🎪 Ludodrome

This past weekend I showed 3 games at Ludodrome, a one-day experimental games event here in Montreal. There were several traditional screen-based mouse-and-keyboard games but then there were games with weird inputs or displays like:

• Shouting "Buy! Buy! Buy!" and "Sell! Sell! Sell!" into old-timey telephones to trade stocks
• Hitting buttons on the wall to make lights race along a strip to collide in the middle
• Holding your keyboard like a guitar and trying to play a riff that your opponent just made up

Crowd Games

I ran several sessions of my two crowd games Shapeshifters and Friendsloop, with a few changes since Toronto Games Week. Shapeshifters always gets great reactions, with people cheering at the end and high-fiving strangers. Friendsloop still needs some bug fixes and and a more interesting ending but I still think it's compelling enough to tinker with some more.

Strip Tease

I also showed Strip Tease, which is my first attempt at a hardware project. It's a vertical strip of LEDs with a knob on the side that you twist to control a green light that moves up and down the strip. You discover and explore different "worlds" by finding weak spots in the fabric of spacetime and tearing portals between them. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. I'll share more about how I made it in another post.

I'm planning another crowd-game event in November, but my short experimental phase is almost over. Now I need to get back to my "commercial" projects: Spaceteam and Blabyrinth. I do also want to get Forgotten Tiles ready for public testing soon since it's so close.

🛜 Networking still Not-working

Before switching gears for Ludodrome I was trying to get Spaceteam working again. I wasn't able to finish, so I'm back at it this week. Here are some of the things I'm struggling with:

• My iOS testing devices are now too old to run the game (stuck on iOS 12.5.8), and my Android testing device still works but the battery is very swollen and coming unglued from the case so I'm nervous about using it. I might have to find some new (old, cheap) devices to test on from friends or Facebook marketplace or something.
• My Unity version was several years old so I tried upgrading it just a little bit to avoid headaches, but it caused build problems on Android so I ended up upgrading all the way to Unity 6.3 LTS. This has repercussions for other parts of the game and a few plugins that I'm using.
• Multicast Networking (which Spaceteam uses to discover local games) just straight up didn't work on new devices until I discovered that I need to explicitly ask for the user's permission to enable the feature (or "entitlement" as it's called on iOS). Unity has an API wrapper to enable these entitlements but for some reason they expose all entitlements except for the specific one that I need??? Frustrating.
• I'm trying to switch away from Microsoft-owned PlayFab/Azure (which I use for some small networking things). The first thing I tried switching to was Unity Cloud Code and Unity Cloud Save, for convenience, but for some reason just including those packages broke the library I use for reading JSON data??? Also frustrating.

Spaceteam life-support is back to being my top priority.

🎁 Parting Gifts

I have a tradition of ending my posts with a giveaway of some free Steam codes. If you want one just send me an email. Here is the latest batch (special thanks to a fan for providing some of these codes!)

• 🎁 VA-11 Hall-A: Cyberpunk Bartender Action
• TOEM: A Photo Adventure
• Arco
• Calico
• 🎁 Dandara: Trials of Fear Edition
• 🎁 Astalon Tears of the Earth
• 🎁 Grime
• 🎁 Berserk Boy
• 🎁 BioGun
• 🎁 Shantae and the Seven Sirens

See you next time Spacefriends! 🚀

~ Henry (aka Captain Spaceteam)