Unity’s Timeline⌗

I spent some time learning about Unity’s timeline. Here is a great video:

What I had been doing before was using a single animation controller and moving all of the objects around within 1 animation clip. This was hard to manage with multiple objects, and trying to do repeating animations required copy/pasting keys. With Timeline, you can easily compose different animation clips from different objects. You can also easily switch between camera views. This let me breakdown my animations to a few animation tracks for each object, and clearly compose them in one place.

Weekly Game Jam 136⌗

The weekly game jams have some great entries. This past week’s theme was “Single Player Co-Op”.

My favorite game:

This game has an interesting mechanic. There are two characters connected by a rope. You can move around with standard platformer controls, but pressing ‘space’ will tug the rope, flinging the other character towards you and switch the controls to the other character. The mechanic is interesting, but the use of color in the tileset to indicate which character is active was a great touch.

Another one I need to check out that looked interesting:

It’s a game with Wizards and stuff.

Upcoming Game Jams⌗

There’s a Bad Lovecraft Jam coming up that might be interesting. I might have to quickly push out my Penguinthulhu idea. It’s a pretty dull month.

Random Chatter⌗

I’ve been trying to find games that are designed to make you feel empathetic about ostracized groups or individuals. There was a great game that came out a couple years ago called Bury Me, My Love, but I’ve had a hard time finding other similar games.

New Game Ideas⌗

I had a few ideas:

Elevator Simulator⌗

This game is about getting that common feeling of standing with a group of people trying to guess which elevator door will open first. The game would have 3 elevator doors and a group of people standing infront of them, moving around to guess which door will open based on the lights and numbers visible above each door. You can switch doors at any time, but you wind up at the back of the line for that door. The AI will try to guess which door is right as well. Things might happen like an elevator breaks down, or it winds up going right past the stop unexpected. The person first in line get 5 points, 2nd gets 3, 3rd gets 1.

Urban Myst-Like⌗

We talked about this a bit on the gamedev channel. I’ve been wanting to do an Urban game for some time, but haven’t had technical knowhow and time to pull it off. One of the big struggles with the game was trying to use GPS to figure out a player’s location to show the next screen. Someone mentioned using QR codes that you could print out that would just link you to a website, which I thought was a really novel idea and greatly simplifies the logistics around coding up GPS positions.

We’d basically have a list of location IDs and encode each location in a URL to our game.

http://fredricdorothy.net/game/location?id=123abc456

No one would be able to guess those location IDs without seeing the QR code, so you couldn’t really play the game unless you physically could see the QR code. The other really cool thing about this is that you could reuse the same QR codes for other games, or print them up and organize them in different cities to play approximately the same game.