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Global Game Jam 2012 Wrap-Up

February 6, 2012 / posted in Awesome, Games, Programming / 1 Comment

The 2012 Global Game Jam is over and it was another year of awesome games in the Raleigh-Durham – North Carolina area.  This week I wanted to put the spotlight on all the games lovingly crafted by our crack squad of jammers – especially mine, Low Power! :D

The Theme

theme

The Ouroboros – but no explanation was given.  We just showed the jammers the image and it was up to them to interprete it.

LOTR Body Snatching

Rock, Paper, Scissors with body snatching!
Avoid or possess enemies to stay alive and win.

Low Power

In order to survive Low Power you must consume yourself (like the Ouroboros) to survive.  You control a robot whose battery is constantly draining but there are valuable energy cores scattered throughout the level that will sustain your life.  There are all kinds of dangerous environmental hazards that unless you enable your sensors/abilities (lights, shield, ground sensor, microphone) you’ll never survive.  However enabling the different systems will drain your battery even faster!

Parasite

You are a Parasite that leeches off battle ships. Enemies will constantly come in formations to destroy the ship you are occupying. Using the possessed ship, you must defeat your enemies! However, as you leech your ship it slowly dies, you will constantly need to take control of and leech of another ship. With out a ship for protection you are helpless!

Planes on a Snake

A rift in spacetime has resulted in a large number of World War II era planes getting stuck on the world snake.  Join the frequent fliers club of Ouroboros Airlines, racking up points while taking advantage of the torus nature of your new environment.

Roller Snake: The Quest for Chili Dogs

Control “Hardy the Hoop Snake, Jr., III, IV, and V” in his quest to eat as many chili dogs as possible while winding through ‘Catastrophe Canyon’

Snake Run

You are the snake’s guardian, you must ensure that balance is maintained.  Let enough creatures be eaten by the snake to ensure he doesn’t starve, but not enough that he frenzies and destroys everything.  All the while outrunning him!

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Global Game Jam 2012: Friday!

January 26, 2012 / posted in Awesome, Games / No Comments

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately rebuilding the old Triangle Game Jam website. Now that it’s done I can get back to new articles. The new site is up at http://www.trianglegamejam.com.  It’s where we’ll be archiving all Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill – Global and Triangle game jams.  All the past years works that I could get my hands on are up there and worth taking a look at.  It’s amazing what people with a goal can create in a weekend.

In other news – The global game jam starts this Friday (January 27th).  You should signup and find a local jam site you can attend.  It’s totally worth a weekend of your time.

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Published Achievement Unlocked!

September 8, 2011 / posted in Awesome, Game Industry, Graphics, Programming, Rendering / No Comments

image

The September 2011 issue of Game Developer Magazine contains an article of mine!  They asked me to write an article for the “Inner Product” section summarizing the Hi-Z GPU Culling algorithm as well as the related research I started working on to automatically generate occluders for the runtime.

My copy hasn’t yet arrived in the mail so I don’t know how the final version turned out, but the last draft I saw after the good folks at GD Mag spruced up the language in my article was looking really good.

It was a lot of work putting the article together, more than I actually thought going into it.  Especially since I already had 3 blog entries to pull from.  However, you find yourself second guessing everything you write because it’s not like a blog entry that you can go back and edit if there’s a mistake.

It also becomes a bit more of a challenge to summarize things that you simply can’t add a link to and tell the reader, go read this.  Also, not being able to just insert a huge chunk of code makes explaining something simple often a lot harder to explain in words.  Hopefully you’re good at making diagrams in those situations.

It was an interesting experience.  Really glad I got the opportunity to contribute an article.

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Project Photofly Experiment

July 26, 2011 / posted in Awesome, Game Industry, Tools / No Comments

Last week we were sitting around the office wondering if it would be possible to place ourselves in a game world with Autodesk’s Project Photofly.  How cool would that be?  We thought we might be able to scan one of us in a T-pose and then use Mixamo’s Auto-Rigging tool to create a rigged avatar.  Then we could be running around a level in front of our Kinect as ourselves.

Sadly it never went past stage one.  It’s harder than you might think to hold a T-pose for 3 minutes while someone circles you twice snapping pictures at 10 degree intervals.

I don’t have any pictures of the results; I came out looking like the elephant man.  We’ll probably try again at some point, but in the meantime I made another scan of a pair of static objects that was turning out pretty good until I got to the back of the monkey.

YouTube Preview Image

All in all Autodesk’s Photofly software is pretty cool.  It’s still lacking in the area of iteration and debugging.  You can try manually tagging photo matchup points between images to give it a better idea on how the images fit together but it takes awhile for the data to be processed in the cloud.  It’s also unclear where some data comes from, or why portions of the background become part of the foreground mesh.  If it had better feedback for how that data became part of the mesh cleaning up the results would be a lot easier.

Also, if you own a camera with a sports video mode that captures at 60 FPS you can just slowly circle the subject and then dump all the frames using ImageGrab.  Which is way easier than snapping individual pictures.

I wonder if I could generate 3d art for a game jam…

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Intelligent Character Motion 1.1 – With Unity Integration

July 1, 2011 / posted in Activate3D, Awesome, Game Industry, Motion Gaming / No Comments

Back in April I wrote a short post about Activate3D releasing 1.0 of ICM, but unlike the 0.8 alpha version the 1.0 did not ship with a community version.

Well today I’m happy to say we’ve released a new 1.1 version with a community version along with a Unity (Free or Pro) integration.

The 0.8 version of the product was much harder to pickup and play with because there wasn’t a level editor.  With the Unity integration that problem has been greatly alleviated.  Users can now drag and drop features into their level to create a world they can explore and interact with using their Kinect and OpenNI.

YouTube Preview Image

We’ve tried to expose a lot of the functionality to the GUI layer in Unity.  For the things you’re unable to do through the GUI, we’ve exposed a great deal of our API to .Net.  The 1.1 community edition also includes our native and managed binding layer code so that if you need to expose additional things or need to do something only available in our native C++ API you can take advantage of our existing SWIG code to wrap your new functionality, instead of writing your own wrapper layer or SWIG interface from scratch.

Download ICM 1.1 Community Edition

The new 1.1 version of ICM solves many of the problems OpenNI users encounter and more. All of these ICM features are usable out of the box with a couple of mouse clicks,

  • Skeleton retargeting
  • Skeleton stabilization
  • Gesture/Pose detection
  • Several grasping solutions
  • Refined hand position for NUI GUIs
  • Engagement/Disengagement with physical objects
  • Physical object collision
  • Feet planting
  • Avatar physical simulation
  • Sample intractable features
    • Bars/Poles
    • Ropes
    • Floors/Walls
    • Water
    • Ledges
    • Dynamic Box/Sphere
    • Jump Paths
    • Triggers
    • Zipline

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