Wednesday, January 15, 2014

Dance in the Void


Dance in the Void is is a game I designed and built using Unity3D in the latter stages of 2013. It is a local multiplayer game about two spaceships who are doomed to be near each other duel for all eternity, accompanied only by the sounds of classical music. But, there is more to discover when one goes dancing in the void.

Please share this game with whoever you feel would enjoy the experience.
I also intend to write up a brief reflection on some of the lessons I learnt during the games development. Stay tuned.

Tuesday, January 14, 2014

To Go Dancing in the Void


The magical year of 2014 has arrive and I have been fortunate enough to gain employment at a small little games company in Melbourne! It is currently a part time position but it allow me to continue to work on my own projects. This is a fact that I am very excited about.

One such project is Dance in the Void, a Unity3D game which exists in some screenshots here and on Screenshot Saturday (through my twitter account @verbvirus). Well...I am happy to announce that after some months of work and feedback from play testers Dance in the Void is ready to be played!



I look forward, in the next few days, to uploading and sharing it with as many people as possible (who I hope will do likewise). The only thing that might stop this from happening will be if I do not melt first.

Thanks all, Dance in the Void will be with you soon!

Wednesday, September 25, 2013

Give mechanics the game they deserve

This year has involved me creating a whole host of projects in Unity. I have tended towards finding a mechanic I like and pushing it quite a distance without giving thought to how it might actually fit into the structure of a game. This work process has, at times, led to feelings of frustration for me as I do not have any playable demonstration of the mechanics I feel have great potential.

Thus, I now am giving conscious effort towards placing mechanics into a game structure or framework before polishing / developing each any further. I have found some immediate success with this approach which can be seen in these screenshots:






I have been having a great time with my house mate over the last few days actually playing this game and I look forward to sharing it with everyone very soon.

Tuesday, July 30, 2013

And Death: World Spinning


Money makes the world go round, completely false and besides, most of these people don’t even understand money, let alone gravity. These students, kids, shamelessly showing their faces in my first period Physics class. They play ball games at lunch, unknowingly applying the requisite force at the requisite time to gain another point in another round. They are quite dull, and I suspect are lacking in intellect. They don’t understand or comprehend, and think they want money so that they might make the world spin. They don’t even talk to me and ask questions. No one ever talks to me.
This is a 100 word short story I have written for the book I am working on The Future of Life and Death

Sunday, July 28, 2013

The Future: Science Fiction

It was written, in the time of ink and paper, there might exist an impossible future.
Awakening to a South African morning, a young man excitedly prepares to speak with a woman struggling through the depths of a Canadian night. With each word, something new was learned. With expressions evolving on their faces, regard formed and just was.
The pair shared long conversations.
They argued on the feeling of warm and cold days. They laughed, sometimes.
Each had thoughts that requested to be hidden. They were aware of the impossible given the distance.
At least, they lived the impossible future.
This is a 100 word short story I have written for the book I am working on The Future of Life and Death

Saturday, July 27, 2013

Of Life: Sweat

Sweat was never like this. It was a maligned representative of Dean’s sedentary life, birthed by his teenage habits. Sweat was dirty. Sweat was uncomfortable. Sweat had never been this.
Sweat would never highlight special moments such as it did now.
Dean looked over the figure lying naked, with and like him. Sweat was sliding, mingling and shifting between he and his partner, his partner and he. Sweat was not uncomfortable now. It was not the product of an unclean exertion. Sweat was the emblem of something worth that effort. Total acceptance partnered with an exposure of a naked self.
This is a 100 word short story I have written for the book I am working on The Future of Life and Death

Wednesday, July 24, 2013

The Future of Life and Death

The Future of Life is a book of short stories I have been working on since December of last year. The idea of this book came about when I began writing a series of short stories with the single constraint of a hundred words. This limitation that I placed on my writing has allowed me to experiment with different styles, voices and approaches very easily. I began to build up a collection of these stories and it was my desire to structure them within some larger narrative form that led to The Future of Life and Death.

The Future of Life and Death will be a book of one hundred stories of one hundred words each and will communicate through its three sections my thoughts on:

  1. The Future
  2. Of Life
  3. And Death
Each of the one hundred stories is a new experiment with this story format and will be arranged into these sections so that they might provide comment and context to the other stories surrounding it.

I had planned to conclude the book by the end of 2013 but a recent burst of productivity on my part may see me finish it sooner. I hope to share a number of stories which I am considering for the book here in the weeks and months to come.