Rapid Prototyping

So every week in Rapid Prototyping we have to make a prototype for a game. It’s pretty fun, but it also takes a lot of work. I’ve been using Construct 2 by Scirra for several weeks now, and despite its limitations, I’ve been happy to learn to develop games with Construct 2.

I’ve got pictures or links to the games. Not all of them work or work well, but its ok. You don’t strike gold every day.

Here are my games:

1. Paper Plane
I’m a sucker for fast movement. This game was supposed to be a simple tutorial project, but I wanted to dive right in and figure out how to use Construct.

2. Maze
I forget the mechanic required for this, but I didn’t have much time. I threw together the most simple game possible. I liked the simplicity of it. You’re presented with an obvious goal right from the start and the timer pushes you to go as fast as possible.

3. Kitty
This game’s requirement was to use the slice mechanic. The way I did it was to draw a tiled image 1pixel high from a start to end point. If the distance was greater than a certain threshold, then it started a new line. I made a limit to the number of consecutive lines that could be drawn.

This method worked for drawing the lines perfectly, but it didn’t translate into cutting the objects properly. Each line made its own cut and if two lines were over an object, the object could be cut twice or more.

4. Dino Garden
My focus for this game was to work on a water hose mechanic and throwing objects back into 3D space.  It was also fun getting the hose and animations to work seamlessly.

5. Balloon Pop
This game was using the mechanic of “mirroring.” I thought it was fun.

BTW. Press space to “fire.” I overlooked some documentation there.

6. Ball Pop

7. Gnome Rock Breaker
   This was based off one of the games inside the IGF Pirate Kart. Our assignment was to make a sequel to the game. Everyone agreed that this was one of the more difficult assignments because you first had to implement the original game design and then add on your own expansions. I ran into limitations of construct because the physics plugin wasn’t cooperating with the mechanics of the original game.

If you want to check out all the projects or more information about them you can look here: http://www.rapidstateofmind.wordpress.com

Intro to 3D Modeling

I found a bunch of stuff from intro to 3D modeling that I though had been lost in a hard drive crash. I decided to render it out and throw it up here before I lost it again.

Animals

Spent a few minutes making a dog’s head the other day.

some sketches of cats I did last summer maybe??

I’m making interactive space-time models!

This is for a friend’s PhD thesis. He needs some interactive space-time models to visualize A TON of data. And when I mean a ton of data. I mean 5 years worth of data from several large retail stores. This is going to be awesome.

I was thinking about using Blender and Python, but I’m kinda wanting to dip into Unreal Script to make it super pretty ALSO, I would really like this to work on a touch-pad.

 

Update:

So we had a meeting this Saturday and I quickly threw together this concept of doing the graphs using UDK. The only trouble that I have now is figuring out how to get in SO much data into UDK, and I’d want it to be more dynamic than static, but I could create Python scripts to convert it into UDK ini files or something. It would just be tedious. I’m always worried about lag, but we’ll see. Modeling SoCal with 50+ stores and 5+ years worth of retail data should be fine right? But this is the direction we wants to take this. Alot better than clipart and excel graphs imo.

Virtual Environments

I’ve had a few projects in Virtual Environments that I enjoyed working on. I did all the modeling, texturing, and lighting except for the one in the city. I just worked on a few materials in that one.

All this was done with UDK, Maya, Crazy Bump, and Photoshop.

Some Blender Demos

This was a flocking demo I did for a professor. The bats use a simple animation and flocking mechanism to fly around. I was learning about rotational vertices   (bats.zip)

The flocking mechanism was simplified further to be used as a background element of a game.

This was a demo I did for my evolution class. The pink M&Ms reproduce based on given traits like aggressiveness and color and the familiarity/availability heuristics. It depended on the initial group, but blue/green were the most likely to out breed the others.

Both of these were made using Blender and Python.

Some old models

I had some old models laying around and I thought I would give them a quick render. These are from my freshman year, Fall 08.