It’s been a long three months since our last update, but fear not. We did not go gentle into the good night. Far from it, in fact; we have been busy with many things.

     The main change in our lives is the hallmark out-of-college experience—we got full-time jobs. That’s what it means to be an adult, right? To bring home the bacon? Well, regardless of what being an adult truly means, getting a job and being financially grounded is important, especially in the independent gaming industry. Fortunately for us, work is fun. We work at a fabulous company called Rally as Fullstack Software Engineers. The work there is engaging and pushes us to learn new coding tools and techniques. Besides work, we play with the Rally soccer team too, and even managed to win the championship last season! The only downside to working is the 1 hour 30 minute commute, but we take advantage of that time by working on Realm Racer.

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Alpha Build

     We are really excited about this one. Within the next month or two, we should have an alpha

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     Apologies for the now almost four-month silence. Suchaaver and I have been busy graduating from college, moving out of our apartments to back home, and taking a vacation. In fact, I write this article from our hotel room overlooking the beach in Waikiki, Hawaii. But we have an update that I’m glad I’ve gotten through, as it opens up the door for a lot of feature development. Behold, moving rockets as obstacles!

Near miss with that second rocket.

     Suchaaver modeled a nice prototype rocket for use in our game, and it is now our game’s first moving obstacle. The design of the rocket pays homage to old school spaceships (think Pizza Planet from Toy Story). It’s fun, a bit nostalgic, and most importantly, fits the feel of our game by having a low-poly style to match the player vehicle.

Good ol' Pizza Planet providing some inspiration for that rocket.

What took so long?

     It took a lot longer than I anticipated to put the obstacle movement system in place. From the outset of this game, I knew I wanted to create

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     We haven't done this in a while, but this post is going to present to you all the wonderful updates we have for our game!

     I'm quite happy with the progress we've made. It's been considerately motivating, applying different software engineering principles and seeing what a difference they make in game. I'll discuss what those changes are and reflect on why they've made me a better coder.

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Aesthetics

     The gif below sums up most of what the game looks like now:

     The game has gone from just a bunch of debugging objects to actual art. We tweeted some concept art we had in mind for one possible slice of the game and have, to some degree, implemented that art. The tubes and the car currently reflect that. However,you'll note that the lines on the tube are very large. I had to perform some scaling due to nonstandard sizing of the models. Don't worry, I complained to our artist, and he says he has now standardized the sizes of all the models.

     The gif doesn't

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      Hey folks. Long time no talk. School's over for me, and the moonlighting profession has been taken up once more. However, I want to wind the clock back to the beginning of my previous quarter at UCLA, during which I enrolled in a class called "Game Development with the Oculus Rift." I couldn't refuse an opportunity to take such a class! In this blog post, I'm going to cover what it is like to take a class in game development, especially with virtual reality in mind, and how a class like this may benefit you or not.

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What makes Virtual Reality any different?

     At first, when we were all coming up with ideas for our games, a lot of them were rejected outright by our professor. The continuity needed in virtual reality requires a different kind of gameplay. There can be no cutscenes, no eye-blinking, no arm movement, no looking at oneself in mirrors—all these things can break the experience. This limited selection caused around eight of our fourteen teams to create horror games. Luckily, our team went a different route, really focusing on how the Oculus Rift allows

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     If you've been following our twitter, then you'll know we've been making some progress on our game! If you haven't, well, then you should be following us!

     We've done some concept work, and are pretty satisfied with the direction of the game. It's planned to be mobile game—an endless runner, to be exact. However, what excites me most is that it will all be procedurally generated. The whole game. I'm talking the track, the obstacles, the power-ups—everything (even the environment, if we are really good)! It might be slightly hard, trying to balance the game and give the user a fair chance at making some headway, but the challenge will be fun and, more importantly, a learning experience.

Concept Art and Inspirations

     We drew inspiration from some things that consumed a large part of our childhood: HotWheels!

Concept art from player view.

     To be more specific, Hot Wheels World Race, Hot Wheels AcceleRacers, and Hot Wheels Velocity X. The first two are movies (well, we own the game for the first one as well, but the the movie

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     I have our winners from the PacktPub givewaway!

     In no particular order, the winners are:

1. Charles J. Geringer, winning The Game Jam Survival Guide
2. Jonathon Lewis, winning Game Data Analysis, Tools and Methods
3. Jenny Allan, winning Mobile Game Design Essentials

      The winners will receive and email from PacktPub when the book has been put in their PacktPub account (if you do not have an account, PacktPub will help take care of that for you).

     Thanks for entering the giveaway everyone, and congratulations to the winners!

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