skyclimberstudios

[skyclimberstudios]

Professional Work

In addition to the various personal and side projects I've worked on over the years (some shared here, and plenty more locked away), I have also worked in industry as a professional Game Engineer. Let's take a moment to look at some of the more interesting projects and my contributions to them.

I had the opportunity to make significant contributions to a wide swath of Five Nights at Freddy’s: Security Breach (FNAF: SB) during my time at Babaroga. My work in Unreal Engine included solutions in both the 3D (most Security Office challenges, Fazer Blast, etc.), 2D (all secret arcade games), and user HUD parts of the game with additional contributions to lighting, cameras, level design, and AI. I was also lead on implementing achievements, both backend (Steamworks and PS4 Dev Net) and frontend (game triggers, additional hidden content, etc.).

After FNAF: SB, Babaroga formed a three engineer team tasked with porting Not For Broadcast (Unity) to multiple Virtual Reality platforms (PSVR, Quest 2, Index, and Vive). My work on this project included implementing the VR and input backend systems (not the frontend physical interactions) for each platform’s unique hardware and software requirements, along with completing countless gameplay improvements and fixes.

At one of my earliest industry positions, I was the lead game and UI engineer at Barrett Technology, a robotics company creating physical rehabilitation hardware and software. I built their entire Unity development framework and the vast majority of their content from scratch.  Nearly everything you can find in this blog post is something I either built myself or heavily modified. This included developing a number of tools that handled common behaviors and integration with other programs so that external developers could focus entirely on making content. I would also regularly manage interns and their creations, upgrading their initial rough concepts into something that felt “right” to play with appropriate physics, haptics, and controls.

Most recently, I have had the opportunity to work with Dartmouth College on multiple aquatic robot simulators in Unity. This fascinating work has primarily been focused on converting equations from whitepapers into code so virtual sensors in Unity can replicate real world behavior. I also provided a workflow that will allow researchers to take real world elevation data and convert it to virtual landscapes without having to use complex and expensive software. Additionally, the simulators have ROS integration, allowing researchers to test their real world control software with virtual robots and sensors and limiting the amount of wasted time, money, and potential danger that would come from doing initial testing on real hardware in real aquatic environments.

[skyclimberstudios]

Search and Find Preview

One more quick update from Skyclimber Studios. We’ve been working on a Search and Find game unlike any other. No more looking into the weird and wacky worlds of Where’s Waldo, Hidden Folks, and the like from afar. You’re going to be right in the middle of the action as you hunt for hidden objects. Once again, expect more details in December. We’ll see you soon.

[skyclimberstudios]

Update from late 2018

Long time no see Sky Climbers. We’re ramping up production again after almost two years and it’s going to be bigger than ever. Minigolf Wonderland has morphed into Recreation Wonderland - the home to pretty much every kind of entertainment you can think of. Think family fun center meets theme park but without the restrictions of needing lots of contiguous land, needing to travel halfway across the continent to visit, or needing to completely adhere to the laws of physics. Expect our next update sometime in December. For now, here’s a quick video summary of what else we had put together back in 2018. See you soon!

[skyclimberstudios]

Modeling is effectively finished at this point. There’s quite a bit you can’t see from here, but the interiors are done too! Anywho, on to lighting and texturing! We’ll give you a walkthrough of the interiors once it’s not so pitch black in there.

By the way, we’re going to be at the New York World Maker Faire on the 22nd and 23rd. Feel free to drop by and say hello!

[skyclimberstudios]

Here’s that video walkthrough of the upcoming Kickstarter course I’ve been promising along with a variety of details about the story / world this game lives in. Let me know what you think!

[skyclimberstudios]

Nine Kickstarter Holes: Complete!

Yes, you’re reading that correctly. All nine holes for the Kickstarter demo - Mission to the Asteroid - are complete! Now to work on texturing and all the scenery surrounding the course.

I didn’t think we’d be able to get the remaining five holes completed so quickly. Good thing we held off on the video walkthrough of the course... Should be the next thing we post here.

Anywho, on to the photos of the five new holes!

Hole number 1 - The cockpit / bridge for your spaceship! It’s a straight shot through four chairs. We only modeled the bases of the chairs for now as they are the only part that really affects gameplay. We’ll add the actual sitting part of the chairs and their associated workstations shortly once we start work on the scenery.

Hole number 3 - The hallway leading into the airlock plus the airlock itself. The hallway does go past the airlock to another (currently locked) room, so you have to make sure you don’t overshoot. Once you sink the shot, the airlock will close and the door will open to the asteroid.

