wandering down dark zombie infested sewers for real to get your heart rate up. Thankfully I have played the game through almost half a dozen times so I know where to go and what pops out at you. Doing this for the first time in the Rift… Continue reading
Well, this is it. The Oculus Rift has me changing my life already. I have come to the realization that the Rift is going to be such a revolutionary device that I am going to devote most of my attention to it through it’s commercial release. You should watch these videos from GDC this year to get a feel for the energy surrounding it: Oculus VR @ GDC 2013: Behind the Scenes Oculus VR @… Continue reading
Well, it has been about two weeks since the Oculus Rift arrived. I have spent many hours with the device glued to my face, exploring what it feels like to be inside a computer generated world instead of looking at it through a flat window. The experience can best be described as stunning, with a sense that this is the beginning of a new paradigm for anything involving three dimensional graphics, especially games. There is… Continue reading
I purchased a Google Nexus 7 last summer and purchased a Nexus 4 phone at the beginning of the year. I wanted to relate my experience with this rather famous but not well known Google product and the latest flavor of Android, called Jelly Bean. I normally am not fanatical about things like this, but having had a good experience with both and having had an iPhone since 2009, I thought I would put my two cents… Continue reading
After some time away, I have started to dig back into AOS. Things have been progressing a bit more slowly since the end of last year and I have had a number of side projects going on that are taking away from my time working directly on AOS. However, some of them will eventually be beneficial to this project over the long run. I have reached a point in the development of the framework and… Continue reading
I finally got to my first game jam this year. I have wanted to go before but never took the time out of a hectic schedule and committed to one. I have to say that it is a lot of fun and everyone who gets the chance should try and go to one. It is fun, you get to meet new people, and you really can go wild with ideas and do whatever you want. My only… Continue reading
This entry is a bit of a diversion from gaming, but I wanted to write about the importance of internet security, and also wanted to alert people to the way things are moving in favor of hackers these days. Initially I want to point out a few articles – the first of which was fairly prominent in the news during the summer and the rest which are just good technical articles on how evolved and trivial… Continue reading
This is the second part of my series on better looking environments in Unity. It has been a while since the first post and Unity has made a lot of improvements since then. In this part I wanted to cover the post processing effects needed to achieve a more dramatic look, like the one in the current set of screenshots that I posted over the summer, which can be found in the Media tab. With… Continue reading
The first ever Boston FIG (Boston Festival of Indie Games) happened this past Saturday and it was an amazing event to be a part of. There were over a thousand in attendance, which I think far exceeded the expected registrations for the the event. The main feature was a digital games showcase which housed a select set of indie games from the area which you could both play and vote on – with the developers themselves… Continue reading
Originally AOS was going to be a strictly top down Diablo style game. After my friend Nathan started testing out my game builds the first thing he said is you need WASD! And I just groaned and said it is supposed to be a Diablo clone. Anyway, long story short – you can play both ways at the same time now. After salivating over the nice first person vistas using the new HDR+Bloom capabilities in… Continue reading
Well, it seems VR has made a comeback with the Oculus Rift HMD Kickstarter. Inspired by a dedicated hobbyist named Palmer Luckey and supported by John Carmack from Id, it seems we are going to have something very special in the coming year. The Oculus Rift is unique with a wide field of view and low latency tracking. It will be a consumer version of a true immersive stereoscopic HMD. The hype level surrounding the… Continue reading
I am still working on basic combat in AOS. One of the areas that I have just completed is driving the biped characters based on the movement stat. This stat is the first of my action stats which is in feet per second and because it is a stat will allow buffs and debuffs to automatically impact the movement rate of the character. So in a combat scenario I want the character animation and footstep… Continue reading
I have been working on the beginning of the official story for AOS. I have had lots of ideas and background material that has been percolating for years, however to actually begin the design of something that is supposed to excite, intrigue, and surprise people is extremely difficult. Having no formal training in storytelling or writing, and being cursed with a programmer’s brain, I am working at a great disadvantage. The background story is a… Continue reading
I have successfully updated my project to 3.5 and switched to using external version control, moving it into a Mercurial repository. I am still a little dismayed that Unity doesn’t work a little more smoothly with things under version control. Having a second set of meta files for everything means that you need to manage moving and renaming everything yourself and then doing the proper commands to your VCS when you do that. Workflow like… Continue reading
So the verdict is in for me – after two weeks of demon squishing I have concluded Diablo III just isn’t Diablo II or Diablo I. The magic just isn’t there. I have run two different classes now to completion and I don’t think I want to play anymore – replaying the same stuff in Nightmare just isn’t appealing. After watching the entire credits, I can’t believe how many people worked on this game and… Continue reading
