The Time Has Come...
The time has come, the replacement laptop is here, all the backups (mostly) have been restored, and what feels like hundreds of applications are reinstalled and set up. The worst part was after stealing my wife’s laptop, we realized it too was having some serious overheating issues. They sent a tech to the house, replaced the heatsinks and still ended up having to ship it in to have more repair work done. On the bright side, both laptops are now working flawlessly the way they should have from the beginning!
Unfortunately, my real job has been keeping me extremely tied down lately so not a lot of progress has been made, however I was able to get back to work on ACROS: Battle of the Wits!
The premise is simple, and (I love this part) fully voiced over by a voice some people may recognize from television; all thanks to some AI genius and people donating their voice models to be used by developers like me. The game will create a random acronym, and a category. You, the player, must decide on what that acronym stands for. Enter your answer and then wait on everyone else to finish, then vote on your favorite!
In ACROS, you can play directly on the table or scan a QR code to use your phone as the controller. The game itself is mostly done (except for options menus, etc.), it’s the mobile controller aspect that’s been taking the longest time to develop. I ran into issues with the web server asset I was using within Unity and had to reach out to its developers for some assistance. Now that we have it configured, it’s a matter of creating all of the different game scenes in an HTML format that your phone can send back to the game table. In the end, it will be a seamless integration, and this should end up as a great party game!
So far most of the basics have been implemented and I’m currently working on player customization through the webpage allowing you to enter your name and select your avatar. The next step is a simple waiting screen for the game to begin. Displaying the acronym is already done and animated, then it’s a matter of building out the logic and checks and balances to allow you to enter your response and vote on other players’ responses. Should be easy enough, it was the background processes that took extra time, sending messages back and forth between multiple phones and the table.
Overall things are progressing nicely, and this should be shaping up for a release to the testers here in the near future!!!
