TigJam is over and as promised here’s some of the awesome games that came from it. I spent most of my time refactoring Brothers and unfortunately there’s not much visually to show for it. So instead of giving you the same demo I gave you last week I’ll show off some of the projects done by other people at the Jam, but I touched in some way. All of these games were made in Unity.
These guys went crazy with the visuals in this game. Though I haven’t seen many curling simulators in my time, I’m sure this game is by far the prettiest. I helped them with some of the depth of field stuff, but other than that this is all them. Wish I knew the rules to the actual sport so I can understand what’s going on.
Team Mechtley spent their weekend on Robot Rampage. A BattleBot-esque game for the iPhone. The current prototype features dynamically generated robots and a unique art style already.
When Ben wasn’t spending time working on assets for Brothers he spent time mocking up a new platformer. This is reskin of the Brothers platformer mechanic.
Well I dropped the ball on getting a weekly project out to you all this past Sunday. I might have had a little too much to drink Saturday to be anywhere near productive on Sunday. So to make up for it, here’s a little gem I’ve been working on as a side project with the Flashbang Art Director, Ben Ruiz. At the moment it’s still in dire need of some catchy mechanic to bring it all together. However, I think its art direction and 2d platformer mechanic have come together quite well so far. We hope to continue developing after most of the Flashbang related work dies down a bit. No telling when that’ll be though.
Also, I seem to be having problems getting the real-time shadows working properly in Firefox 3.0 on my Mac. If anyone else is having problems seeing the shadows let me know.
Brothers
On a side note. This upcoming weekend I’ll be participating in the 1st Annual TigSource Game Jam (TigJam). I’ll be working with some of the great indie game developers minds to make an “Accidentally Awesome” game in three days. So this Sunday look forward to some amazing game prototypes.
The game designer at Flashbang Studios, Steve Swink, came up with an idea for a game mechanic where you are in a world of complete white and the only way to see around is by shooting paint on the environment. After he mocked it up in Unity, I took a pass it. My contribution to the project is how the paint is applied to the objects in the scene. In the original mock up, the paint would be a bunch of quads placed over the mesh. Every single splatter of paint was an additional draw call as well as an additional 4 vertices. With the amount of paint we want to spray on the environment this was simply unacceptable. So the new approach is to draw the splatter directly onto the objects’ textures. This technique has virtually no rendering overhead. However, it does have the downside of not being able to draw over UV seams.
After weeks of headache from Apple, iSplume is finally up on the iTunes App Store.
Splume was originally developed as a web game. It was the first project I worked on with Flashbang Studios and was also my first exposure to the Unity engine. In iSplume I was tasked with porting all of gameplay from the web game to the iPhone. This turned out to be quite the undertaking. Unfortunately, Unity doesn’t build to the iPhone quite yet, so this meant that a new graphics engine had to be developed from scratch. It also meant that we didn’t have the flexibility of Ageia (nvidia) PhysX, so we had to revert to using a 2D physics engine instead. All things considered, I’m quite happy with how it turned out. Definitely a very valuable learning experience.
A friend of mine gave me this idea about having a device that shows you a parallel dimension when you look through it. I liked the idea, but I wasn’t to sure about how best that would be implemented into an actual game. Well on my plane trip to Washington D.C. I was listening to an episode of This Week in Tech from twit.tv and they were talking about generating a full 3D scene using a handful of 2D images. While talking about this new technology they referenced a recent movie, Déjà Vu. In that movie they were able to compose a full 3D scene of the past from (what they claimed at the time) multiple cameras from satellites. Well all of this composition stuff seemed like way to much work, so I decided to combine the parallel dimension concept and the full 3D scene of the past concept to create a four dimensional camera.
When looked through, this device will show the player what had happened in the past from his current positional perspective. The thought is that not only could you watch something you experienced while playing the game, but you could also look at predefined cinematics from any perspective, which happened before gameplay actually started. This would allow the player to learn more about their game world and possible be required for continuing a plotline or solving a puzzle.
Earlier this week, over a delicious breakfast burrito with egg, avocado, spinach, mushrooms and crispy potato squares, one of my coworkers looked at me and said, “Make me an awesome Stereoscopic effect!” So I decided to make it the first project that I would put up here.
In essence it’s two separate cameras representing each eye. They both render the scene from slightly different positions and with only the color used by that eye. After they are rendered they are added together to generate the final render. Since the cameras were slightly offset the objects in the scene get the distinct red and cyan ghost like effect on either side of all of the objects.
Well the wordpress theme isn’t quite what I want it to be yet, but that can improve with time. No reason we can’t start work with the content, right? So here’s the deal; Once a week I’m going to give you, the Internet, a game prototype. Most of these prototypes will be focused on gameplay, but some may be graphically oriented, given that I’m a Graphics Programmer professionally. I’m thinking every Sunday at midnight I’ll make a post here showing you the new prototype. I’ll keep this up for as long as I can and hopefully this’ll be the start of a beautiful relationship between you and I, Internet. I will also be posting general announcements I deem necessary.
You might have noticed that this isn’t what this site usually looks like. I’m currently going through a revamp of my website, but it’s going to take a bit of time. I’ll hopefully have the transition done within the next week or so, but it’s difficult to say. <3 Wordpress
