Project 1: Marble Racers

When I was a kid, I loved marbles. I only had a few of them, but what I had a lot of was K’nex. From those, I built Rollercoasters and tracks of varying sorts to watch the marbles roll. I always wanted those complex marble track sets, with the funnels, and the complex paths marbles could go down. Their mesmerizing movements were easy to get lost in, and building the tracks was nearly as fun.

Marbles however, as a toy, had somewhat died out, but this game will hopefully be able to replicate the joy that track building and marble runs can bring.

The idea is simple enough, to create a VR room where one can set up marble tracks, and watch the magic with the close up camera power of the VR headset!

The concept is simple enough to distribute an early version that does simply that, perhaps with features like customizable marbles, with options for colors and particle emissions that would be impossible in the real world, marble race courses, and sharable levels, with varying levels of monetization.

At the moment, I’m building track pieces in Houdini, and running simulations to get ideas about dimensions, movement, piece shapes, and interesting, but not too intensive materials.

My idea comes at a fortuitous time, as there’s been a recent uptick in marble related interest due to John Oliver’s sponsoring of one of Jelle’s Marble Races events on YouTube, which have now regularly garnered over a million views per video. To demonstrate the hypnotic power of the marble, I’m rendering out a video, which should show just how interesting even a simple funnel can be to watch, which I’ll post once it’s completed.

If interested in this project, please slide into my Twitter DMs.

What I’ve Been Working On

I don’t usually like to talk about my projects on public forums, it makes me paranoid that someone will take my ideas, but as it turns out, a number of people made things I wanted to anyways, so I couldn’t even take credit, hah.

I spend a lot of my time learning new things still, filling my head with a disparate range of skills. Most recently I’ve been learning how to render stuff in Houdini, to be able to quickly develop decent quality prototype and procedural assets in Unity.

Well that brings me backwards to why I want to create assets for Unity. I was frustrated about the kinds of games that are mostly available at the moment for VR. There are a few good titles, and more trickle out each month, but there are a number of genres of game that just really don’t exist in the way that I’d like for them to. This has led to my idea journal being filled mostly with ideas for various VR games, rather than the physical ideas that I had, such as for a light-weight VR system that strongly resembled the Rift, or a biotech device that resembles the effects of trees on CO2, but capturing the carbon onto a sort of filter that could be then either be buried, or turned back into fuel.

In any case, I’ve got a list of games which could be quickly developed into a minimal viable product in short order, or at least conceptualized to the point of raising funding, and am currently working on what basically amount to tech demos of the games.

I enjoy learning how to use these tools, and creating my vision for more fun, and mesmerizing VR experiences, but I’ve spent a lot of time on learning, and not much time doing as a result. It would be helpful to have one or two additional people to work with me, but so far, I work alone.

That’s neither here nor there though, nor is it the last thing I’ve been working on! Semi related to those game ideas, I’ve been thinking a lot about stories, and storytelling. Games that inspire stories, and stories that inspire games. I’ve had a few of both, but a lot of these projects are what you could consider intermediaries for my final goal game, but I’ll reveal that later.

Oh! I nearly forgot to throw in one last set of projects. I’ve been making yarn things for a number of years, and work on things while stuff is rendering, watching stuff, and have been making large yarn blankets, which I’m considering selling if there’s interest!

On a final note about my third book, these last 3 months have been brutal on my writing spirit, but I’m working on getting the story in my head out onto the page.

Of course there’s more that I’m up to, and it always feels like never enough. I’ve been thinking about needing to communicate with the world more, doing a podcast, or YouTube, or maybe just getting philosophical while I stream games, maybe a multi-media simulstream, but I’m terrible at self promotion.

I guess what I’m saying is, I could use some help probably a media manager, and an actual developer, and I will be listing some of my projects here in more detail soon!