Hole number 5 - A straightaway on the surface of the asteroid. That crater acts like a huge ramp in the middle of the straightaway, so make sure you don’t accidentally launch your ball into space by hitting it too hard. ^^

Hole number 7 - The entrance to a cave leading deep into the asteroid. You have two options here - try to shoot straight through the tunnel in the column, or bounce around it. Either way, it’s a tricky shot.

Hole number 9 - Some sort of stone monument at the bottom of the cavern? What on earth could it possibly mean? And where’s the hole at the end of the course? All of these questions and more will be answered shortly... I will say that seeing this hole in context in VR gave me the shivers.

And now you’ve seen the last of the holes. I can’t wait to tell you the story for this course and where we’ll be heading in the near future! We’re really looking forward to bringing a narrative approach to minigolf, and we really hope you’ll enjoy playing through our stories and courses. See you soon!

[skyclimberstudios]

More Verticality

Salutations Sky Climbers! Feeling a bit under the weather, so no video this time, but it is in the works. On the plus side, I do have two new holes for you to peruse.

Hole number 2 has morphed from a straightaway into a series of ramps leading from the second floor to the first. While you will initially just pass through here on your way to the airlock, you may want to return here after you complete your mission on the asteroid to see if any new doors have opened up...

Hole 8 on the other hand has stayed effectively the same - a giant spiral ramp leading down into a vast cavern. Who knows what mysteries you may find at the bottom.

And with this update, all even numbered / vertical holes for this course have been modeled! Only five more to go, and they should be considerably simpler to develop due to being mostly flat.

Don’t forget to sign up for our email list and join the subreddit if you haven’t done so already.

See you next time!

[skyclimberstudios]

Craters on the Cliff Face

Evening Sky Climbers. Sorry for the delay, but we were working on the most complicated hole in the course.

Travel down a series of craters on the edge of a cliff wall to find a secret cave below. Keep in mind that we’re focusing on the gameplay first and foremost, so you’ll have to imagine all the scenery on your own for now.

This particular hole was super difficult to create (as I will explain in a future post) and went through several iterations before we decided on the current tubes and ramps version you see here.

Originally, each crater would have had at least one gap in the outer wall, leading the player to knock the ball down from level to level. Unfortunately, it was too easy to accidentally knock the ball into the canyon below instead.

Now each crater has a hole in the middle with a tunnel that spits the ball out towards the next crater. The ball is launched in just the right way that it will spin around the outer edge of the crater but will not go into the next hole. Sorry folks, no chain reactions.

You can still try your luck in knocking the ball over the crater edges if you want, or you can knock the ball into the secret tunnel hidden inside a fake rock on the first crater. This tunnel leads all the way to the final hole and could bring about a hole in one. You’ll have to take advantage of the curved edges of the crater to pull it off though.

All in all, this hole is a lot more fun than the original design and looks to be one of the signature holes of the course.

And here’s a quick update to the course layout, replacing each hole we’ve “finished” with the actual model. New version is on the left and old version is on the right.

As you can see we’ve swapped holes 5 and 6. This splits up the two adjacent vertical holes we had before (4-5) and provides a bit more spice where there used to be two linear holes in a row (6-7). We’re probably going to change hole 2 into a vertical hole as well so there is an element of verticality every even hole. Should be fun!

Once again, our apologies for the extended delay between this post and the last. There are only two of us working on this project in our free time, so things are not progressing as fast as we would like. If there is a gameplay content gap in the future, we will instead post details about other parts of the process. This will include updates about game physics, our story driven approach to level design, our plans for real world courses, and possible Kickstarter rewards to name a few.

Keep an eye out for a new video this weekend! We’ll do a quick run through of the course and “show” you the plotline and scenery plans as well as the two completed holes.

See you soon!

[skyclimberstudios]

Four!

Greetings Sky Climbers! Time for the fourth update of Minigolf Wonderland!

Remember to sign up for our email list and join us on our brand new subreddit for everything related to Skyclimber Studios and our partner developer D-Works.

We put together a quick color coded layout showing where each hole in the Mission to the Asteroid course will roughly be in relation to the others. It’s just basic shapes, but it helped finalize how the holes should fit together. We will be using this color scheme when we design new courses in the future. In particular, we’d like you to pay attention to the green hole.

This is the fourth hole in the course. Specifically, it represents the moment when you step outside the airlock from your spacecraft and take your first putt into a crater on the asteroid.

