Animated Pixel Art of Civil War Union Soldiers training for combat on a farm.
Pixel Art – Civil War Union Soldiers
Author Archives: Jan Schlosser
Radio Teddy Virtual Reality Tour
Description
Virtual Reality project for Radio Teddy. Users get to experience a tour through the Radio Teddy building and watch the rooms and moderators in 360° VR videos. The user starts off in a colorful 3D Toon world and has some time to marvel the VR landscape. Afterwards the user is invited by Teddy and his furry friend Paulchen to join them for a tour through Radio Teddy. Hoping in the elevator, the user drives to 4 different floors and gets to watch videos. In the videos he gets to overview the accommodation of Radio Teddy and the process of broadcasting a radio channel. The game is optimized for Oculus Go and was developed with Unity3D. It is used as a promotional tool at live events. In addition, there is the option to show a commercial in a separate customized scene.
After testing our Beta on our focus group (kids) for the first time, we came to the conclusion that we are failing to hold their attention span for the full Virtual Reality radio tour experience. Specially during the Videos, as they are around 40 seconds each, we saw a drop in concentration. Altogether the whole tour takes about 5 minutes. So currently we are working on a more interactive and slim design. The new version will possibly include a Minigame, shorter videos and a real voice for Teddy instead of speech bubbles. With Oculus stopping their support for Oculus Go in 2022, we are even considering using a different VR Device as target platform.
After testing our Beta on our focus group (kids) for the first time, we came to the conclusion that we are failing to hold their attention span for the full Virtual Reality radio tour experience. Specially during the Videos, as they are around 40 seconds each, we saw a drop in concentration. Altogether the whole tour takes about 5 minutes. So currently we are working on a more interactive and slim design. The new version will possibly include a Minigame, shorter videos and a real voice for Teddy instead of speech bubbles. With Oculus stopping their support for Oculus Go in 2022, we are even considering using a different VR Device as target platform.
Screenshots of Virtual Reality Radio Tour
Video
Radio Teddy and BB Radio Fortune Wheel
Game Description
Reskin of the Fortune Wheel Game for Radio Teddy and BB Radio. The game is used at promotional live events and players can win prizes on site. Set up on a display stand, the game is controlled with a big red buzzer button. Additionally, the game is optimized to run on a small office PC.
Fortune Wheel Game Radio Teddy
For the Radio Teddy version most of the scene is in 2D. I drew the scene in Adobe Photoshop (except the curtain is a stock image), as i had more control over the viewpoint perspective doing so. Saving the drawings in different layers, I added the 3D Model of Teddy and 3D Toy Models to the Unity3D scene. When the player wins a prize, Teddy celebrates with a dance animation, and greets the next player with a hand wave.
Fortune Wheel Game BB Radio
BB Radio requested their own graphics in the background. To make the background less static, I extracted some details out of the picture and animated them with Unity3D. For the Wheel I added a glowing light effect to the outer rim and inner wheel, which reacts depending on the game status.
Game Screenshots
Game Videos
Toiletpaperman Game
Game Description
A funny Meme game project named Toiletpaperman. With budgets being cut due to Corona, we started working on a small game named Coronaman: Toilet Paper Battle. The plan was to publish it for Android on the Google Play Store and monetize it with Unity ads.
After testing around with gyroscopic and swipe controls, we came up with a working Beta after 3 weeks and uploaded it to Google Play. Waiting several days to get reviewed by Google, the game was declined and I received a strike on my Google Account. The support gave us no real explanation for the denial except a link to the Google Upload rules. Therefore, I contacted the support and asked for the exact reason. The reply was another link to the same upload rules I received in the first place after being declined. Doing our own research, we found out Google Play and Apple Store currently reject all Corona related Apps if they are not made by an official government or organization like WHO. This rule was put in place to ensure that no misinformation gets spread over the pandemic.
After that we rebranded our game project to „Toiletpaperman“ and contacted the Google Support again. Asking if the game would be accepted if we remove all Corona references, we got an unsatisfying response. The support stated that no info can be given and we just have to upload our game again, risking another account strike. As you are not allowed to open another Google Play Account if yours gets banned, and strikes being permanent, we ditched the idea of releasing to Google Play Store. Demoralized, we finished the failed project by uploading an unoptimized WebGL version to Kongregate.
Lesson learned to do research before starting to work on a project…
Game Project Screenshots
Play Toiletpaperman Game
The unoptimized WebGL version can be played here: https://www.kongregate.com/games/JanSchlossser/toilet-paper-man-corona-battle
Game Video
War of the Immortals TEW2020 Mod
WOTI Description
My longest running project, WOTI VI: Fury Mania. War of the Immortals is a real world fantasy mod for the wrestling booker simulation game Total Extreme Wrestling 2020. I took over this Mod in 2010 and worked constantly on it ever since. My research led me to scouting hundreds of available wrestling pages from the past (archive.org) and present in several languages. I made over 20000 pictures to accompany the mod and created a database with almost 5000 real wrestlers, including biographies, personal relationships, individual skill sets and a bunch of narratives to give the game world a more authentic feeling.
