Critic's workshop
in Portfolios
I'm mostly a coder and spend some of my time on creating tools and prototypes that don't really qualify as "games" for this community, still it's game development related, so I will use this thread to show some of that work. Feedback is welcome.
This one is pretty recent, my first Unity Asset Store project, the idea is to enable a developer to make transparent games for Windows, it started off as a project that was supposed to allow me to draw Unity UI over an existing game. Before that I have thought many times about a virtual desktop, or games that run as a wallpaper. Current implementation allows both ways of functioning, drawing a Unity project at the bottom or top of the windows stack.
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#!/content/104871
This one is pretty recent, my first Unity Asset Store project, the idea is to enable a developer to make transparent games for Windows, it started off as a project that was supposed to allow me to draw Unity UI over an existing game. Before that I have thought many times about a virtual desktop, or games that run as a wallpaper. Current implementation allows both ways of functioning, drawing a Unity project at the bottom or top of the windows stack.
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#!/content/104871
Comments
I imagine something that'd be pretty big for turning this into a "live" desktop or something is for the game to have awareness of where other application windows are, whether it's using them as colliders/physics objects, or just interacting with them in general (e.g. at a most boring level, have a character walk out from under a window if you dragged it over them).
And I guess this is irrelevant to most people but... Does/can it work for mac?
I do agree with @elyaradine that window/desktop object awareness would add hugely to this. And how would focus work, can/would you still click through the game to whatever is beneath? Can you set things to go over and under desktop stuff like windows?
Lol it's like AR for your desktop :P
The overlay can be drawn as a topmost window or as the bottom most window, input is a bit tricky so there are explicitly two modes of operation, active/inactive. When the overlay is active it has input focus, so you can't interact with windows that are below it and your game has full input control. In inactive mode, you can interact with other windows applications, you still get mouse input and your game runs the update loop as normal, but you don't have keyboard input.