Recently I was asked to solve a puzzle. I was faced with a very quick demo of a game that I did not recognize, and I was asked how it was done. It was a fun challenge, but it started me thinking about if classic 8-bit arcade games had anything to offer us today. There are a lot of really good 8-bit (or at least retro) games, true there are some stinkers too, but is there anything retro games can offer us today?

If there is one thing that is guaranteed to drain the blood from the face of Unity Developer it’s a tight loop. If you introduce a tight loop into your code then chances are you’re going to have to kill the Unity Editor (tip: sometimes you can escape them by deliberately introducing an exception in the loop’s code while running).

One way to mitigate this risk is put any dangerous code into a Coroutine with at least one yield inside the loop. This can give Unity the opportunity to stop the code. However, if you’re writing a Unity Editor, StartCoroutine is part of the MonoBehaviour not the Editor - these are actually ScriptableObjects.

Demo of an interactive flight scene made from course material and assets from ‘GameDevHQ’. Additional asset of the full body avatar from ‘Mixamo’, glued together with ‘Final IK’. The fingers are animated to correspond with the Oculus Touch Controllers.

I used SpeedTree to create a Gorse Bush. It’s a tricky proposition as it’s, figurativley and literally, very thorny and that doesn’t work too well with the Tree model. But it’s going quite well, so I’ve added some variants with some of the animals I bought from the Asset store. Starting to look like a proper scene.

I’ve been developing a script that takes the dimensions of a structure and automatically constructs a prefab of the structure made up of individual destructable bricks. In the latest incarnation I’ve added an entrance.

First off, I know almost nothing about Art Engine so the fact I could get it to do some useful stuff in next to no time is a good start. This blog post is about what I tried.