The mod can be downloaded at TEWDB.
The WOTI TEW2020 Wrestling Mod itself combines different wrestling eras and puts wrestlings all time greats in their prime. If you ever wanted to book legends like Bruno Sammartino vs. Roman Reigns, Hogan vs. El Santo or The Rockers vs. The Young Bucks this is the go to mod. Every imaginable dream match is possible! Additionally the mod features 78 active real life wrestling companies, 2500 tag teams, 600 titles and 6000 wrestler relationships. From the good old „Rasslin“ days till the modern „New Age“, Lucha wrestling in Mexico, pureruso in Japan, to strong style in the UK, everything is represented appropriately. Fans of every existing wrestling era will get their money’s worth!
But let´s be honest, since Wrestling always has been a passion of mine, I use the WOTI TEW2020 Wrestling Mod as an excuse to watch wrestling and do extensive research on it😆
WOTI TEW2020 Wrestling Mod Hypevideo
IAA Car Runner
Description Endless Runner
Endless Runner Synthwave Game for IAA Motor Show in Frankfurt. With Radio Teddy´s show truck being present at the fair, they were in need of entertainment for the kids. Therefore, we rebranded the regular Radio Teddy Endless Runner to a car game. The game is played on a display stand with mats as controls. For the art style we chose retrowave, as it suits the setting and is easy to make. I drew the ground textures and Frankfurt Skyline in Adobe Photoshop. All 3D Assets are from the Unity Asset Store. Programming tasks were reduced to some minor adjustments, as I had done all the work in the previous project. The Endless Runner Synthwave Game was well visited and received at the Mass. It was also promoted on the IAA website and in their brochure guide.
As I am a big fan of the synthwave art style and music genre, this project was fun to work on. The start game screen is an homage to probably the most famous Synthwave artist Kavinsky. Despite having a tight deadline of 2-3 weeks, the project was finished early due to my motivation.
Pictures of Synthwave Car Racing Game
Video of Endless Runner Game
A10 Center Fortune Wheel
Description
A Fortune Wheel Game made with Unity 3D in 2019. A10 Center, a local shopping mall, was planning a promotional event at their center. They wanted to include a fortune wheel game, where visitors can win prizes, coupons and even a 2 day holiday trip from local shops. With a tight deadline, I bought a fortune wheel from the Unity Asset Store and modified it so the client has a back-end, in which he can select the participating firms and included rewards for the prize pool (in case they run out of certain prizes). The rewards get randomly selected from the prize pool depending on the winning field after spinning. I also textured the surfboards with logos from the participants and designed the 3D environment with Unity Store Assets.
The short lived game fulfilled its purpose in catching the eye of customers, and was perfect to handle the high amount of people who wanted to play. Can´t go wrong with free stuff. The success of this event led to several fortune wheel games being ordered for other live events. To have a look at the Radio Teddy and BB Radio fortune wheels click here.
Screenshots Fortune Wheel
Video of Game
Radio Teddy – Endless Runner
Description
Radio Teddy Endless Runner is a promotional game for Radio Teddy live events. The game is aimed at small kids and is controlled with a dance mat. The player must navigate Teddy around a series of obstacles or jump across them and collect notes for points.
Platform: Pc
Genre: Endless Runner
Engine: Unity3D
Players: 1
Year: 2018
My Tasks
For the first time I completed the pipeline of modelling, pelting, texturing, rigging and animating a 3D character in form of Teddy. While the first model came out a complete disaster, I am happy with the current state after going through several iterations. I made the level with Unity Terrain and programmed everything. Additionally, I produced other assets like the white and radio house model, drew 2D textures for the Skybox, lend my voice for the sound effects Teddy makes and made particle effects. The starting screen background, the music and models from the Unity Asset Store like foliage, decoration, butterflies and bunnies are not made by me. The kids can play up to 3 levels, with each of the levels having a different difficulty. Due to the target device being a PC without a graphics card, performance was a problem at first. We solved the problem by doing optimization.
Pics of Endless Runner Promotional Game
Video of Endless Runner Game
Augmented Reality – Soccer App
Description
Augmented Reality Soccer Game made with Unity3D and the plugin Vuforia. At starting point I had a distorted photo of a real soccer wall that FuPa uses to promote their website at events. I restored the texture from the photo and applied it to a 3D Model soccer wall. The goal looks bad, but was made pretty fast out of some scaled cubes and Unity cloth with a transparent png net texture applied. This served my purpose well, as the cloth moves if a ball hits the net. Kicking the ball was made with a slightly modified trajectory script from Unity Asset Store. The goalkeeper is a 2D sprite. This was a low budget prototype and there was no money/time for hiring an artist or modelling a goalie.
The Unity3D plugin Vuforia uses markers to track the real world. So there needs to be an image Vuforia can detect, and project the Augmented Reality content on. I experienced one particular problem while working with Vuforia. So further away the AR content gets from the marker, the more it gets impacted by movement from the user, making the experience a bit shaky.
Screenshots Augmented Reality Soccer Game
