The #FoG12 is a small game industry event, were the key players of the Dutch games industry can be met, as well as companies from other countries interested in meeting these players (such as ourselves – PreviewLabs).

There’s also a conference part to it – this time appealingly called the Creative Spirit Game Conference 2012, but I’m mainly attending for the networking opportunities.

If you’re attending the Festival of Games as well, and would like to learn more about what PreviewLabs is doing, please don’t hesitate and get in touch through our contact form!

• We delivered our first Unity3D + Kinect prototype for Yale University a few weeks ago. More specifically, this was developed for the Yale Child Study Center at the Yale School of Medicine. The prototype is currently being used for research purposes.
• Last month, I attended the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. This was a great occasion to meet some of the customers we’ve worked for before in real life for the very first time, and also to make new connections. Together with Kinection, we even used this unique occasion to work on some ongoing projects together for a few hours.
• We’ve been brainstorming for Cartamundi – the world leader in playing cards – and developed a prototype for them showing off Printechnologic’s TouchCode API in combination with cards printed by Cartamundi. The prototype shows how this technology can enhance the gameplay.
• The books of the Unity Essentials Books Giveaway found their way to their new owners. Enjoy!
• After all the work done for Kinection, it’s no surprise that there would be more educational game prototyping projects coming up. The first one has been delivered just a week ago, for a client in Belgium. I’m starting to see more and more signs indicating that the market for serious games for educational purposes, used in schools, is something that will really kick of in the next years.
• We’ve worked for our first customer in Hong Kong! And that’s pretty much all that can be disclosed about it at the moment…

Six of our readers will get either Unity 3.x Game Development Essentials or Unity iOS Essentials.

Unity 3.x Game Development Essentials seems to be aimed at users new to Unity3D and gives quite a complete tour of the game engine – covering beginner’s topics like 3D game development basics and user interfaces, but also more advanced topics as ray-casting and optimization.

One of the main differences when developing for iOS, compared to PC or Mac, is that you have to be more careful when it comes to performance. The author of the other book, Unity iOS Essentials, is clearly aware of this, as the readers already get their hands dirty in the the second chapter called iOS Performance Guide.

All you have to do to make a chance to win one of the books is to add a comment to this post, letting us know which one of the two books you’d like to win, and what topics you’d like to read more about in it.

An overview of the topics covered in the books can be found here and here (under the ‘Table of Contents’ tab).

Winners will be selected at random. Winners from the U.S. and Europe can either choose to receive a physical copy of the book or the eBook. Winners from other locales are limited to the eBook only. The contest will close on the 14th of February, and the winners will be contacted by email the day after – so be sure to use your real email address when you comment!

First of all, here’s a top 3 of our most popular blog posts in 2011:

1. File I/O in Unity3D (6117 pageviews)
2. Writing PlayerPrefs Fast (4387 pageviews)
3. Unity and Playmaker (1458 pageviews)

During 2011, there was a spectacular growth in number of page views and visitors: from 1157 pageviews and 233 visitors in January 2011 to 4861 page views and 2728 visitors in December 2011. This means the amount of page views quadrupled, and the amount of visitors increased by a factor of ten!

Graph with the amount of visitors (dark blue) and page views (light blue) on our website in 2011.

Most website visitors are from the United States, the country with the biggest game industry, while Belgium takes a second place, as the PreviewLabs team’s home country. It’s nice to see that we have visitors of so many different countries: 126 countries out of the about 196 countries in the world.

Visits per country

To end this article, Google tells us that 3.75% of our page views have been made on mobile devices. This is still quite small, but I’m curious to see how this will evolve over the course of 2012 – as the smartphone and tablet market is expected to grow…

During a brainstorm we organized for our customer Crazy Monkey Studios in 2010, we asked ourselves what it would be like if you could move the towers in a tower defense game. This little brainstorm exercise triggered our imagination: Towers were replaced by RPG-like heroes, walls were added to allow building mazes, and a king was added as moveable target for the enemies. The core concept for Siegebreaker was born!

The reviews aren’t lying – for example at AppGamer.net, the game gets a 9 out of 10 for gameplay!

July 2010, Wouter Boudry – one of our prototyping specialists – started developing the prototype. As usual, a lot of questions were still open: How much screen space should the units take? Should all the enemies take the shortest route to the king, or should they rather swarm towards him? And most important: will the core gameplay be strong enough to be the foundation for a great game?

Left: The prototype graphics have been kept simple and clean, allowing to focus all budget and attention on the gameplay.
Right: Crazy Monkey Studios developed a vibrant art style featuring animated characters which were drawn frame-by-frame using old school methods.

