Category Archives: game engineering

Dev Diary: Custom Occlusion Culling in Unity Improved

Posted on July 30, 2017 by Chris

Back in 2014 I wrote about the custom occlusion system we built for DEAD SECRET.  It’s a pretty simple system that works by knowing all of the places the player can stand ahead of time.  It allowed us to cut our … Continue reading →

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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 →

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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

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

Porting Wind-up Knight to OUYA

Posted on July 3, 2013 by Chris

Wind-up Knight has just shipped for OUYA. It runs great on the console and is really fun to play with a controller. If you have an OUYA, go check it out! If you don’t have one, $99 is totally worth … Continue reading →

Posted in Android, game engineering, wind-up knight | 2 Comments

OS Native UI in Wind-up Knight

Posted on January 4, 2012 by Chris

A while ago I posted the following tweet to my twitter account: Fun fact: #windupknight on Android includes 7575 lines of Java. iOS version has 7005 lines of Objective-C. Both have 12000 lines of C#. This generated a lot of responses, mostly … Continue reading →

Posted in Android, game engineering, iOS, mobile games, wind-up knight | 11 Comments

Locomotion Smoke and Mirrors

Posted on December 18, 2011 by Chris

If we’ve done our jobs right, Wind-up Knight is a fairly simple game.  There are only four inputs, and only two are ever needed simultaneously.  Sir Sprint, our heroic spring-loaded knight, runs forward automatically, removing the need for a classic … Continue reading →

Posted in game design, game engineering, wind-up knight | 26 Comments