It’s a fairly standard jump where a misputt will send your ball bouncing to somewhere it ought not. The large curving crater should make this shot rather forgiving, but any lost balls can be instantly recovered with the press of a button. This is virtual reality after all.

We’ll definitely be tweaking the placement of the two pieces relative to each other to make sure that most folks can get their ball into the crater in one or two putts.

Let us know what you think so far in the comments or on Reddit! We’re most active on Reddit, so that’s probably the best place to catch us! Keep an eye out for more updates in the near future as we’ll be creating new models on a regular basis over the next few weeks!

[skyclimberstudios]

Thanks for all the feedback!

How’s it going Sky-Climbers! We’ve gotten some great feedback via Reddit over the past few days. In short, everyone loves the gameplay! Considering this was the first public appearance of Minigolf Wonderland, I’d call it a complete success!

So now that y’all know about Minigolf Wonderland, it’s time for regular updates on where we are and how we’re going to progress.

The biggest piece of feedback we received was a need to add scenery (or at least change the skybox from Unity’s default) for the demo course. We’re in complete agreement here as the demo course was just a whitebox layout to develop/test gameplay. We’ll be adding some visual polish to the course before we start the Kickstarter.

When creating a Kickstarter, you need a promo video. If you can’t capture people’s imagination in the first 10 seconds, they’re probably gone forever. With that in mind, we’re going to create a new nine hole course from start to finish and post regular progress updates here for all to see. This course will be released at the start of the Kickstarter as another demo to help catch folk’s attention.

As for the theme of the new course, better put on your helmets and grab an air tank. We’re going to outer space!

We’ve put together a rough outline that we’ll be modeling and testing over the next few weeks. The basic narrative is that you’re a deep space explorer and your ship has discovered an asteroid with some anomalous readings emanating from deep inside. After some exploration, you find a portal leading to somewhere unknown... Where does it go? You’ll have to wait for the remaining nine holes. ^^

And that’s it for today’s update. I hope it was as much fun as it was informative. Let us know what you think in the comments below and make sure to sign up for our email list here if you haven’t already. If you like what we’re doing here, share it with your friends. The more people know about Minigolf Wonderland, the more likely we’ll be able to bring it to fruition!

- Paul Sassaman

[skyclimberstudios]

Hi all! It has been quite some time. Let’s cover the latest game I’ve been working on - Minigolf Wonderland - and where it’ll be going in the near future. You can download and play the very first whitebox course as a single player experience here. Make sure to also sign up for our email list to keep up to date with the latest updates and details!

Minigolf Wonderland is going to be a continuously updating fantasia of different miniature golf courses playable anywhere you can find a VR setup (currently limited to the Oculus Rift + Touch but expanding to other headsets in the near future).

We’ll be adding multiplayer in the near future so you and up to three of your friends can compete to complete a variety of nine and eighteen hole experiences with the lowest score.

The initial courses released will be purely digital with a focus on providing fantastic gameplay, visuals, and stories that unfold over the course of the course.

We will also be working to license real world miniature golf courses from around the U.S. and bring them into VR through photogrammetry. Many famous minigolf courses have shut down over the years due to lack of patronage. Digitizing courses in this way will both archive the experiences for future generations and provide the original courses with another source of income so they can continue to exist in reality.

There will be a Kickstarter in the very near future that will give you an opportunity to help make Minigolf Wonderland a reality.

Here’s hoping we’ll see you soon with a putter in hand!

[skyclimberstudios]

Minigolf Wonderland - Alpha Demo

Download here

A more detailed post will be available fairly soon.

[skyclimberstudios]

Psst... It’s a secret!

We’re a week out from MITxMake and things are going pretty well!  Want to try out one of the games from the PAWcade?  Sure you do!  Just click this link while you’re on an android phone and the game should automatically download/install.  When you open the app, you’ll need to calibrate some settings real quick and then the game should appear somewhere physically nearby.  If you’re too far away or too close, just walk to a better vantage point.

Let us know what you think!  We hope you enjoy this first taste of the PAWcade!

[skyclimberstudios]

Weekly Update 3 - Clickable Objects and an Improved Menu

Hi all!  Sassaman here once again!  As of this weekend, we’ve finished pretty much everything we wanted to complete for the first release version of the Standalone Scenario SDK version of PAW (minus a bug or two).  We’re going to spend the next several weeks using the SSSDK to create an AR experience (an augmented reality arcade - the PAWcade) in an attempt to shake out any remaining bugs and to have something to show off at MITxMake. (April 16th folks!  Just under three weeks from now!)  After that, we’ll start looking into a way to start distributing the SSSDK so that all of y’all can start creating your own experiences.

