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…

Ever heard of Meals on Wheels? How about the Brady Bunch? Well, RLTV has teamed Mom Brady up with Meals on Wheels to create a new cooking series for RLTV. The series focuses on the fun side of creating healthy, appetizing meals for folks of all ages while also addressing the very real issues around senior hunger. Bully! was pleased to create the open for the series, which premiered on RLTV recently (check local listings).

For more information on the series, watch Florence Henderson (aka Mom Brady) and co-host Joy Bauer talk about what making the show means to them.

Good Food Good Deeds from Bully Entertainment on Vimeo.