Posts Tagged ‘great-game’

Hanna in a Choppa 3

Thursday, September 2nd, 2021

Take flight in the latest installment of the hugely popular Hanna in a Choppa series of games. This time, in fabulous 3D VR on the Rift and Quest, rather than crappy old 2D Flash. Guide Hanna through 10 bonkers levels each with hidden secrets and achievements. Train your pet elephant Stompy, steal honey from pesky bees, humiliate upgraded OXOBot at his own game, and of course The Button makes a spectacular return.

Join the discussion on Discord: https://discord.gg/VmA5fWPryw

Get it FREE for Quest and Quest 2 via Oculus App Lab
https://www.oculus.com/experiences/quest/3599849596718662

Get it FREE via SideQuest
https://sidequestvr.com/app/2979/hanna-in-a-choppa-3

Get it FREE for Rift (includes 10+ unlockable custom items for your Oculus Home)
https://www.oculus.com/experiences/rift/6436508716374995

The Eastern Edge

Wednesday, June 10th, 2020

THE EASTERN EDGE – THE FEVER-DREAM SURVIVAL-SHOOTER WHERE YOU PANIC-LOAD EVERY ROUND WITH YOUR BARE HANDS, BECAUSE DEATH IS ONLY EVER A FUMBLED BULLET AWAY.

Test your nerves and your gun skills without all the abstractions of the modern FPS – no auto-reloads, power-ups or recharging health bars.

This is a VR game exclusive to the Oculus Rift and Rift S that I worked on as the main developer with the incredible team at Shadow Industries.

Out now, you can buy The Eastern Edge on the Oculus Store here, and see the official website here.

PENNZOIL JEEP BAJA VR

Saturday, September 16th, 2017

Push the limits of performance in the desolate beauty of Baja, Mexico, and find out what it takes to dominate the desert.

Pennzoil Jeep Baja is high octane VR experience developed from the ground up to showcase the unique performance of the Jeep Trailcat and Pennzoil Platinum.

I worked with the fantastic team at Shadow Industries on this wonderful project that included integration with a physical simulator. It was a beast of a machine, simulating the beastly 707bhp Trailcat. The goal was to make the player feel like they were wrestling with a tiger!

Unfortunately, unless you catch the exhibit at an event, you can’t play it. The best I can do is show you a 3 minute trailer made for the website.

Bending the Light

Tuesday, August 8th, 2017

bending-the-lightDon your Oculus Rift headset and grab your Touch controllers for this mind-bending puzzle game. Manipulate beautiful beams of energy with all manner of tools to try and charge up the targets. Includes 40 levels, each with its own secrets to discover.

Play on Oculus Home

  • – 40 levels, each with secrets and collectables
  • – Designed for Oculus Touch
  • – Playable with gamepad
  • – Even playable with just a keyboard
  • – Abstract, dreamy, beautiful and atmospheric
  • – Meta-puzzles for those who solve everything else
  • – Low pressure, relaxing gameplay, but not simple!
  • – Can you achieve 100% completion?

Watch the trailer

See the walkthrough

Puzzle Putt

Saturday, October 17th, 2015

Puzzle PuttPlay crazy-golf with Shaun the Sheep! In this game though, you get to bend the course to your advantage by adding new blocks to the course. Can you get a hole in one? With 72 levels across 8 courses, there’s loads to conquer here. And if you’ve beaten the lot, why not make up your own levels with the built in editor? You can even capture and share instant replays of your best shots (or worst failures).

Download Puzzle Putt for iOS

Download Puzzle Putt for Android

Download Puzzle Putt for Kindle

This game was designed and built with Aardman Digital. They gave me loads of freedom to design the game, which is always a lot of fun. I wanted to build something unique, and which gives the player freedom to express themselves. The idea for Puzzle Putt is based roughly around the original Trackmania game, mixed with elements from Minecraft and of course other crazy-golf games that have been around forever.

Puzzle Putt: Three StarsTechnically, this build presents a few challenges. The first is the shot preview line. I really wanted the game to be more about solving the puzzle of how to get to the hole in the fewest shots, rather than being about performing the ideal shots with skill/judgement. To help the player achieve great shots, they need an aim prediction line that gives a lot of accurate detail about where their shot is going to go before committing to it.

The only way to get a super-accurate prediction line is to compute the shot via the physics engine, before it is played. You can’t write approximations and expect them to match the built in physics beyond the most basic of shots. Unfortunately, Unity’s physics engine is tied like clockwork to the FixedUpdate calls, and can’t be computed separately to the passage of real time. In other engines, you can often take a full copy of the physics world, then allow it to run several seconds of updates all within a single frame. Then you can present the results as a preview line instantly.

