Hallow Games

West Virginia video game development

Unity

Cheese

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I have been working on a new project for the past few months and it is called Cheese.  I don’t want to share many details about it, as I want the game and the experience to be a surprise to the players, but the purpose of this post is to confirm that it is a real thing and that I am currently developing it in whatever spare time I can find.  You heard it here first.

Also, I’m confident this doesn’t give anything away about the actual game.  This was a screenshot from last year when I was messing with a few things I wanted to include in it:

Leading Unity Workshop Spring 2017

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I got to lead a Unity Workshop for the club again this semester.  I got feedback at the end of the previous workshop and worked most of that into improvements for this version.

As before, the library has been super supportive of the event and Unity was still on the Mac books from last semester.  I noticed that we had several people that didn’t install the engine before the workshop last time, so to help make sure everyone was on the same page and using the same version of Unity, I required the group to use the library Mac books, which solved that problem.

A huge challenge I had with the previous one as well was people working at different paces.  To help solve this more, once we walked through all the basic Unity controls, I told everyone that if I was going too slow they were welcome to work ahead on the downloaded PowerPoint.

It seemed to me like people worked together more on this one, when one person had a question, if they couldn’t ask me they could ask someone next to them or I had enough help from my fellow officers to help everyone with their questions.  I think everyone got something out of it just based on the positive conversation afterwards and the more positive feedback on our forms this time.  We also got more people working in Unity after the workshop either in the club’s Fixer Upper Jam or in the Unity Jam.

Image may contain: 4 people, people standing

Video Game Trivia Quiz App

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So over Christmas break, I looked back at my goals for 2016 and I saw that I had written to publish a game on the Android store.  As you may have seen in an earlier post, I worked through a course where I created a basic Elementary Math Test and published that to the app store.  After I made that, I felt that I knew enough to create a video game trivia app. It included basic trivia on famous game developers, consoles, industry firsts, and a mix of all those categories.

The game has been in an open beta since I posted that tweet.  I have gotten some feedback from the club, including in a feedback form that I created and shared which has really helped me out.  I’m hoping to address those changes and fix bugs soon to get it into a release state.

Links Here:

Game Description Page on Hallow Games site

Game Store Page on Google Play

Elementary Math Test App Launch

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Elementary Math Test is now available on Google Play for free!  It works on both phones and tablets above Android version 2.3.3!

Check it out on the Google Play Store by clicking the badge below:

Get it on Google Play

Google Play and the Google Play logo are trademarks of Google Inc.

Elementary Math Test – Unity Quiz Game

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This month, I have always wanted to make a quiz game in Unity and I was able to work through a simple online class that taught the basics of it.  It was just a simple math quiz, and I decided to post it on my itch.io just for fun, so if your interested have a go at it!  I exported it to web there.

The main reason I took it was because I wanted to make a basic quiz-type of app for Android and iOS that quized individual club members about the history of games and some of the famous developers in the industry.  I figured that would be a more fun way then hearing me talk about it (even though I touched on it a bit at several meetings this semester).

Game Link:

https://hallowgames.itch.io/elementary-math-test

Leading Unity Workshop

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Leading the Unity Workshop was probably one of the best things I did this semester.  The first ideas for this came in the Spring semester when it was discussed briefly among officers and the club.  Up to that point, we had a couple of tutorials on Unreal and Blender that we worked through at meetings, but an hour really wasn’t enough time to work through the basics of the engine and get comfortable with it.  I also had several people approach me and ask about how I learned about Unity, as I have mostly self taught myself through several books and online classes.

So one of the goals that was set early on for the club this semester was having the Unity workshop – and I also felt more comfortable doing it in the fall versus that spring after gaining more experience teaching that summer at iD Tech, which I have also covered here.

In the workshop, I covered the basic Unity Interface, creating and manipulating objects, and then we moved on to making a basic platformer and designing the levels.  Overall, I think it was a success but there were several things looking back on it that I could have probably done better.  One is that it is hard to keep a huge group on the same task, as everyone moves at different speeds.  I felt bad because I knew some people were going through it very quickly.  However, others had never programmed before in their lives and struggled with it.  We also had several technical hiccups out of my control and I had said to those attending the event to have it installed on your computer BEFORE coming to the workshop (if they chose to bring their own), but some still came and wanted to install it there, so they were all behind from the start.

In closing, I am very grateful to the WVU library (Beth Toren and Rodney Adlington especially) and them working with our club to install Unity on the Macbooks and testing it out and making sure everything was working before the day of the event.  Also the event would not have gone as smoothly as it did without the help from my assistants Destiny Dunn, Connor Haynes, and Ryan Kubik, who I had taught the workshop to several weeks prior as a trial run, and in return, they helped me teach the twenty students we had at the event.  Shout out to Ryan also for the poster design for the event.