Star Wars

2017-2018

A long time ago

Ah, Bloxels Star Wars. Surprised at the existence of a Star Wars game outside of EA? At Pixel Press, we were surprised to be making it. At the height of our 3-year partnership with Mattel, they graciously worked us into the Star Wars universe via their contacts at Lucasfilm. It was a very ambitious project given our time frame of less than a year, small team, and augmented reality companion product.

The game was released in January of 2018, and unreleased in January of 2020. The nebulous nature of the same forces allowing this project to exist ultimately led to its early retirement. The project never received any updates, though I would have loved to revisit it. From the experience and growth of our team through its development, I feel a future for Bloxels Star Wars may have been bright.

My Role

The work I'm most proud of on this project is the implementation of the character controllers. Our newly hired animator Aaron and I quickly discovered we worked well together, and were able to iterate a lot to give all 8 playable characters a unique feel. Another layer I'd brought to this was integrating the character controller parameters with a spreadsheet on Google Drive. This way, our level designer could adjust them in builds for his early drafts, and we'd routinely come together for consensus as the project matured.

Throughout the early months, I was in charge of the technical development of the AR product, a branded and more refined version of the original Bloxels board. This mostly involved requesting and analyzing 3D models and physical prototypes from Mattel, providing feedback to make sure the final product had strong AR tracking features and that we had reliable color classification for the 8 different block colors.