Hanalei Studios

I am a Game Designer from Australia

[hanaleistudios]

30 mins of Soma, Mini Metro and Thief: Gold

So one of my goals that has spanned many years now is to play 30 minutes of all of my Steam games. So far I’ve played nearly all of them but for the final few I thought I’d do a little bit of a write up on them. 

Soma

Soma is a horror game from the same studio that made the Amnesia series, of which I’ve played none of it’s respective games. Horror games have never, and unfortunately continue to not be my kind of game. That however isn’t a comment on the quality of Soma, from the brief time I spent with it I was really impressed with the art style, the tone it set and audio. My favourite part of Soma was how the volumetric lighting and audio played off each other like a 2 piece band. 

The reason why I specify volumetric lighting is because it really invokes a sense of walking along a road on a foggy night, it also just looks cool and I’m a graphics nerd. I also like the way the fog effects make the light have more of a pseudo physical presence in the space, very cool. 

The audio was also very nice, very haunting, I really loved how a heart beat faded in and out, pretty cliche I’ll be honest but as someone who doesn’t play horror games I was impressed. 

When the audio and lighting tied themselves together in a section with an enemy stalking you around corners it created a looming presence auditorily and visually, the stomping and fog drawing closer was a bit to intense for my poor lil heart.  

Mini Metro

Basically all I can say about Mini Metro is I’m never playing it again, not because it was bad, but because it was so fantastically enthralling and enticing to the part of my brain that wants to optimise everything. I adore the feedback in this game, the soundtrack that builds with you’re railways, the pops and clicks when you drag in new trains and connect tracks and everything else was just outstanding. 

Ok I lied I’ll definitely be coming back to Mini Metro...

Thief: Gold 

Thief: Gold was an interesting case, on one hand, I really dug the theme, atmosphere and the light mechanics, but on the other hand in places the level design was a bit of a slog and somewhat obscure but I think that is more the game showing its age. 

However where this games shines is in it’s audio, I could feel my heart start racing as guards footsteps edged closer to me, my blackjack fired up ready to whack whatever poor soul walked around the corner had me on the edge of my seat. Thief: Gold is another game I can very easily see myself coming back to. 

[hanaleistudios]

Hey Gang! Here is a quick video of HoloRuler V2! It now has node based measurement and the ability to move nodes around :D 

[hanaleistudios]

Hi Gang! Here is my first draft for the Unity Neon Challenge! Hopefully going to do several iterations of this and make something super duper cool! 

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Here is a video of a project I made in about a day and a half. It’s a basic HoloLens model viewer with some voice commands and uses Unity UI, Pretty cool to learn how to use Unity UI and voice commands so I’ll definitely be using them for more holographic stuff in the future :D

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I made a video of my holographic measurement tool running on a physical HoloLens! I’ve got a few other videos that’ll I’ll post of other things I’m working on as well :) 

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Little gif I made while playing around with shaders! Used timeline, this tutorial and the post processing stack

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Upward Mobility Update #2 Screenshots!

Hi Gang! In tonight's post I thought I’d share some screenshots of all the lovely art our artist Eliza Moskalewicz has been making!

[hanaleistudios]

More Vuforia experimentation tonight! This time I decided to make a little thing where there are 2 sad people and when the player puts them together they aren’t sad anymore!

[hanaleistudios]

Started playing around with Vuforia tonight! More comprehensive guide tomorrow or whenever I decide to write it!

[hanaleistudios]

Looking At Lookdev in Unity!

In todays blog post we will be taking a look at the experimental Lookdev feature in Unity! The look dev tool allows you to check a model's materials and textures and gives you full control over how you can examine them!

1. Open up the asset store

Go to the asset store and grab these 2 things:

This is collection of a few HDR images that we’ll use as backgrounds for the lookdev view: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/essentials/beta-projects/unity-hdri-pack-72511

We will also grab the Adam character models from the Unity Adam Demo: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/essentials/tutorial-projects/adam-character-pack-adam-guard-lu-74842

2. Open a lookdev view window!

Go up to the window drop down and it should be under experimental (this will probably change in the future so look out for that)

3. Get familiar with it!

First up drag in the Adam character model into the lookdev window and download:

Then if you drag in one of the HDR images that you downloaded and it should light the model and put the background in:

Now you can rotate around the model to see how it looks!

