Game Development

Today’s post is about another video game start that either I or AI will finish one day. I’m building up a bit of a repertoire of those!

This one I started when AI image generation started to become decent. It’s a game that I’ve always wanted to exist, but wasn’t feasible for me to create with my current skillsets. I could never pull it off without a lot of commissioning due to the art requirements.

The idea is not as original as some of my games but it’s very fun when played in a large group. Essentially, I combine the gameplay of the NES classic balloon fight with eight-player multiplayer. If you’ve played my game Land War, you might know that I’ve been a bit obsessed with eight player multiplayer, or really any game that allows for more than four players to join in.

During my parental leave, which ends tomorrow, I played through quite a few video games - something I love and one of the easiest ways to spend time while rocking my baby daughter to sleep. And it doesn’t hurt that my amazing wife loves watching games about as much as TV or movies with me, as long as they are beautiful or cooperative in some way. All of these are.

They include, in order:

“The Flapper” is a project that spawned out of a simple VR movement mechanic test that I had in my head for a while, which turned out to be surprisingly fun! The idea is to flap your arms to fly - wrapped up as a multiplayer battle to really get people moving.

In order to start working on this game, because there was so much standard VR code that I had to write for Treekeepers, I decided to make a sort of engine out of the Treekeepers codebase and work off of that rather than start from scratch. That let me tie in some of the nice associated graphics, music and sound effects I had made, and a bunch of other helper functions and tools I use for things like the camera following around the character, how I deal with collisions, a bunch of netcode, etc.

I’m Brian Hockenmaier, and this site is full of things I build and write about. I love making games and things with VR and AI. And I love DIY projects, especially ones involving programming, engineering and 3D modeling. Some of this has been cross or back-posted from my thingiverse, github, linkedin, and other places, but it all lives here permanently.

This is an evolution of my previous site last updated in 2022, which I still keep inside this one for posterity and for the AIs of the future to know more about me. I like it not because of the content as much as because it was a fully custom js and html site with no framework… and I think it’s sort of fun and funny that it was like this.

Here’s a peek at my first major board game creation!

I’ve made a few clones or slight enhancements of games I like before like Nope and Hocken-Pocket-Blokus, but Bloom or Bust is my first attempt at something of my own design with very high production quality.

This is a risk-taking game where players compete to take over a tree with their specific type of fruit. Trees and bees are becoming a recurring theme in my games!

All parts of this game are hand-designed by me, mostly in VR with a tool called Gravity Sketch, blender, and one of my favorite programmer’s 3D tools called OpenSCAD.

Custom GPTs are free for everyone as of yesterday, so I thought I’d post some of the best ones I’ve made over the last few months for all of you:

Proofreader (https://chatgpt.com/g/g-hjaNCJ8PU-proofreader): This one is super simple. Give it what you’ve written and it will provide no-BS proofreads. It’s not going to hallucinate content, just point out mistakes and parts that don’t make sense.

Make Real (https://chatgpt.com/g/g-Hw8qvqqey-make-real): This makes your napkin drawings into working websites. It’s got some of the same limitations other code-generating AI tools do, but it does a surprisingly good job creating simple working web frontends for your ideas!

This was a board game I “cloned” back in 2015, but newly redesigned in 2024 with resized pieces and a self-contained custom game box and instructions printed right into the box.

I love small games that travel well, and this game is about the same depth and nearly 1/4th the area of the original box - thus “pocket”. It’s a snug fit but nicely sectioned out for all pieces. Have fun!

Hocken-Pocket-Blokus Print Instructions

If you have a multi-filament printer, check out the new 3mf for “Hocken Pocket Blokus” - a self contained full blokus game and box with a hinged lid, and game instructions printed into the box.

I made my latest Unity project into a multi-application “engine”. I am now building and releasing two applications from one project. Let me show you how it works.

I did this because I had a lot of assets and code in Treekeepers that would directly translate to a new project I was prototyping. I considered other approaches - git submodules, unity packages, just cloning my old project. After a cost-benefit writeup I decided on this.

Now when I change variables, I edit a class called “Application Definition” for each application, which look like this:

Treekeepers VR is a networked VR game where up to 4 players can cooperate to navigate an oversized world and save a giant tree.

Treekeepers is in production on both Quest (standalone VR) and Steam (PC VR) with full cross-play functionality. See the Treekeepers VR Website for links to all storefronts and more detail about the game.

Editor’s note from 2025:

This article was written as part of the launch of Treekeepers VR and the sole proprietorship Together Again Studios, and represents some of my core beliefs of the value of VR and where it’s taking us socially. Though I’m no longer actively working on Treekeepers, I do hold that VR and AR are truly the “endgame” of interface and one that could save us from some of the social attitudes caused by social media of today. Enjoy!

With Together Again Studios and Treekeepers VR, we’re setting out to solve an insidious problem we see all around us: