Triangular Pixels
Development on Smash Hit Plunder has been going for about 10 months now, and with multiple game modes, several rounds of optimisation and lots of user testing it’s a surprisingly complicated game under the hood. So when it came to upgrading to Unity 5, we weren’t looking forward to it.
As we’re developing Double Destruction, we will be uploading blog posts as frequently as we can so you can keep track of what it’s like to VR Jam! Today’s development post is about how we came up with the concept and what our influences are.
25th February was the first ever SouthWest VR conference down in Bristol. We took along Smash Hit Plunder and our Gear VR’s down with two new comfort modes, new book UI, and a new game mode.
I also did a talk “Allow them to believe:Lessons learnt creating dynamic VR gameplay”, which I’ll attempt to go through now!
Demoing a VR game can be a weird experience. If you’re not careful you end up with someone blindly waving their head around, while a group of onlookers watches in bemusement. To turn this into a much better event for everyone we needed a second, shared screen to bring the whole experience together.
On Tuesday 2nd September we went to Bossa’s VR Meetup . Had a great time meeting some new people as they played Smash Hit Plunder. Scores were a lot higher this time around guessing as everyone was VR pro’s. What we did find was that everyone just loves the concept of the game, and that it was inherently fun! Thanks everyone.
So last week I had another post up on Develop in relation to the experiences I’ve had while developing in VR for Project Morpheus while I was at Sony, training games at Preloaded, and of course the work on Smash Hit Plunder.
On Monday 28th July we showed off a much improved build of Smash Hit Plunder. It went down so incredibly well!
Gamesbeacon has a write up and gameplay footage.
Y Lle for S4C Welsh TV were there filming, and had a right laugh with our game. Nick nicely saying that our game was the best there, thanks! I’m sure Radial G will be awesome too.
Friday 18th July was a big day for us. We crunched for 3 weeks to get from a paper design to a functional prototype that can give a snapshot of what Smash Hit Plunder will eventually be.
Don’t you hate it when you’re writing some new image loading or texture drawing code but don’t have any suitable test images? I always waste lots of time looking for a “nice” image to test with, and often end up drawing something with distict pixel values so I can pinpoint where any given image loading bug is. With that in mind I’ve spent a few evenings working on a proper “test card”.
Sometimes you get an idea that’s a little bit oddball but for some reason you can’t get out of your head and just have to run with it. This has been bouncing around my head for the last couple of days and has just been translated into code:
I plan to extend this somewhat to make it more useful, like having multiple (cross linked) pages of stats, a logging page containing trace messages, and possibly a resource/texture/rendertarget viewer as well. Any suggestions as to what else to (ab)use http for are welcome. 🙂