Unity

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.

The advent of general coding AI assistants almost immediately changed how I think about hiring and interviews.

In the software engineering world, this mindset shift was psychologically easy for me, because I’ve always had a bias against the types of coding questions that AI can now answer near-perfectly. And they also happen to be the kind of questions I personally do badly at - the ones requiring troves of knowledge or rote memory of specific language capabilities, libraries, and syntax. It is not so psychologically easy for everyone, especially those who have developed a core skill set of running or passing “leetcode-style” interviews. Even before AI, the only types of coding questions I would personally ask were things that simply evaluate whether a candidate is lying or not about whether they can code at all, which was and still is surprisingly common. I have interviewed people that list bullet points like 7 years of Java experience but can’t pass a fizz-buzz like question, and this was a question I gave out on paper with a closed door and no significant time pressure.

“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 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:

I’ve been playing around with neural radiance fields (NeRFs) lately and thought a fun way to explore them would be flying through them in the Treekeepers “Puddle Jumper” in true scale.

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.

The “Human Joystick” is an experimental VR movement system in which the player moves through the virtual environment by changing their physical location within their VR “playspace”.

Land War is an 8-player strategy game I developed as a solo project and released to Steam in March of 2019.
This game was intended to have low art requirements and simple interaction rules that result in deep strategic gameplay.

The core concept is that of an ultra-simplified real-time-strategy game. Each player is represented by a color and can grow their territory by moving in any direction. The strategic elements occur when players encounter other players and have to make choices about which side of their land to defend or give up. Players can use the structure of the map and the coordinated action of other players to gain defensible footholds in order to take more area and eventually be the last player on the board.