Retro is all the rage. Minecraft, Terraria, and the Nintendo64 sold out in minutes. So, how do you bring a retro feel to cutting edge technology? That was the task we faced when client Mixed River hired us to help with Synergy Technical’s Game Changer HoloLens game. We know not everyone is a retro gamer so the characters had to be engaging enough to appeal to today’s user, but still reminiscent of aliens we loved from Space Invaders.

Awesome right?

In the beginning, we thought we’d keep a bit of the classic process we use for development: sketch the character, detail it out, and then run through production. We soon realized we needed a way to make a big character in an itty-bitty playing space.

Enter MagicaVoxel. Instead of the normal pipeline, our concept artists built the little guys in this lightweight voxel editor. MagicaVoxel helped us achieve two goals: excellent visuals and reduced production time.

Kinda makes you feel bad shooting them, doesn’t it?

Our designers also used MagicaVoxel for our asteroids.

These little gems get blown apart and increase game complexity. As you progress through the game, more of them show up and blow up (if you’re good that is). Again, using MagicaVoxel reduced production time while improving production quality for this application.

Sometimes, it really pays to think outside of the voxel.

Google Cardboard has brought virtual reality to masses with it’s simple, effective, and inexpensive design. In the interest of sharing our experiences and furthering the Cardboard community, we wanted to share an issue we dealt with during development of some VR experiences and how we fixed it.

We started to experience a strange bug on iOS devices when testing our apps that would give us a black screen saying “Let’s get you set up” instead of actual game view. By looking at the Debug.Log() messages, it was clear that the game was working and seemed to be running behind the black screen. After trying several work-arounds, the “Let’s get you set up” message was still blocking the view. Although we strongly believe in the power of Google, a thorough search did not produce any results on how to fix this. So we started to dig in.

After a couple of hours of banging our heads against the wall, we noticed that this screen appears after the game is started and a couple of frames where rendered. It seemed it was definitely related to iOS SDK and was probably some ViewController pushed on top of the game view controller. So we decided to find out where that code was called from.

After some file “grep’ing” we found out that these texts are stored in libplatform.a binary and we had no source code of it. The next step was to try to prevent this code from executing and we started exploring all of the SDK code we had hoping to find out calling points. Luckily, the solution came pretty easily from there. The CardboardAppController.mm has a couple of functions, and one of them is “void launchOnboardingDialog(){…}” so by just commenting it’s content we solved this black screen problem!

Hopefully this helps some of you out there who may be dealing with the same issue. This was a quick fix, but we are working on a solution that will stop this problem from happening in the first place. Stay tuned…

Audio for mobile presents some pretty fearsome challenges. Today’s software offers almost limitless audio features and options, but once your application goes to mobile it’s a whole different ballgame. The audio developer is in a constant struggle for CPU, RAM, and the small amount of volume produced by that tiny little speaker.

Robust, interactive features like those found in today’s audio middleware seem completely out of reach for the mobile developer. This middleware, like WWISE or FMOD, can handle complex playlists of music, and can change the music interactively based on the user’s actions. It knows the natural pulse of the song it is playing, and can be used to synchronize other game events. It can automatically change volume levels to make sure every sound is heard clearly. All of these would be great features to have on a mobile platform, but would require far too much CPU time to be practical.

But at Bully! we don’t believe in sacrificing quality in our mobile apps. In fact, we aim to improve it! Harnessing the immense power of Unity’s scripting engine, Bully! is working on a solution called Maestro! It’s a mobile-optimized plugin that offers a complete suite of audio features that is being battle tested in a couple recent and upcoming releases.

Maestro!’s goal is to make it easier for developers to drop the music in and have greater control over the sound with features including:

• Interactive scoring: The software can change the audio it only where it musically makes sense, so it feels locked to the action like a movie soundtrack.
• A robust event system: Developers can synchronize game features with background music, lock animations to a beat, or to create rhythm-based gameplay.
• Familiar audio middleware functionality: Maestro! can easily “duck” the background music in a variety of ways, elegantly softening the score to allow sound effects to shine through.
• Smart looping: Audio designers can also specify a “tail” segment of their sound files, allowing an audio clip to loop in the middle while still playing the natural echoes after the loop point.

Keep an eye out for updates on Maestro! in the coming months. And if you’re not a mobile developer, don’t fret, it will work on desktops too!