4. Getting fancy with it!

Now it’s time to start getting fancy with it! If you start digging into the different modes you can have a look at how your models will look in certain lighting conditions, how all the material properties look! Here are 3 examples of some cool things you can do with the look dev tool:

1. Using the side by side tool to see how the model will look in different scenes and lighting! 

2. Checking how the model will look in the same scene but with different lighting using the zone tool

3. Checking that all the material properties are correctly working

Thats all folks! Hope this was useful or interesting! I’ve been sitting on it for a while so I’m glad to finally have it out!

[hanaleistudios]

MELBOURNE INTERNATIONAL GAMES WEEK 2017 IS COMING

Hi gang! If you live in Melbourne and are a part of the game dev community around here then you’ll know that Melbourne International Games Week is coming up starting this Sunday with GCAP Loading! It’s getting kinda crazy around here but I thought I’d give you all a little bit of insight into what I’m going to get up to during games week!

First up we got GCAP Loading on Sunday.

On Monday I’m going to Unite and it’s afterparty, followed by a Halloween party.

Then Tuesday I’ll unfortunately have to give GCAP a miss because money but I’ll be at the VRCC birthday party! 

Wednesday again no GCAP however there is another VR meetup on with people from Village Roadshow and Microsoft going so I’ll be there!

Then on Thursday I’ll be helping set up a booth at PAX, having my beta meeting at AIE and if I can I might pop on over to the Codebreakers Exhibition over at ACMI and have a look, followed by volunteering at Parallels that night.

Then on Friday I’m volunteering at PAX and going to the Double Adapter Party.

Saturday Pax volunteering

Sunday Pax volunteering and hopefully mega dev if I can squeeze in! 

Gonnaaaa be a fun 8 days!

[hanaleistudios]

Hi gang! I got another freelance job, this time it is another small one, the guy wanted a model viewer prototype where you could place models around in AR kit so I whipped this up in the last few hours and tomorrow I’ll get it working in AR with him! 

Ciao!

[hanaleistudios]

Holiday Holograms #3: Prototyping measurement tool

In todays blog post I’d like to run you through how I made my first Hololens prototype! It’s a pretty simple tool for measuring out different areas using the tap gesture! Shortly after creating the prototype I realised there was a much more advanced version of it included in the HoloToolKit examples but they took a very different approach to mine so hopefully you’ll learn something from my take on it!

1. Functions of the app

The basic functionality of the app should be:

Have the user tap in one position.

Have the user tap in a second position.

Have a line draw between the two points.

Have the distance between those 2 points appear in the middle of the line.

If the user taps in another position have the first line disappear until they select another position then have the line re appear with the new information 

2. Programming for the HoloLens

After setting up our project using the steps from the last entry in the Holiday Holograms series to actually set up our project we’ll now need to actually code for the HoloLens. The main thing well need is to get if the user performs the “tap” gesture. 

I used the TappedEvent event to do this, you will first need to create a Gesture Recogniser then assign our delegate to that event. Here is the code to do it: https://pastebin.com/mk2e91Yx

Lets break it down a bit more though:

In the start function we create our gesture recogniser “gestureRecogniser” then we assign our measurement tool stuff to the tapped event.

Then in our delegate we do everything to measure out the line, first we check if we aren’t setting the points, if not we set the first position to the position of the cursor and set the position of the line render to under the floor and the bool setting points to true.

Then we wait for the second tap, set the positions of the line to the right spots, get the distance and set the distance string to that number.

Then in update we set the text meshes text to the distance from before, its transform to the middle of the line and make sure that it is looking at the player. 

3. Demonstration

I hope this whole post wasn’t a mess but it totally was lol. Just had to get it out the door! 

[hanaleistudios]

Holiday Holograms: #2 Initial project setup tutorial

This post is all about the necessary tools and project set up that you have to do in order to get your project ready to develop hololens apps and games, depending on how good I am at explaining stuff this will either be super handy or really useless.  

What you’ll need to get started

To follow along with this you’ll need a few things to get started! They are:

A controller compatible with Unity (I’m using an Xbox One Controller)

Unity 2017.1.0f3, while you may be able to use older versions this is the one I’ll be using

Basic understanding of how Unity works and how to navigate it

1. HoloToolKit

The first step to start developing Hololens stuff in Unity is to get the HoloToolKit from GitHub, it contains all the necessary scripts and prefabs you’ll need to get started. The GitHub also has a HoloToolKit Example package you can download and use to work out how specific things work. Download both of them as we’ll use them later on.

