The Official Blog of Patcoola

August 22nd, 2019

Canada Day July 01, 2019, I woke up to the joy of a broken down refrigerator. The refrigerator left more than just defrosted food as we faced a journey which lasted over a month. The floor had to be repaired, the upper cabinets had to be trimmed, and the amount of labor was shocking. I say thanks to our family friends that helped with the labors, thanks to the delivery people that put in so much work, and thanks to the unused refrigerator from the basement. This is the story of our refrigerator mayhem.

June 18th, 2019

Use your Oculus with Steam

Did you know, you can use your Oculus Rift with Steam. When you first try to run SteamVR or a VR game from Steam with your Oculus you will be blocked. This is not because Oculus is anti-competition, it’s because Steam is a different system. Oculus will block any application (app) or game that is not from the Oculus store by default. This is primarily for quality control and safety. The Oculus requires the use of the Oculus software/store to operate. Steam uses a variant of OpenVR. Although Oculus and Steam are different, Oculus can detect and add your SteamVR apps/games to your library for quick access. Enable running apps from an unknown source to use SteamVR.

May 11th, 2019

It’s not about Pong, it’s about what comes from Pong.

Game engines has really spoiled us developers, turning Pong into a 30 minute task. However, that doesn’t mean you have created Pong the right way. Back when Adobe Flash was popular; Flash presented a development environment that lead to many poor development practices. I took a step back and went back to basics. I took a calculated approach to recreating Pong. In fact I believe I did it a bit better. I added the paddle behavior from Brick Breaker and added perspective. Now the doors for many more game mechanics has opened.

April 20th, 2019

Change has came!

I jump into the sky with confidence and pride. The blog’s big redesign took about three weeks and is finally here. The new blog features full responsive design. Updated top pages with new menus and some new headline graphics. Social graph cards have been implemented. Google Ads have been restored with full policy compliance. Best of all, the blog was re-branded to be about myself and to feature my cartoon alter ego. I hope everyone likes it, or not I don’t really care.