I feel like I have been making some good progress on No Future and my underlying VR ARPG sandbox lately and want to share details. One of my various efforts towards a vertical slice is building some zombies and I am at a new milestone with them. Check out this video which I captured on the Quest 2. These are the zombies from the Synty Studios Simple Apocalypse pack that I am currently working with. They… Continue reading
So why am I creating No Future? My primary motivation is my VR ARPG sandbox called Pixel. No Future is simply a fun choice of something that will help drive the creation of that framework. My hope is to eventually develop several VR games using it. So what’s Pixel? Pixel is essentially a codebase for a VR ARPG sandbox inside Unity with built in level editing and generation in VR. The world is created using… Continue reading
I thought it was worthwhile writing a little about how Oculus is unlocking the Quest with the new App Lab distribution process. App Lab is a new way to share early access concepts with the Quest community that finally breaks down the extreme walled garden that Oculus aka Facebook has built around the platform. For Quest it will be the only way someone can distribute content for the device without being chosen and blessed by… Continue reading
Since it is now 2021 and I haven’t been doing any posts for a while I started feeling like I am neglecting the blog and wanted to introduce my new hobby project No Future. I have been pretty busy the last few months with a variety of work projects – some Unity/XR related and some not but a really nice mix of things and all in the realm of real-time 3D. I guess that I… Continue reading
I recently found a great channel if you are interested in learning the new Unity XR framework. Valem is really cool and he has a series called Introduction to VR in Unity – UNITY XR TOOLKIT that provides a nice foundation for basic cross-platform VR interaction. This is excellent for beginners and is pretty easy to follow along. I just love listening to this guy!
I have been having fun building out the damage system for Alien Assimilator. During the assimilation run the human army is attacking your ship and as alien overlord you need to protect it fighting off various units like a wave shooter. However at the same time you must keep consuming material to power the shields, weapons, and other systems along with harvesting humans from the city – with your ultimate goal being to harvest as many as possible.
The ship is a simple working system with a variety of modules. These include lots of things like blaster cannons, snatcher beams, shield generators, matter to energy converters, energy storage cells, and thrusters to keep you aloft. If you lose to many modules your ship is going to start to fail ultimately crashing. There will eventually be a variety of designs with different trade offs to unlock – probably even a Borg Cube like one! I will also probably have a simple editor to make your own designs as well.
Looking for something with many of the features of GitHub but you want it on site in your office for your team so you aren’t paying for a hosted solution along with the storage and bandwidth costs associated with larger projects like games? If this is you definitely check out Gitea! I decided to experiment with it primarily for myself as a way to work on various projects that i am accessing via different machines.… Continue reading
After four amazing years at Wayfair doing really cool XR projects I am now moving on! I am hoping to find some new and exciting projects to get involved in. Going forward I plan to work on some of my own concepts while looking for freelance Unity development opportunities!
I have many years of experience with Unity and leading XR platforms and devices – SteamVR, Oculus, Magic Leap, HoloLens, Google Daydream/Cardboard/ARCore etc. I also have plenty of experience doing mobile development and performance optimization with Unity including on standalone devices beyond phones like Oculus Quest and Magic Leap One.
I am willing to take on any project. I am reliable, detail oriented, and passionate about what I work on. Check out my LinkedIn profile to see more about my skill set, past projects, and published experiences.
If you need help with a Unity project feel free to contact me via mike@pixelatedramblings.com or reach out through LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook.
Lately I have been trying out ideas for what the humans should look like in Alien Assimilator. After getting some inspiration from lots of voxel characters and looking at voxel games and their art styles I have settled on a style that I like.
I will be working on a lot of different ones following this art style. I decided I wanted a very simplistic design so that the vertex and triangle counts would not be extremely high. Plus these guys are little maybe a couple of inches tall on the ground so you won’t see lots of detail unless you get close to them.
They are modeled in MagicaVoxel as a body, head, arm, and leg. I put them together via script and do simple movements for the legs and arms while they wobble walk. They just wander about and look around right now. I plan to add some more states to them – one is to run around in circles hysterically waving their arms in the air. They can also turn into a rag doll and float when being snatched by the assimilator.
Another open source gem I have been using for a while is called diagrams.net (previously draw.io) which is a great free diagramming tool that I wanted to share with anyone who hasn’t already found it.
It works really well and integrates into Google Drive and many other services providing numerous diagrams right out of the box. I particularly like it because it is really easy to share diagrams from Google Drive.
It has a nice set of UML diagrams which I am used to and also a large variety of other diagrams for all kinds of needs. Here is a simple flow chart for Alien Assimilator showing the game flow.
After switching Alien Assimilator over to Steam VR I wanted to figure out what options there were for spatialized audio. I ended up searching around some on the internet and found this great post that covers the Oculus, Google and Valve spatializers. I had the same requirements they outline: Free to use and ship in your app. Currently supported by active development. Cross-platform compatibility with Unity. The article does a fantastic job outlining the strengths… Continue reading
If you really want to know “How Does a GPU Shader Core Work?” then check out this slide deck from Aras Pranckevičius’ presentations. This is the first thing that has finally made a whole lot of sense to me when it comes to trying to understand GPUs!
I wanted to discuss Pica Voxel which is a great little voxel framework for Unity that I have been using in my latest project. It is written entirely in C# and works pretty well. I have had success with it and plan to use it as the core in my next project. The best thing I like about it is that it has shaders that produce a really nice flat shaded look. The… Continue reading
Here is some concept art from my 8 year old son – two units we will have in the alien invasion arcade game we are working on. He likes to mock things up in Minecraft. I am starting to train him with MagicaVoxel which is what I am using to build the voxel models for the game. These units will likely grow in detail over time. I am focusing on a programmer art approach which is to get things in then refine them over time as the game play takes shape and the fun emerges!
I wanted to share my thoughts on the Magic Leap One. I was able to work with the device as an early access developer at Wayfair and I built an experience for it called Wayfair Spaces that is published on Magic Leap World. These are some of my personal thoughts about the device and the bigger picture of this tech and community of early adopters around it. I honestly believe that Rony and… Continue reading