Link to HoloToolKit GitHub: https://github.com/Microsoft/MixedRealityToolkit-Unity/releases/tag/v1.2017.1.1

2. Project setup

There are a few things you’ll need to do to your Unity project in order to get started with Hololens development, these are:

Import both the HoloToolKit and HoloToolKitExample packages from the GitHub into your project

In the build settings change the target platform to Universal Windows Platform, set your target device to Hololens, build type to D3D (Stands for Direct 3D) and tick Unity C# Project.

In the player settings tick Virtual Reality supported and make sure your Virtual Reality SDK is set to Windows Holographic

Make sure that the following options are ticked in capabilities section are ticked:

MusicLibrary

PicturesLibrary

VideosLibrary

WebCam

Microphone

SpatialPerception

You will also need to open up a holographic emulation window, set it to simulate in editor and select a room to emulate. 

3. HoloToolKit Examples

The next step is to make sure all this stuff actually worked! We can do this by checking some of the examples from the HoloToolKit Examples we downloaded earlier. Simply navigate to the HoloToolKit Examples folder, select prototyping, then scenes and go to the scene called “PositionAnObject”. If you run this scene you should see a floating object, if you use your controller and press A or the equivalent button on the object it should start moving around with you! 

If you want to see the room you are supposed to be emulating you’ll need to drop in a  prefab called “SpatialMapping” from HoloToolKit under the prefabs folder in the Spatial Mapping folder. It’ll take a while to load in the geometry of the room when you run the scene using the SpatialMapping prefab. If I were you I’d play around with all the different scenes and try to work out how they work. 

4. Thats all folks!

That should be enough to get you started! It’s a wild world out there and I’ve still got a lot to learn but that is the absolute basics of how to get started developing for the HoloLens! If you found this post at all helpful please share it around as it took me longer than usual to write it! Also if I missed anything please let me know so I can fix it.

[hanaleistudios]

Holiday Holograms: Part #1 Concepting / basics

Holidays are here and I’ve decided to spend that time making some Hololens stuff! In this series I’ll go through each step of my process to show you how I made what I made and what I end up with! In this post I’ll go through my concepts and a talk I watched on the absolute basics of making hololens stuff!

1. Unite Talk

This awesome talk by Rene Schulte from IdentityMine discuses some best practices for Hololens development, building a basic prototype, what IdentityMine managed to build with it and a few other cool things.

My main takeaways from it were:

Building for the hololens isn’t as scary as it looks

There are pre-built tools out there to make development for it easier

The Hololens is a complete computer with 2gb or ram, a quad core CPU a GPU and a specific processor called the Holographic Processing Unit or HPU 

2. My ideas

I had 10 ideas for different apps and games, all of them are really simple but I think I’d be able to learn a lot from doing any one of them they were:

Stacker AR, an augmented reality version of the classic mall arcade game

Time game, the player must use either their voice or gestures to manipulate time to show a different series of events in the space 

Character yells at you, a game where a small character appears on your desk / table / whatever, the player must yell at or tap on the character to get it to go away

The floor is lava, the classic childhood game except the floor is literally lava 

Kart game, like a model train set a kart will roam around the room until the player tells 

Busses / large objects flying at player, a bunch of huge objects (maybe busses) are being flung at the player and they must dodge them to survive!

Draw ropes to measure space, the player can draw holographic lines in their space to measure out the distance between the points 

Bug squishing game, bugs start flying around the room and the player must tap on them to squish them

Interact with animal / horse, a life sized animal appears in your space that you can pat and feed

Bird that flies around from point to point, a small bird that flies around the room

3. Chosen idea

I decided on doing the rope drawing idea as it seemed like it would be the easiest to do and easiest to polish. 

[hanaleistudios]

Upward Mobility Update #1 Alpha

Hi gang! I’ve decided to try and start updating this everyday so lets go! Here is a video of my end of year project game at AIE, it’s called Upward Mobility, its a spy game set in an office where you have to bug and record everyone in the office and black mail them. Here is a video I sent to a contact today:

[hanaleistudios]

Today was a pretty slow day at AIE so I whipped this up! It is using the effects from the Adam demo, linear lighting, timeline, some tips from an 80 level article and a few other things here and there. Links: Adam Effects, 80 level article and Timeline Manual