As the game was developed, it appeared totally insoluble within Unity. You simply don’t have API access to the physics engine at the level required to precompute outcomes. This was a classic case of designing around the problem, rather than solving it directly. Rather than giving the player an instant preview line, the game fires invisible golf balls into the scene continuously and records where they go. The frame by frame progress of each ball is shown as a separate preview line. It gives an interesting mix of perfect prediction, but delayed, so you can’t expect to easily find that perfect ridiculous implausible bounce shot. Add to that the imperfect precision of touch inputs, and it actually gives a lovely balance between prescience and guesswork.

Unity’s physics engine presented another challenge too. Since the levels are made from lots of separate blocks, the simple approach is to build them from lots of separate prefabs, each with their own built in collider to form the ground. The problem is that where two flat colliders meet, there’s a little seam. When a ball rolls across that seam, it sometimes catches on it and flips up into the air. This is a disaster for the gameplay since it gives unexpected bounces on smooth ground, and lets people break the level design by hopping over things they shouldn’t be able to.

The solution was fairly involved, and took a few iterations to get right. First, I built a separate mesh collider for each separate wall of each individual block. When the level is started, it iterates through all the walls and searches for overlapping identical walls. So two square blocks side by side will share a wall between them, and that can be removed. This helps, but doesn’t solve the problem completely.

The algorithm for comparing walls is actually pretty simple. Grab the verts of the wall being considered, convert them to world coords, then compare to the verts of each other wall. If you can match off every vert with one from the other wall, both walls are redundant and can be removed. In this game, you only have to consider walls from the neighbouring blocks (including above and below), since any other blocks will be too far away to have overlapping walls.

The next iteration performed the wall removal as above, then also iterated through all the remaining mesh colliders and stitches them into one big mesh. Well, two big meshes – one for normal grass, and one with different physical properties for mud.

The algorithm for stitching colliders together feels more complex at first, but actually it’s pretty simple again. You generate a new empty mesh with no verts, which will be the output mesh. Then you iterate through all the input meshes (after removing redundant walls) in turn. For each one, consider all of it’s triangles in turn. For each triangle, translate the verts into world coords and see if a vert already exists in the output mesh. If it doesn’t, copy it in. If it does, remember which one it is. Create a triangle in the output mesh that matches the one from the input triangle, and move on to the next. Once you’ve worked through all triangles from all meshes, you’ve got one big mesh with shared verts in all the right places. The physics engine now gives perfect rolling behaviour across the seams, which is a total solution to the problem…

…except it’s slow. 10 seconds or so on a typical level, and 30 on a big one. I did consider simply hiding the mesh creation when the level was first entered, but you have to allow for the player’s edits. That means you have to run it at the point where the player hits “play”, and 10 seconds is totally unacceptable there. I considered computing the fixed part of the mesh at the start of the level, then adding in the user blocks later. Turns out that doesn’t let you remove redundant walls around the edges though, since they’ve already been stitched into the main big mesh.

I was including collider geometry as a GameObject within each block, and physically deleting it from the world. That works, but it turns out that creating and deleting all those GameObjects costs quite a bit of CPU time. The solution was to remove them from the prefabs, and instead load example wall meshes from Resources into memory. There’s a list of which ones each block requires, and it just uses the data from the shared meshes over and over, rather than creating/deleting them. Sounds obvious, but it does complicate the workflow of creating a block quite a bit, and you don’t get automatic translations between the local and global coords system when working through the mesh data.

The final technical issue was the Everyplay plugin. This is a lovely bit of software that lets people record their gameplay, then share it with other players. So if you pull off a spectacular trick shot, you can send it to your friends, show off with other players and so on. The plugin integrates pretty easily, and works fantastic on most Android devices. On some Androids however it doesn’t work, and worse than that, it totally breaks the rendering of the game, displaying a black screen. Everyplay is supposed to cope with this by asking a server if the current device is compatible or not, but it doesn’t seem to know the answer. In the end, we made a simple white-list of devices where it worked, and left it at that. When new devices are launched, we’ll have to update the game to include them, but that’s better than running the risk of ruining people’s games entirely.

Pi-Pi-Ee

Wednesday, February 26th, 2014

pipiee-screenshotWage epic battles in this turn-based strategy puzzle game. Play on your phone or tablet, with a friend or against the computer opponents across 30 increasingly challenging levels.

Play FREE on Android

Try for FREE or buy on Windows Phone 8

No longer available on iOS. Apple make old software obsolete for no reason other than it’s old. Same as they do with hardware. I can only recommend you go with an Android device next time you drop your iPhone!

Move next to your opponents to capture their cells. Shuffle one space, and you’ll grow a clone. Move two spaces, and you’ll jump, potentially leaving a gap in your defences. The balance of power can shift rapidly back and forth, and with deep and engaging gameplay you’ll be engrossed for hours. And if you do manage to beat every level, you’ll unlock the full-strength computer AI to really test your mettle.

