Hey hey, I have new cool things to share! 🧡
While I was planning what new features I should add to the game I came to conclusion, that my pace of creating mini games is too slow for them to be a full-fledged part of the game, and they may quickly become boring for the players. The answer would be to create games that have infinite replayability, and while it's true, this type of games also need a lot of time of development to become complete.
So I came up with an idea - what if I made so Unity-chan wasn't limited only to mini games created by me? After all, Unity-chan is a mascot of a game engine, it would be fitting if she reacted to other people's work too. And her name is all about uniting things, it all made sense so much I couldn't pass up on this idea! And that's how two new features have emerged:
1. Register ANY game into Unity-chan's Game Station. 🎮
2. Control Unity-chan environment through external communication. 🌐
1. Register ANY game into Unity-chan's Game Station 🎮
This one is quite straight forward:
a) Open the Game Station in Kohaku's room, click '+' to open the form
b) Input the game title, its path to '.exe' file, preview image and some brief description. There is a checkbox whether you want Unity-chan to comment on your screen. I'm not sure if I should remove it (because why would you add a game to Unity-chan's station if you didn't want her commentary, lol)
c) And voilà! ✨ Now just select the game. Unity-Chan: Desktop Companion will transition to the desktop with Unity-chan in streaming mode, and if everything went correctly the app should open right after that. From now on Unity-chan will comment on what she sees on the screen as long as the app is opened!
Here I was playing Slay the Spire, a deck-building rogue-like (which I recommend!), and our clever friend suggested what card she would choose as a reward!
2. Control Unity-chan environment through external communication
🌐
It may sound very complicated and, well, it kind of is! :D But let me explain it.
Do you play multiplayer games? Most of them have very basic structure, where there is one Server and multiple Clients. Server gathers all clients, and lets them interact with each other. For example 16 players connect to one server, where they can all chat and shoot each other, capture flags etc.
Now, what if we made Unity-Chan: Desktop Companion a server, and give other applications a way to interact with it? That's what this feature is about.
Imagine if Unity-chan was hanging out on your desktop, and you were playing a completely different game (let's name it Mines&Crafts for example). If you registered the game in Game Station she can comment on current state of the game based on screen, it is a bit passive and timing of comments is random, disregarding of what is currently happening in Mines&Crafts.
Now, let's say something happened in Mines&Craft, you just found a precious sapphire. How cool would be if Kohaku could become notified about this moment right away and comment about it knowing all the context that came from the game itself, knowing that you have all ingredients to craft a necklace for example? Or maybe even play a specific animation for this event?
Thanks to this feature, any game/application could potentially do it.
Here is my professional schema of how the communication would look like in this example:
From the side of Unity-Chan: Desktop Companion app, enabling the feature is very simple. You just need to go to Settings, Port Connection (new view), and then define a communication port and click Enable.
But in order for other games to communicate, they would need to know what messages they should send. That's why I created another project - a very simple Console application that allows to send any currently implemented message to the application.
I made the code public and with free license, so any willing game developer or modder is free to play with it! I plan to create more thorough tutorial on how to create your first communication with Unity-Chan: Desktop Companion in the future, most likely just before the release.
Here's the link to the repository:
GitHub repository link
That's all for now, thank you for reading! 🧡🤎