And now on to the news!

- Clickable Objects -

You can now give any script an OnClick method by extending the abstract class ClickableObject.  If you click/touch an object with a collider and a ClickableObject script, whatever you’ve put inside the OnClick method will be activated.  In the video at the top of the post, we’re just rotating the cube by 10 degrees on every click as an example, but the possibilities are pretty much endless. 

- Improved Menu -

The settings menu has been transformed into a more usable general menu that can easily be extended.  Opening the menu will initially just show the compass toggle and a new settings submenu toggle.  The settings submenu contains all of the camera settings from before as well as a new button which lets you redo the calibration sequence at any time.

- What’s Next? -

Our goal for the next three weeks is to create the PAWcade in time for MITxMake.  This should be a ton of fun as we’ll be both creating games and putting PAW through its paces with a serious project for the first time.  We can’t wait to get started and we also can’t wait to show you what we build in the weeks ahead.  See you early next week!

[skyclimberstudios]

Semi-Weekly Update 2 - Calibrations, Invisibles, Makerfests, and Games

Hi all!  Sassaman here.  We’ve made some solid progress over the past three weeks.  Not quite as much as I would like, but then again we did have the release of the Nintendo Switch and the best Zelda I’ve played in ages. ^^  Anywho, on to the news!

- Calibration Sequence -

When you start an augmented reality app, you need to make sure that everything is set up properly.  Not every smartphone has the same internal sensors and not every smartphone handles the input from those sensors the same way.  You don’t want everything to be sideways or the virtual world moving out of sync with reality.  While we provided everything you needed to fix these issues with the Settings Menu, the average user is probably not going to immediately understand what all these settings do or if they even exist.  Thus, the creation of the Calibration Sequence.  It will pop up the first time you start a PAW app and take you through four quick calibration steps to get you up and running.  You still have the ability to adjust these options from the settings menu afterwards at any time in case something isn’t quite right, but you should never have to touch these settings again once they’re set.

- Settings Save Files -

Speaking of settings, we now save your current settings in a file and load them upon launch.  No need to have to recalibrate everything every time.

- Invisible Objects -

With the exception of smartphones with a depth sensor like Tango or Structure, smartphones can’t natively determine what the world around them is shaped like.  This leads to situations where if a virtual object is behind a real world wall, you can still see the virtual object through the wall.  This breaks realism.

We’ve added a material that can turn any virtual object invisible while still blocking virtual objects on the other side from being seen.  This can be used to create invisible virtual buildings and objects that are in the exact same place as their real world counterparts, thereby allowing real world objects to look like they’re keeping you from seeing virtual objects behind them.

- MITxMake -

And here’s an update on MITxMake - We’ve acquired a booth!  Our current plans are to build a giant augmented reality arcade just outside the building the makerfair is hosted in - specifically the Zesiger Sports and Fitness Center on MIT’s campus.  You’ll be able to download the PAWcade app onsite and keep it forever.  Tickets for the event are already on sale here.  We hope to see you there on April 16th!

- Arcade Games -

Dinithi is continuing work on creating proof of concept games that we can incorporate into our Arcade at MITxMake.  She’s already got a few classic games up and running in Unity, and we’ll be working on porting them into the PAW engine over the next three weeks.

- What’s Next? -

Our goals for now until Monday (4/27/17) are:

- to get touching/clicking virtual objects up and running

- to do a little minor cleanup of the settings menu (put the calibration sequence settings in an advanced settings menu + add a ‘redo the calibration sequence’ button)

- Keep working on creating games for the PAWcade.

After this weekend, we’ll just be focusing on creating games for MITxMake, so look forward to videos of classic arcade games in real life.

And that’s the end of Semi-Weekly Update number 2!  If you haven’t visited our Youtube channel or Trello yet, make sure to give them a looksee.  See you early next week!

[skyclimberstudios]

Weekly Post 1 - 2017 Update!

Hi all!  Been a while.  Between starting working in industry with a hour long commute one-way and moving to a much better job halfway across the country a year later, there hasn’t been a lot of time to work on PAW or keep this blog up to date.

As of now, that is going to change.  Once a week, we’ll be posting details on whatever progress (or lack thereof) has happened along with photos and/or videos.  We’re also going to start actively looking for community feedback instead of just waiting for people to come to us.  With any luck, having folks asking for updates / new features will provide the impetus needed to keep working on this regularly.