When disaster strikes a nuclear power plant, sometimes you only get once chance to fix the problems and save lives. So of course, reactor engineers need special training to stay cool and collected during a crisis. While special simulator rooms can provide this instruction, the good ones are hard to come by and can be very costly.

Enter Nuclear Training VR – a virtual disaster POC developed by Bully! that features a faithful VR reproduction of a reactor control room where trainees can interact using Oculus Rift headsets. When an earthquake cripples the power plant and puts the facility into crisis mode, participants are tested on their stress levels during the simulated disaster.

The goal of the experiment is to ‘raise the blood pressure’ of the trainees, to give them a taste of what it’s like during an actual crisis. Early trials of the virtual training simulation are promising and demonstrate just how effectively VR can immerse someone in a virtual world – earthquakes or otherwise!

Bully! recently launched a new Augmented Reality game for Mondelēz International promoting the “SOUR THEN SWEET” SOUR PATCH KIDS candy and their X-box game WORLD GONE SOUR.

The game, found on the App Store (here) uses AR image markers (found here and here) to spawn a Bully! created set featuring Dolly Doll, a main boss character from the X-box game.  Dolly, controlled by the mischievous Yellow SOUR PATCH KID character, throws anything at hand – toy blocks, doll heads, firetrucks – at the user.  The user must dodge the projectiles and, with the help of the Green SOUR PATCH KID character, throw tag-alongs (small SOUR PATCH KIDS) back at Dolly to win.

Beyond being among the first AR advergames, a key differentiator of the game is that the user must actually duck to avoid being hit by virtual projectiles – not just move back and forth with on-screen buttons but physically move his or her body to avoid being hit by the Dolly’s  barrage.

This technique, utilizing an operation that comes ‘naturally’ to people as an input to computer interaction, is referred to as a natural user interface (NUI.).  This kind of interaction is being actively explored by groups such as but in its infancy with mobile device experiences.

“One of the things we wanted to explore with the SOUR PATCH project was how NUI inputs could be used to add a new dimension to mobile game play – where the user has to move in real space to interact with virtual content – or in the case of SOUR PATCH game, duck the virtual blocks Dolly Doll throws.” said Carlson Bull, Creative Director and founder of Bully! Entertainment.
“As mobile technology progresses we’ll be able to utilize this kind of real-world interaction to create some very interesting engagements.” Says Bob Berkebile, VP of Technology and Innovation.   “We can envision a new genre of experiences that seamlessly blends natural inputs and virtual content to dramatically enhance game play, learning and brand activations.”

“The SOUR PATCH game is a step toward this future,” said Bull.  “When AR and gesture recognition systems make their way into eye ware, a world of possibilities will open up.”

How fast can you shoot flying oranges out of the sky? How fast can you do it without falling down the stairs? Download the COBRA Orange Out game from the App store, and you can answer both of these questions. Using the iPhone’s gyroscopic capabilities, Bully! created the game to allow golfers stuck inside for whatever reason to get their virtual hands on a COBRA’s line of AMP clubs and obliterate flying oranges to their heart’s content.

Check it out if you are itching for some time on the back nine, but life seems to be getting in the way. A word of warning though, do watch out for stairwells.

Get a preview here >

Get the iOS app here >

Hacking the Kinect for Ford

How do you showcase the technological marvel that is the 2013 Ford Escape? You hack the technological marvel that is the gesture-based Kinect for the XBox 360, of course.

Bully! worked with CINCO Interactive to create a free-standing kiosk for Toronto’s Eaton’s Center – as well as malls across Canada – so customers could interact with the 2013 Ford Escape before its release there. Using a Kinect controller to drive Unity 3D content, customers were able to use simple gestures to explore the 2013’s Escape and cusomize such features as color and rim size. The insallation also allowed users to access content about Ford’s innovative hands-free lift gate and its revolutionary Ecoboost that is an integral part of the 2013 automobile line, all virtually shown in the palm of the user’s hand.

Bully!’s Bob Berkebile, the chief innovator behind the Kinect hack, likens the experience to a “magic mirror” and expects to see more interactive kiosks like Ford’s appearing in many more locations. It provides a wealth of information with very little extra equipment and makes it an extremely portable mode of conveying complex data to consumers.