Private Variables and LEDs

I played around with my Arduino starter kit and read a few pages in Making Embedded Systems (more on it here). Now I am ready to blink the built-in LED of my board. My first approach looked like this: #define LED LED_BUILTIN void setup() { SetupLED(); } void loop() { EnableLED(); delay(1000); DisableLED(); delay(1000); } … Read more

Unity: Sync Objects With Music

So you want to build a rhythm game. A game that has elements moving in sync with the beat of your music. I participated in the rhythm game ‘A Jesters Tale‘ at the Nementic game jam. And it turned out it’s not as easy to sync objects with music as it seems at first glance. … Read more

Unity: Frame by Frame Animation with Dynamic Eyes

Can you have dynamic eyes that react to the environment but at the same time use frame-by-frame animation for the body? Yes, you can do that in Unity and it’s not difficult at all. Most of the work is setting up the hierarchy of GameObjects in Unity correctly and creating the animations. The frame-by-frame animation … Read more

Unity: Comment Component

Problem Do you ever think “The GameObject setup is so weird, it should be documented” but then don’t do it? Or are you forced to insert components in strange places because Unity just can’t do it any other way? Keyword: Unity’s UI rendering order is influenced by the hierarchy.   Most of the time it … Read more

Unity: Screen Space Gizmos

Unity’s default gizmos are essential for visual debugging but can only be drawn in world space. This restriction can be rather annoying if you try to debug custom UI or viewport-based camera movement. A simple line at a specific pixel coordinate would solve the problem most of the time. There are two solutions to this … Read more

Unity: Google Drive + Asset Bundles for D&D

One evening when I was engaged in playing D&D with my friends I realized that we had a hard time remembering the names of the characters and cities we encountered. And it would enhance our experience if we knew them and not fall back to asking our game master all the time.   The idea … Read more

Unity: Why Random.Range is Dangerous

Unity’s random seems like a straightforward to use and easily accessible function. It is helpful when dealing with procedural generation and AI behavior because the seed can be fixed to repeat the behavior. So it seems. But this is not always the case. UnityEngine.Random can case intricate timing bugs. These bugs are hard to track … Read more

Unity: UI Workflow Improvement

  If you build a game in Unity you will need a few UI screens to guide your player. The number of canvases will increase with the complexity and size of your project.   The canvases and the UI graphics will start to clutter your scene view because canvases are not moveable. This leads to … Read more

Unity: Custom Editor Examples

 I will show two examples of custom editors I implemented in production to enhance our workflow with generated data.  The examples are from the game ‘Space Shop VR‘. It is about a shop in space that sells different items to aliens. The clue is that all aliens speak different languages and the VR player must … Read more