Spent some time after hours doing some work with unity and blender with my friends Sam and Malcolm. We’re all trying to become more proficient in putting together virtual spaces and using these tools to build more interesting assets.

I’ve got a daydream headset now to complement my HTC Vive. I really want to reach the point where I can build things that work on flat PC screens and both the vive and daydream (cardboard might be nice as well, but it is less interesting as its control capabilities are quite limited).

Malcolm and Sam are focusing on the daydream for now. We’re all going after different sorts of content. I’m aiming for a computer mediated, turn based, multi-player game inspired by some of the old board wargames I played in high school and college.

Malcolm and Sam helped me get my phone and computer loaded with the daydream development tools and mostly running (I left my daydream headset at home so I’ll have to fill in the remaining details later). I still have quite a bit of coding to do in order to get a working initial environment for my game going. I’m also going to have to work to keep the graphical intensity at a level that the phones can handle…I expect the PC and vive will want a different sort of assets for practical purposes.

Once the base game is working, I’ll need to put together a PHP/MySQL back-end to connect the game-board implementation to other players. Details here remain to be worked out, but I expect the initial version will be hosted here with some hand coded PHP managing the back-end. I am still split on how to partition up the game rules logic. Ideally the local copy of the game would only handle display and rendering while the server side code would handle random number generation and rules logic. Placing that much complexity in the PHP code may not be an ideal solution…I’ll have to play with things more in order to be sure.

I’m looking at building a game similar to stellar conquest (without borrowing any copyrighted content) using unity and then setting up a multiplayer capability through an internet connection (likely my hosting with some PHP persisting moves to a MySQL database).

I’ve got the basics figured out for laying out the playing surface and it looks as if prefabs work for creating stars, planets and ships. I can see how the player interface would work in VR (either room scale or three axis) but I’m going to have to dig in to work out hit-testing for on-screen mouse activity.

I’m going to be thinking about how to handle star generation. The game that is providing the inspiration used a fixed map with the star located at mostly symmetrical positions. I’m inclined to have my game place the stars using a random number generator but with a defined distribution of star types to ensure some level of balance.

I’m going to do the same sort of thing for planets…not cards from a deck as with the board game but again, randomized with appropriate probabilities to yield the right sorts of planet mix.

I think the next step is probably to build the star cluster and scatter some colored lights about through space…I’m really tempted to go with a three dimensional star cluster for the final version if VR is the main target.