Terrain from a Convex Hull and Triplanar Mapping

As I pointed out last month, I’m putting my personal projects on a hiatus for a while. Instead, I’m going to talk a bit about interesting game dev and graphics stuff that’s come up at work. Naturally I can’t blab too many details about our internal projects at PEAK6, but I do want to point out some of the publicly available technologies and/or resources.

The project I’m currently working on has involved a witch’s brew of proc gen techniques. I want to focus on two in particular: convex hulls, and triplanar mapping.

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Slow month, little to report

I didn’t really do anything for my personal projects this month, and in fact I may be taking a hiatus from working on them for a while. As mentioned a couple posts ago, I just started a new job that I’m pretty busy with, not to mention I just had a second baby (which obviously is also keeping me pretty busy!)

Just so this update has one pretty picture, here’s a smoke effect I created at work. This was supposed to just be some programmer art for testing, but turned out unexpectedly good:

Demolo is playable on Oculus Go!

As laid out last month, there are 3 main tasks in order to port Demolo from the web build to work on Oculus Go: HMD controls, adjusting the UI, and replacing mouse with tracked controller. Well, I’ve done all three, so all the main tasks are done!

Now there’s just assorted polishing left to do (mostly glitches in the UI) and then submitting Demolo to the Oculus app store. I haven’t done a ton of research on their submission process, so I have no idea how long it takes (eg. is there a review period like iOS apps?) Aside from the unknown submission time, I estimate another week and Demolo will be released on Oculus Go!

I will of course be posting another blog update with a link to the live app.

Demolo release: Almooooost…

I’m mildly annoyed that Demolo still isn’t on Oculus Go yet, but I’ve been spending the past month addressing player feedback from the WebGL prototype. There is one last new feature I’m considering; make sure to read about it at the end and tell me if you think yea or nay.

Introducing Demolo

So the 3D puzzle game I discussed last month is nearly ready to release on Oculus Go. I’ve made all kinds of changes based on player feedback to the WebGL build I put on itch. I’ve done lots of graphics tweaks, but the most important change has been replacing the timer with an energy system, both making the increasing challenge more visceral but also incentivizing chains (by awarding bonus energy).

So this weekend I finally came up with a name: Demolo

3D Puzzle for Oculus Go

Alright so what I did this past month may seem a bit out of left field…

I developed a 3D puzzle game to put on Oculus Go! The game is almost complete but still missing touches like, say, a name. I uploaded a web build to itch.io for people to try out and give me feedback.

Unity in Action 2nd ed. is out!

So the biggest news this month is that my book is finally completely released! It has been a really long time since I finished writing it, but I suppose this is just the downside of Manning having a high quality bar and spending months on making everything perfect. At any rate, the book is available on both their website and on Amazon.

As for my RPG, this has felt like my single most productive month. I realize this is because of multiple systems I implemented months ago falling into place (eg. the data models for shops have existed this entire time, but you couldn’t see it) but it still feels awesome.