Cardboard VR Project – Squishy Toad

I’ve been progressing through my Unity VR tutorials and wanted to share a game that I’ve been working on:

SquishyToad
My First VR Game, Squishy Toad

Squishy Toad is an extension of the Unity VR tutorial I was doing, where the players play as a Frog/Toad and must cross infinite lanes of traffic while escaping from the unyielding advance of the fire behind them. The player keeps hopping forward, watching out for traffic, until the Toad is squished by a car or burned by the fire.

View while in game
View while in game

Integrating VR content is actually fairly straight forward. For this project, the target device is for mobile, so Google VR (previously known as Cardboard) was used. After downloading the Github GVR library and importing it into the Unity Project, I was able to utilize a Google VR “Prefab” (Which describes a set of GameObjects and their associated properties) to replace the traditional camera. After that, I was able to get the stereoscopic display seen above. The overall experience was quite smooth, allowing a designer to focus on creating gameplay as opposed to struggling with the ins-and-outs of getting VR working.

Besides learning about Google VR, this was also the first time I had the chance to learn about procedural generation. Although this was a one-dimensional algorithm, I did get some insight into how this can be extended into multiple dimensions. I also learned about some VR specific philosophies as it pertains to UI, as many of the traditional UI concepts do not carry over when the player has full control of camera movement at all times (One of the core tenets of VR). Therefore, most of the UI is in the World Space (Vs. overlaid on top of the screen), left for the player to discover.

I also learned about some VR specific philosophies as it pertains to UI, as many of the traditional UI concepts do not carry over when the player has full control of camera movement at all times (One of the core tenets of VR). Therefore, most of the UI is in the World Space (Vs. overlaid on top of the screen), left for the player to discover. I find it quite natural, as the concept requires some level of world building built in to accommodate the idea that words are not just floating in thin air.

I plan to continue developing for Squishy Toad until I’m happy with it, after which I’ll put it up on the App store. Stay tuned!

Eye-Fi upload fix: how to get past hotel logins

Having been living in Shanghai for some time and travelling all over Asia, it finally occurred to me that I would be well served with a WiFi-enabled SD card in my Canon D100; Imagine! The wonderful convenience of having to never remove the SD card again, simply uploading pictures through the ether as I return from another adventure.

The beginning, middle, and end of all my problems.

Having been convinced of this glorious future, I convinced my buddy Lee to get one for via on Amazon and deliver it to me when he came to visit. I could barely contain my excitement when I finally got the SD card of my dreams.

However, actually setting it up turned out to be a lesson in frustration. It seems that despite the Eye-fi being marketed as an on-the-go device, wifi networks with splash pages are not supported. It even says so on their customer support page. This is certainly a problem when a huge majority of public places use splash screen like this:

And hotels would often have pages like this:

Basically, any page that forces you to login or click a button before giving you access will NOT work with the eye-fi cards.

Being frustrated won’t help, however; Afterall, my own home wifi uses a similar setup and right now I was about to admit I spent $60 on a glorified SD card unless I came up with a way to bypass this issue.

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