To help answering these questions, we’re using our tuning system. This system allows us (and the customer) to play around with different settings and different feature combinations.

Left: The tuning parameters that were available in the prototype for the 'shotgunner' hero.
Right: In the final game, the heroes can be upgraded using power orbs.

While prototyping, we also discovered gameplay issues. For example, it could take a long time to make a unit to walk to a position on a nearby wall, having to follow the twists and turns of the maze. Wouter tackled this by allowing to build bridges between walls, allowing the heroes to move around more easily.

Left: Bridges form convenient ways to move to other parts of a level.
Right: In the final game, gates can be traversed.

Fast-forwarding to December 2, 2011, Siegebreaker has been released. They did a great job further extending the core concept for the full game, and came up with a colorful and vibrant art style. The reviews aren’t lying – for example at AppGamer.net, the game gets a 9 out of 10 for gameplay!

Left: When prototyping, we usually add simple messages to indicate the end of a level.
Right: The victory screen in the final game is simply hilarious and motivates the player to try it one more time.

We’re happy to share some of our findings from our internal testing with augmented reality (AR) technology – the Qualcomm AR SDK for smartphones in particular.

A video of this technology in action can be seen in a previous blog post.
These are our findings:

1. If you want your virtual objects to be displayed naturally in the real world, you’d have to set the light color and direction match these in the real world. There doesn’t seem to be an easy solution for this, but could be done by analyzing the images captured by the camera. When using marker images, a possible solution to get the appropriate light color may be to take the perceived color from white areas in the marker image and use this as the light color.
2. When using marker images, you have to know that players can print these images at any scale they want – affecting the size of the virtual objects. This can be a problem for physics based games, as objects with different sizes behave differently.
3. When a marker becomes visible, it takes some time until it’s recognized. This results in the 3D object popping up suddenly. One way this may be resolved or improved is by cropping the image from the camera when displaying it in the game, so the borders aren’t visible and the marker can be detected before it would be visible to the player.
4. The detection of the markers can be slow, and virtual objects don’t properly follow when you swiftly move around your mobile device. This makes this implementation of marker-based augmented reality unsuitable for games where this kind of movements are required.

AR technology may trigger your imagination and you may come up with the wildest game concepts, but in the end it’s crucial to be aware of the technical limitations – otherwise it becomes very difficult to assess the feasibility of your ideas and to come up with solutions needed to realize these ideas.

Siegebreaker’s core concept was conceived at a brainstorm organized by PreviewLabs and was based on a prototype we developed for CMS.

We’re proud to have made our contribution to this game, and we’re glad to see how well CMS filled in the gaps that were left after the prototyping process; the story is really crazy, and the graphics – all drawn frame by frame using old school animation techniques – are very vibrant and colorful.

The following video is the game’s official trailer, showing the final game in action.

Siegebreaker is due for December 2nd and will be released for iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad and Android devices.

We’ve recorded a video demonstrating the example prototype developed by Jonas:

In order to help our customers develop this kind of games, it’s important to have a good insight in how the technology works, and to be aware of the resulting technological limitations.

An overview of some of our findings developing this prototype will be given in a future blog post.

In AR games, the real world is blended with a virtual world. This certainly is something that sounds very cool and triggers imagination.
However, until now there hasn’t been a real breakthrough, as the first mainstream AR game still needs to be developed.

In augmented reality games, the real world is blended with a virtual world. This certainly is something that sounds very cool and triggers imagination.

There are many different ways to create augmented reality (AR) games, often using image analysis. All of these methods are using a source of real-world images, such as a webcam or a smartphone’s camera.

Some of the possibilities:

• Marker objects placed in the real world are tracked, resulting in a 3D position, orientation and scale that can be used to position a 3D object, which may be animated.
• Using a device’s GPS and compass to determine the position of the player in the real world. This can be used for example to use real world positions for player interaction.
• Image analysis can be used to recognize shapes and objects, such as the outlines of a building or corners in a wall, human beings or animals, cars, etc.

One of the first appearances of Augmented Reality I personally recall was in the 1987 movie RoboCop, where a fictional HUD commenting on real-world situations is shown.

A nice overview of possibilities that have already been tried out in games can be found in the augmented reality category at TouchArcade.

We have done substantial research on AR and developed an example prototype, which we’ll show in a next post.

Unity3D’s GUI class (previous post)

Sprite manager systems like GUISpriteUI (previous post)

3D objects and orthographic projection (previous post)

As you can see, each of them has its own specific advantages and disadvantages. This means there is no ‘best’ method; all depends on the needs of your project.