And now on to the news!

- PAW progress -

-GPS Positioning-

As mentioned way back in late 2015, we’ve had a functioning GPS based augmented reality engine up and running for a while now.  As you can see here, we’ve got four cubes sitting at four distinct locations on two connected sidewalks.  PAW lets us place objects at specific GPS coordinates (gathered via Google Earth in this case) and walk around them like they are really there.

It’s not perfect since GPS isn’t super precise (especially with heavy cloud cover like we had here), but it is close enough that we can definitely tell where the cubes are supposed to be in the real world.  With dedicated hardware like Hololens or Tango, that accuracy will increase dramatically.  (And with the improvements in hardware in the past year and an increasing focus on AR by major industry players, it’s really starting to look like we’ll be adding support for hardware other than smartphones sooner than later.)

-Compass and Locally Positioned Objects-

Here you can see the compass in action.  This simple “layer” can be toggled on from the settings menu.  The compass is also a good example of a locally positioned object.  As you walk around the world, the compass will always be located the exact same distance away from you.

-Settings Menu-

The settings menu contains a variety of options for changing the way the real and virtual cameras behave along with the ability to change the device orientation and toggle the compass layer.

Since Android can be heavily modified by different manufacturers, not all Android phones handle device orientation the same way internally.  This means that we can’t guarantee that one orientation works for all phones.  So, we’re providing a way to allow users to manually fix the rotation as needed.  In the near future, we’ll be moving the device orientation settings into a calibration sequence that will help users get their device properly set up the first time they turn the app on.

* Virtual Camera Rotation will rotate the camera which looks at virtual objects (3d models, text, etc.).

* Real Camera Rotation will rotate the video taken from your phone’s camera.

* Device Orientation lets you change your phone’s orientation (portrait, landscape, and their mirrors).

* Virtual Camera FOV lets you adjust the the field of view of the virtual camera so that it matches the field of view of the real camera.

* The Compass button toggles the compass layer (see above).

- Point of Interest | Navigation -

As an example of using a virtual object to show points of interest in the local area, I wanted to be able to navigate back to the Artisan’s Asylum (a local fantastic makerspace) after shooting all the other videos at a nearby park.  I dropped a large cube with the Artisan’s Asylum logo right above the entrance, then used the cube as a reference point to get back to the makerspace.

- Site Update -

At the top of the site, we’ve added links to our Youtube and Trello pages.

Youtube will be the home of videos showing off what PAW is capable of.  As of now, we have four videos showing off various features, and there will be more coming in the weeks ahead.

Trello contains our Task List - what we’ve done so far, what we’re actively working on, and what’s to come.  Keep an eye on the Trello for the latest up to date info on PAW progress.

- New Employee -

Before this point, PAW was a solo endeavor by Paul Sassaman.  As of late February, 2017, we’ve added a new ‘employee’ to the project - Dinithi Silva.  While new to the world of Unity, she will be working on creating demo projects and games using the PAW engine.  In addition, she will be keeping an eye out for bugs and providing performance feedback / suggestions.  Her help will prove invaluable in improving the overall quality of PAW, and we certainly look forward to seeing what experiments she cooks up in the coming months.

- MITxMake -

We’re applying to MITxMake!  It’s a makerfest on the MIT campus on April 16, 2017.  With any luck we’ll get a booth.  We’ll let you know how things are going in the upcoming weeks!

- Unity Asset Store and/or Patreon -

And now for the big piece of news - we’re actively working on getting PAW far enough along that we can put it up on the Unity Asset Store and/or Patreon for everyone to use in creating their own projects!  We’re most of the way there with only a few more features left to complete before we can release a minimally viable sdk.  Once we get the sdk out to the world, we’ll keep on updating it as fast as we can create new tools/features.

And with that, we’ve reached the end of Weekly Update number 1!  We hope that you’re as excited about our progress in the world of Augmented Reality as we are.  Keep an eye out for updates early next week!

[skyclimberstudios]

Historical Posts: Complete!

And with that, we've reached the end of the planned background info posts!  For the foreseeable future, all posts should be about recent developments.  The current plan is to put together summaries of how certain aspects of PAW were put together, what is currently being worked on and planned for in the near future, as well as photos and videos of PAW in action.  I've already made some development progress, so the next few posts will be about recent history instead of current events, but we should get caught up fairly quickly.

I should also point out that I just got a job in industry, so posts and code updates are going to be limited by the amount of time I have available (i.e. weekends and evenings).  With any luck, there should be a post once every week or two.