I recently wrapped up a project I worked on for the fine crew at Wildlife. It was a web application involving compositing a user’s name and photo into a video in realtime, so I’m describing this as realtime compositing! My bad if this sounds misleading to ya! Read on if you’re interested in finding out what this is all about.

 

 The Spell Caster

Created for the TV show, Witches of East End, the spell caster allows users to create a spell with their favorite character from the show. After the user logs in with their Facebook account, the application plays out like an interactive video. The user selects an ingredient to mix, their photo is added to the cauldron and stirred by the user, and finally presented with a potion bottle that displays their name on the bottle.

To create the illusion of the user’s photo and name being in the video we developed a sort of realtime compositing system. This isn’t too unbelievably different from something that you’ve probably seen in Flash before but that didn’t make it any less difficult. The goal was to make this seamless with the live action video and visual fx, also handled at Wildlife. With this project I got up close and personal with the quirks and limitations of HTML video — especially with regards to cross platform and cross browsers compatibility.

In Javascript, I developed a system that basically functions as a custom video player. It generates a playlist based on the user’s selection, with certain videos being tied to tracking data that’ll draw the user’s photo and name into the scene as a texture.

Here’s my explanation for how it all works.

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[Partial repost from our Tigsource DevLog]

ANNOUNCING — DONUT GET! for Android Has Been Released!

Download it for FREE at:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.sokay.DonutGet

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Last week I spent some time prototyping our next game in Unity. Of the block matching puzzle game variety.

This week I jumped back to focusing on Donut Get! iPad version and finishing up where I left off with the in app purchasing. I was running into a problem of it just crashing when a purchase started so I had to do a bit of optimizing to prevent that. So far so good, as now I can at least get it to work!

In app purchase screen to remove ads.

Thank you screen!

The textures for the sprite animation is eating up a ton of memory. I’ve tried to keep the cop animation sharp and crisp but I’ve had to bring down the res a bit to accommodate all the lower-end devices it keeps crashing. 🙁 So for now, I’m trying to stop crashing Android phone! haha

Later I hope to do some research to switch between spritesheets based on the memory available on the device. Not quite sure if that’s possible/reasonable yet.

Donut Get! Android is available on Google Play so check it out if you can. Let me know how it works for you!

iPhone version available soon!

The OG Flash version still at http://www.sokay.net/play/donut-get

Thanks for reading.

Peace!

Ok, I had a hell of a time figuring out how to load in XML for a Unity project I’m working on and use it to build a level. Fortunately the Unity Community is vibrant and helpful, even though you may have to do digging to find what you’re looking for. It can be difficult getting started, especially when working in C# as many of the examples are coded in Javascript.

Here’s an example of some game xml:

Keep in mind that there’s a million ways to go about doing this. I tried to justify why I did it this way, and the best I can say is “I just felt like it.” Haha!

I ended up using a C# port of this Lightweight XML parser. The benefit of it supposedly is that it’s only 8k compared to a megabyte or so that would be added if you used the native C# class, System.XML. I used the C# port by chirhotec in this post. I had to make a small change, commenting out the “string nodeContents” line because the variable wasn’t used.
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