Devblog 6: Games understanding any order from you
To start off the year with new interesting stuff, we worked on AR, voice recognition and socket.io. Check it out!
FENO (@feno42)
Yo,
Natural Language Processing (NLP)
This week I messed around with Natural Language Processing. The idea is to treat some text in a way you can programmatically use it. That’s pretty common nowadays, you can find NLP with Siri for instance.
I want to see how we can use that kind of interactions in a game. In order to do that, I’m using Wit.ai (Facebook bought them a year ago). Like, we can imagine the future RPGs letting the player saying what he wants.
For example, in a situation where you could either threaten someone or let go, the player could say “If you try to interfere, this becomes a much simpler matter. I will kill your wife. I will kill your son. I will kill your infant daughter.” or “If you don’t stop prying, I will burn you! I will burn the heart out of you!” or simply “fuck you”, whatever, the game picks up the intent and plays the matching consequences.
The next step would be to make the voice recognition work with Unity!
See you next time.
NATHAN (@grange_nathan)
Hi, Enol here!
Welcome in 2017! It’s gonna be an awesome year.
Vuforia
So, in the last Devblog I showed you my first try at AR with Vuforia. I continued it a bit.
As paper is really not that fun to play with and makes this AR project less accessible to anyone (you need to print or get the target image to play with the app), I focused on other ways to use AR to enhance the interactivity we could have in our future communication.
Let’s take a look:
Here you can see I changed the app to be used with images on a screen. I also removed most of the classic 2D UI to have full AR interactions. I’m thinking about using it to make our website and other visual marketing more original. Sometimes as fully interactive mini games, assets gallery or 3D animation trailers you can see in AR, and sometimes as easter eggs in our games, or anything else really!
On another note, I think this could be a great way for our artists to show off their work in a new way. It’s not stable at all but here is how much you can move around models with a single image tracked on a screen. Vuforia has some magic tracking I’ll tell you that:
AR is really fun to work with for little projects like that, I’m not sure about entire games but for everything else, it’s great and I can’t wait to try out Tango to get rid of the target image necessity.
I’ll continue to work on these AR things in the next weeks.
I tried to stabilize my AR Recordings, it’s a bit better but I still prefer showing you how bad I am at using a Camera. Anyway, if you are interested: First & Second GIFS
Oh, and I can’t tell you anything about it right now, but cloud computing/gaming now looks better than ever. Maybe some things about that coming soon…
BENJAMIN (@Valgoun16)
This week was pretty calm and I don’t have much to show you. I mainly helped Keryann on Spacefleet and worked on Subscribe & Punch.
Subscribe & Punch
For those who don’t know what S&P is, it’s a fighting game based on the Youtubers’ universe. I’m working on it with FeNo and other people outside from IronEqual.
Don’t hesitate to follow the project if you want to know more, on Twitter and Facebook!
KERYANN (@KeryannM)
Hey! Happy new year! 2017 will be an awesome year for IronEqual I can feel it!
So, this week I mainly chilled and enjoyed being with my parents. I only worked on SpaceFleet, a school project Ben and I told you about in the last Devblog.
I’ve been working with the server-side code that Benjamin wrote and socket.io, to sync the ships’ positions and angle between the different players connected.
The synchronisation is really basic and jitters a bit. We’ll maybe improve it, but that’s enough for the school exercise that we’ve been asked.
This was the first time that I put my hands on socket.io, and I really liked it! It is really joyful to create a game or application and just see it working through the internet. It’s really something different from working on something totally local (#REPULSE).
NIELS (@NielsTiercelin)
Happy new year! (Only to those who scrolled all the way down here of course.)
My PC had a mean blue screen last week, and I lost progress on one new prototype I’ll talk about next week, involving time bending.
I mainly (and slowly) tried to fix projects that got broke by this crash. Most of it was easy to repair, except for my “Space Ballet” game I’m still trying to recover…
So basically my most dashing moment this week was when I gave Feno some ideas to make the banner for this Devblog, thus ending up in a magnificent composition that will probably scare away any new readers. Impressive.
See you next week!
If you want to show your support, don’t hesitate to insult the people you dislike the most on Twitter!! We also have a general Twitter account if you want to insult 5 people in only one efficient tweet.
