Squids From Space is an 8 vs. 8 online competitive top down asymmetric shooter in Unreal Engine 4. It started life as sort of a spiritual successor to Fat Princess, an earlier game Fun Bits had worked on, but quickly grew into its own. I was deeply involved with this project since we started working on it (then a mothballed prototype) and was one of the primary programmers through the bulk of the project. In September 2019, I assumed the lead programmer role.

This was our second contract working with the Oculus team - this time, to port the First Contact Oculus Rift demo to the upcoming Oculus Quest. This was quite a big task, as, in addition to the vast difference in power between a PC capable of running Oculus Rift and the upcoming mobile based Quest platform, the original Rift version (from our understanding) hadn’t even been initially intended as a full product, so there was a lot that needed to be optimized.

In early 2018, Fun Bits was contracted to add support for a large list of languages to a few of its demos and tutorial applications. The main one I worked on of these was the Touch Basics (or Touch NUX) application, which was what would run upon first setup of the Oculus Touch controllers. This was a little bit of a challenge, as the project had been built on, at the time, a pretty old version of UE4, which predated many later features for both localization and font support in VR.

Orbital Loop is a music “game” for Google Daydream, as one of two projects (with reGrow) we were working on for the then upcoming VR platform. It’s essentially a relaxing music composition application, intended to take advantage of VR to give a more engrossing experience than would necessarily be possible with a conventional platform.

reGrow was one of the two projects Fun Bits was working on (with Orbital Loop) for the then upcoming Google Daydream mobile VR platform, and the first project I worked on at Fun Bits that was really our own. The premise changed some over its development, but always revolved around the idea of growing and breeding gardens of flowers.