Optimizing Unity at CECON (and some other stuff)

I recently had the pleasure of being invited to speak to the students of the CECON game development course.

In the one hour I had to speak, we discussed the constant market growth to professionals who work with Unity, the main challenges of developing for mobile, optimization techniques and useful tools in the process of creating games for mobile devices.

It was a very good experience and I hope to have that opportunity again. A special thanks to Lucas Criscoullo, course coordinator, for inviting me.

As soon as I have some time I intend to improve and translate the material and maybe post it here.

Meanwhile, some preview images:

Quatis Project: Biodiversity and digital learning

I mentioned, a few weeks ago on my semester's preview, my participation on a UFMG (a brazilian University) project for the development of an ecologic educational game about Mangabeiras Park. And as promised, here's a post with a little more about the game.

Formed by an ICB (Instituto de Ciências Biológicas, Biological Sciences Institute in english) studies group from UFMG, the project's main objective is to teach the population about the variety and fragility of the species that live in Mangabeiras Park, a natural park with a green area of approximately 337 hectares. Through events, long range campaigns and research about the behavior of the creatures that inhabit the park, the group has acted to educate and guarantee the balance of the huge ecosystem that is the park.

Changes

First of all I would like to appologize about the recent irregularity on the posts of the blog. The last weeks were extremely busy, with results that will echo through many of my upcoming posts.

This text will be a little more personal than usual, serving as a summary, preview and reason for the events that will occur on the next weeks.

One thing at a time.

Xbox 360 Joystick Controller + Unity

A few weeks ago I acquired a Xbox 360 joystick controller for Windows and, although my initial objective was to play with it (something I did, of course), my developer's mind did not allow the controller to remain in my desk without becoming part of my studies/experiments with Unity.

I configured Bitz to work with the joystick besides the keyboard and mouse. And with some quick changes I adapted Unity's script, MouseOrbit.js to take the the controller's input. The result can be seen in the video below:

So here's a short explanation of how to set Unity to receive the Xbox 360 controller for Windows.

A preview of my semester

With college classes starting again the geometric progression of negative common ratio that defines my free time according to the time of the semester begins to act once again, as the papers and exams start to get more frequent and scary.

So here's a short list of the thing I am going to do in this second half of the year:

Bitz in Time - Time manipulation gameplay

Before we begin, a little video to introduce the post:

"Bitz in Time" is a demo created to demonstrate the application of data structures in a time manipulation system. It was initially made as a college task for my Algorythms and Data Structures class, but it was challenging, fun and educational enough to make me want to keep developing it, adding Bitz to my list of personal projects. :D

So, what's on the video besides the awesome music?