Author Archives: Chris

GDC Talk: Designing for Mobile VR in Dead Secret

Posted on May 9, 2015 by Chris

It’s been a few months since the 2015 Game Developers Conference was held in San Francisco, but we’ve been so busy with Dead Secret that we barely noticed.  I gave a talk about the game, and how we changed it … Continue reading →

Posted in dead secret, game design, virtual reality | Comments Off on GDC Talk: Designing for Mobile VR in Dead Secret

Dead Secret at GDC

Posted on February 9, 2015 by Chris

Hey! We’re going to the Game Developers Conference in March and we’ll be talking about Dead Secret.  The topic is designing for mobile VR, and the work we went through to convert Dead Secret from a tablet game to virtual … Continue reading →

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Custom Occlusion Culling in Unity

Posted on December 22, 2014 by Chris

Here at the Robot Invader compound we are hard at work on our new game, a VR murder mystery title called Dead Secret.  There’s a very early trailer to see over at deadsecret.com. Dead Secret is designed for VR devices, particularly mobile … Continue reading →

Posted in game engineering, unity | Comments Off on Custom Occlusion Culling in Unity

Performance Optimization for Mobile Devices

Posted on July 12, 2014 by Chris

This week at the Robot Invader compound we’ve been putting the finishing touches on our new Nanobots game, Dungeon Slots.  This game started out as another week-long experiment and has stretched into a month-long development cycle because we like the concept … Continue reading →

Posted in Android, game engineering, mobile games | 3 Comments

Android TV and the Video Game Middle Ground

Posted on July 2, 2014 by Chris

We shipped Wind-up Knight 2 for Android TV last week.  If you were at Google IO, maybe you saw our logo flash up there for a moment.  If you actually have an Android TV, Wind-up Knight 2 is one of a … Continue reading →

Posted in Android, controllers, game industry, mobile games, wind-up knight | 4 Comments

Nanobots: Making Games in a Week

Posted on June 3, 2014 by Chris

When Casey and I founded Robot Invader back in 2011, one of our goals was to build a team that could produce high quality games in a short amount of time with just a few people.  We produced Wind-up Knight with … Continue reading →

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Learning about Free-to-Play from Devil May Cry

Posted on April 3, 2014 by Chris

The first 20 minutes of Devil May Cry are really clever.  What happens is this: you breeze through several rooms, chopping evil marionettes left and right and flicking that silver hair around like you own the world.  After the second or third … Continue reading →

Posted in game design, mobile games, wind-up knight | Comments Off on Learning about Free-to-Play from Devil May Cry

Playing Wind-up Knight 2 with a Guitar (and why it matters)

Posted on January 30, 2014 by Chris

Yesterday we posted this silly video about playing Wind-up Knight 2 with a variety of funny controllers. Nothing in this video is faked; we used a converter box (like this one) to convert our various console controllers to USB, then … Continue reading →

Posted in Android, controllers, game design, game engineering, iOS, mobile games, wind-up knight | Comments Off on Playing Wind-up Knight 2 with a Guitar (and why it matters)

Checkpoints in Unity

Posted on January 22, 2014 by Chris

One of the new features in Wind-up Knight 2 is checkpoints.  They work the way you  expect: if you die after passing a checkpoint you will restart at the checkpoint location with the game world restored to its previous state. … Continue reading →

Posted in game engineering, wind-up knight | 3 Comments

Leveling Up the Wind-up Knight Design Process

Posted on December 20, 2013 by Chris

When we built the original Wind-up Knight, Robot Invader was only three people: Casey, our intrepid designer / animator, Mike, our one-man art machine, and me, the code guy.  We hired contractors (the mighty Jordan Fehr for sound design and … Continue reading →

Posted in game design, prototyping, wind-up knight | 3 Comments