Built with Unity3D
unity-logo

Hanna in a Choppa 2

Tuesday, May 1st, 2012

Hotly anticipated sequel to the original comes Hanna in a Choppa 2. In this huge development of the original game you can fly 11 different vehicles across over 50 levels. Every level has a secret to discover, quiz questions to solve, random humour and more.

Play Hanna in a Choppa 2

This sequel offers fans of the original a much deeper gameplay experience. My final test to be sure that every single achievement was possible took over 12 hours from start to finish!

Just because it’s a deep game however, doesn’t mean you have to struggle through it all. It has been designed in the same way as the original, to grow and shrink to the player’s gameplay preference. If you want a short experience, just play through the new levels with the suggested vehicle each time. Love the new biplane? Cool – beat every level with it. Love a particular level? Great, master it with every vehicle. Love secrets? Ace, have at ’em. Think you can spot a reference? Prove it with the built in quiz. Think you’re the baddest ass-ist gamer ever? Get the lot, I dare ya!

Do as much or as little of the extras as you want. Enjoy!

Tony Robinson: Weird World of Wonders

Tuesday, May 1st, 2012

This puzzle-platformer game was built with Aardman to help promote Tony Robinson‘s new series of lovely children’s history books.

Play Tony Robinson’s Weird World of Wonders.

In every game I try to introduce something new and original. In this one, you control two characters at once. Pee Wee and Nits. The boy Pee Wee can be controlled with arrow keys, and Nits, his dog, can be controlled with the mouse. That means that two people can play side by side on the same computer, in a cooperative manner. It’s great fun, give it a go and try to solve the level puzzles with your best mate!

I’ve loved Tony Robinson’s acting work since I was young, watching him play Baldrick in the Blackadder comedies. It was an amazing privilege to work with him on this project. His browbeating voiceovers totally transform the game, injecting character and humour throughout.

Home Sheep Home 2: A Little Epic

Friday, December 9th, 2011

Help Shaun, Shirley and Timmy find their way home in this super-cute BAFTA-nominated physics puzzle platformer.

Play the London episode on the web, free

Play the Underground episode on the web, free

Visit the official site to buy the game for your PC or iPhone/iPad

After the success of the original Home Sheep Home, Aardman asked me to work on a sequel with the ultra-talented artist/animator, Robin Davey (who did all the art/animation for the first game too). The original game was a pure Flash web game, hastily built just to raise brand awareness for the Shaun the Sheep show. The new game was to be a multi-platform paid download game, as well as a free-to-play web game. We had our work cut out for us!

So, what could both work as a free web game, and as a paid download? Why would anyone pay to play something they can play for free? Well, we came up with a few reasons:

  • Super high resolution graphics, running super-smooth in full screen
  • Lots more content – more episodes, bonus levels, more to collect
  • Developer’s commentary
  • Exclusive fun/silly cheat modes
  • Runs on your iPhone/iPad

Robin and I scratched our heads, scribbled lots of notes, drank lots of tea and ate lots of biscuits until we had a rough plan of the game. Then came months of hard work building it all. Top-designer Gavin Strange worked on the lovely interface screens. Tech genius Richard Davey orchestrated a textbook perfect technology-intercept with AIR3 for the desktop version, and lots of other people at Aardman were involved (check the in-game credits for the full list).

Alongside our own development we also worked closely with the amazing Mobile Pie to help them create the iOS version of the game. Mobile Pie’s star developer Matt Arahna and the rest of the team did a truly spectacular job of bringing the experience to the iPhone and iPad. They slaved for months ensuring the mobile version played just like the desktop and web versions, including every frame of the rich animation, beautiful layered backgrounds, physics, controls and more.

It’s been a long journey, and one of the most complicated projects I’ve ever been involved with! The multi-platform end product was well worth all the hard work though, and although the game has only been out for a couple of days as I write, it has already had hundreds of thousands of plays. Initial feedback from players seems very positive too! That’s the bit that really matters in the end – bringing a beautiful and fun experience to people who love games.

 

Wallace’s Workshop

Friday, October 15th, 2010

wallaces-workshop-0Unleash your inner inventor and build crazy contraptions in the BAFTA winning Wallace and Gromit game, Wallace’s Workshop. You’ll need to use your intelligence, imagination and cunning to build everything from battery powered cars and rocket powered sleds, to Heath-Robinson contraptions and giant trebuchets!

Play Wallace’s Workshop now!

This Flash game is a little deeper and more involved than a lot of the other games I’ve produced. Take your time, and don’t be afraid to skip ahead if you can’t figure something out.

wallaces-workshop-2

Crazy contraptions!

wallaces-workshop-4

Battery powered car

wallaces-workshop-1

Inventive machines

wallaces-workshop-3

Rocket sled!