Santa’s Balloon Ride is Back! Last Christmas, Santa’s Balloon Ride took to the skies, bringing holiday cheer with a festive twist! This year, I’m excited to announce it’s back, bigger and better, with versions for PC, Mac, Linux, and possibly mobile devices! 🎁🌌 In this casual game, you’ll guide Santa’s hot-air balloon around a cozy little plane... Read More

Halloween ‘24 - Dev progress and playtesting Development progress Halloween ‘24 is approaching… This year i managed to put in time to polish several parts of the game. Ill go into detail about several parts which may only be relevant to those interested in the development, otherwise skip to the part about content. Behind the scenes The UI ... Read More

Adapting Conway’s Game of Life on watchOS Using SwiftUI and SpriteKit When I set out to bring Conway’s Game of Life—a cellular automaton simulation—to the Apple Watch, I wanted to leverage the capabilities of SpriteKit and SwiftUI to create an interactive and visually appealing experience on such a small screen. In this post, I’ll walk through ... Read More

Space Trader for Apple WatchOS Outline A project to adapt Pietr Spronck’s Space Trader to WatchOS. Goal is to carefully adapt the original Space Trader gameplay to the WatchOS platform with its real-time travel mechanics, text-based interactions, and simple sprite graphics, thus creating a compelling, easy-to-play experience that fits within th... Read More

Outline This article desribes how I manage multiple cinemachine cameras using a custom finite state machine. Giving the player control over different cameras while also zooming in and out. Use case When dealing with multiple cameras, we need a way to change between these. Cameras can be player controlled and/or logic controlled. This can be d... Read More

Grave Tender - State of the game The game is currently a prototype project. State is closed gameloop, however several bugs persist. I plan on ironing out and releaseing an early build for this Halloween this year. Stay tuned for updates later on Read More

TMPpro and unicode characters So im designing an enemy ai robot that relays its mood or intention to the player by a display - it’s “hooman interaction interface” . The display shows an emoji of the robots current intention. Since I’m using a GOAP style ai for this enemy (if you want to know more about GOAP style ai, you can read my post on it ... Read More

Game is out now Ho ho ho! my sleigh may very well be in the repair shop, but I am luck to have this fine hot-air balloon. Now if you can only help me make it around the world to deliver Christmas spirit to all the homes. The game is out and available to download for free now on itch.io. Soon AppLab and SideQuest Read More

Devlog progress video In the wake of taming rendering in unity for limited standalone devices such as the older quest 2, I needed a change of pace. I remodelled the houses, and decided to remove the trees entirely until everything else worked. Of course, in game development, it is very rare that everything “just works” new problems arise just... Read More

Synopsis I been working on developing a small game for the Quest 2 for upcoming christmas. My goals are to set up a somewhat graphically demanding game with as a fair mix of post processing, lights and shadows in Unity, to learn more about how to implement future projects. Caveat In this post I will go over settings and configurations in Uni... Read More

So santa’s sleigh is in the shop After a rough landing, Santa’s sleigh is in the repair shop. Timing couldn’t be worse, since christmas is right around the corner. Luckily Santa’s friend, the balloon captain Skipper, has lent Santa his hot-air balloon. Now he can ride that when delivering the presents. Question is can he make it. Steer the ho... Read More

Unity Netcode for Gameobjects - Parenting picked-up objects I like many others before me, encountered a problem while using Unity’s netcode for gameobject while attempting to parent objects picked up by a player. What I usually do (non-multiplayer) Usually I would let the player pick up an item, in this scenario lets say a weapon since its a ... Read More

Abstract classes - What are they Well whats this now, something abstract? Honestly it sounds worse than it is. An abstract class is, not unlike the interface, sort of a blueprint of a class. It cannot on itself be instantiated but it serves for other classes to inherit from. Similar to interfaces, the abstract class can have abstract methods wh... Read More

What are interfaces in C-sharp Interfaces, in c-sharp syntax not to be confused with anything the user interacts with, are one of the most important concepts in C# and programming in general. They’re like a contract between you, the programmer, and your code. And just like in any other contract, both parties have to follow the rules or things c... Read More

Game updates post-jam and launch Updated the macOS edit and Linux client - WebGL is under way Its just minor adjustment and tweaks for now v.1.1 - Improvements and bug fixes Default camera is now third person camera - you can still switch to first person view by pressing right mouse button or C on the keyboard UI scaling is now correct... Read More

Ballooning on a sphereoid Game released on itch.io where it can be downloaded or played directly in a browser. Read More

Isometric perspective in Unity Contraversly the isometric perspective is achieved by switching from Perspective Projection on the relevant main camera to Orthographic. To achieve the well known perspective known from classic games, you elevate the camera and tilt it properly. This is done by altering the Rotation of the camera to X: -30 Y:45 Z... Read More