Category Archives: Unity

A Blind Legend

Unity, ,

Update: A Blind Legend is now on Steam!

Hello Everyone !

We can finally talk about the big Unity game project that took almost one and a half year to complete, A Blind Legend.

ablwhite
let’s start with the official game description :

A Blind Legend is a collaborative project of an audio-only action/adventure game for mobile phones. It’s based on a very innovative technology: binaural sound. In this game, the players are guided only by 3D sound and live the adventure by controlling their hero with multi-point tactile gestures. A Blind Legend” is above all a story: an adventure from the Age of Chivalry, to which we want to give epic scope.

In “A Blind Legend”, your eyes will be of no help.
So close them, sharpen your hearing and your blade…
and embark on an epic, perilous rite of passage.

The game is aimed not just at visually impaired (VI) people but also at anyone who’s hungry for an original sensory experience with a trailblazing video game. For us, the game achieves two objectives: giving VI people access to high-quality video games, but also raising public awareness of this type of disability.

What is “A Blind Legend” ? Well it’s a 3D audio game which you can try (and complete) for free. It was created by DOWINO who crowdfunded the project via a french kickstarter-like platform, here’s the link : https://en.ulule.com/a-blind-legend/

You can start downloading the app for iOS or for Android.

There’s even a desktop version of the first level (out of 5) , but that one’s only in french … still here’s the link.

The apps are quite small, but launch them as you need to download content, which is about 130Mb in total of audio content (so if you want to play after you’re done reading this, go ahead now 😀

The game being very rich in what we ended up calling “cinematics” and in dialogue and ambient sounds… The assets are heavy. We’re not working with textures here it’s all audio… And the audio must be of good enough quality.

Ok now that you’ve got the app, and you went in game to download the localized content, let’s go ahead and talk about the development process. Continue reading A Blind Legend →

Back for one week at Gobelins’ school!

Profile, Unity

Next week, I go to Annecy (one of the most beautiful city) at Gobelins‘ school. It’s with a great pride that I’ll come back to my latest school during one week for teaching an introduction to Unity!

During those days, I will present C#, Unity2D, Unity3D and the new Unity UI system. You can find the course online (french only).

I can’t wait to see the talented developers in this promotion! That will be really fun.

Unity2D the Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

Unity

Hey guys, after more than one year working with Unity, I thought it was time to give some feedbacks. With Tamsen (aka Gsynuh) we worked on a 3D game which has been canceled unfortunately. Anyway we were really happy to use Unity3D for this project instead of using Away3D (we’re mostly AS3 developers).

Now Tamsen is working full time on A Blind Legend (we will provide you soon a blog report on this exciting project!), built with Unity3D. On my side I will help him on specific tasks, I’ve also several AS3 projects, and one game in progress using Unity2D.

For those of you who don’t know me, I worked on the Citrus Engine and so I’m very familiar with Starling framework (a 2D API). This background precision is important to understand my approach of Unity2D.

Continue reading Unity2D the Good, the Bad and the Ugly. →

Unity P Dollar gesture recognizer

Unity

Hey guys! Just back from vacations in Norway (what an amazing country!), it’s time to go back to code!
Long time ago, I played with the one dollar algorithm for making gesture recognition. Browsing the page this week, I discovered the $1 has two children $N and $P. This last one is the most recent one and the best one! Its top features are multi-stroke and gestures represented as unordered point-clouds.

The $P algorithm has a C# implementation, so it shouldn’t be hard to use it with Unity? Indeed, unless the UI and files save path, the original code worked fine! A web demo, Github project and it’s on the Unity Asset Store!

Enjoy 😉

Unity, Flambe & OpenFL Skeletal animation libraries performance

Haxe, Unity, , ,

Hey guys, I concluded my AS3 performances test saying that AS3 math performances are still a bit low and that with other technology, we should have better performances. So here we go!

Again I remember that it’s really hard to compare different Skeletal animation engines using different models (and so an engine/a tech). I would really enjoy to have the same model available for each soft…

Flambe
Using Flump with AS3 implementation I had very good performances 30 mascots for 54 FPS. Since Haxe optimized AS3 code, we could imagine that we would win a bit more fps. However using Flambe (which is awesome) and its own Flump runtime I didn’t save FPS. Worst, I lost many! I had 30 mascots at 30FPS. Bad surprise.

OpenFL
OpenFL still use Haxe for coding however it may export native code! On mobile we could suppose that we would win some fps too. I tried several libararies, but the only one I succeed to make working was this one from Lugludum studio. They didn’t try it a lot on mobile, they focus on desktop, but for a first mobile run it wasn’t bad at all: 34 FPS for 30 animated characters.

Unity
For Unity I searched a free library, and I was really glad to see there is an implementation (no official, there was missing an eye with my model) of DragonBones. I put 30 dragons, damn I had 60 FPS! And finally 40 dragons at 46 FPS.

So what to conclude? I was sad to see that OpenFL didn’t save me some FPS relatively to my AS3 benchmark. But we can’t judge a technology on this test. Unity math performances seems to be really good. Is it the best tool for making 2D game? Maybe, without any doubt they are on the good road.

Download sources.

P.S. Gaming for change? Have a look on A Blind Legend! A really nice mobile project using binaural tones! Oh and my colleague and me will work on it. So stay tuned 😉

Unity and its asset store

Unity

This last weeks, I played a lot with Unity. Thanks to its Editor it’s very easy to set up a scene in no time!
Also one of its strongest features is its Asset Store. You can find excellent stuff (assets, code, utilities…), however you’ll have probably to pay for that.

Unity has succeeded to create a market around its product and make its own product even better. Imagine if Greensock/TweenMax or even the Citrus Engine were able to be included into your project in one click. People looking for game engine will see the different ones and reviews. By promoting its asset store, Unity promotes its technology and people which are using it. Developers are highlighted and they gain some profits for their hard work (Unity too it’s a 70% – 30% deal). How many Flash developers earn money thanks their libraries? Certainly less than Unity developers and there are more (were?) Flash developers.

It seems that Unity users don’t hesitate to give money for what they want, whereas Flash users pay more attention. The Citrus Engine wouldn’t be popular and used if it wasn’t free.

Well I could write a long blog post, comparing Unity and Flash frameworks/libraries management but that’s definitely not my goal. I just would like to say that if you pay $15 for this awesome component, you will be able to make a FPS in no time.
Like I did in 15 minutes. Demo.

I wish I could make this in Flash in less than 15 minutes, and I don’t care about the price (if it worths it and is reasonable).