I wanted to play around with GLSL, so I decided to make something small. Just 1kb in size in fact.
The demo is metaball-based, and looks a little like these, except it also moves:
Download the exe and source here. There are some poor choices made with regard to where computations are performed in the shaders in order to get the exe under 1kb in size. I’m sure someone more experienced would be able to correct this, or maybe I will myself with some more practice.
My coursework on volumetric rendering resulted in numerous images of skulls, and since my MSc work has rarely produced anything visual I felt them worth sharing. There’s nothing incredibly exciting going on here, just ray tracing through some volume data, calculating normals with a 3D Sobel filter and trilinear interpolation, shading and then a spot of anti-aliasing.
Ray traced render using 3D sobel filter to calculate normals
Ray traced render
Depth
Depth
Volume
Render using finite difference to calculate normals
The biggest Global Game Jam ever took place over the weekend, and as with last year I headed to the Scottish Game Jam venue in Glasgow to take part. With almost 100 developers attending, this was one of the largest sites in the world.
Teaming up with Andrew Glass (part of my team when developing Panda Dragoon last year) along with artist Craig Mooney and designer Daniel Cleaton (two fellow Abertay grads who I hadn’t worked with before), we had 48 hours to develop a game on the theme of “extinction”. Our idea of choice was Chinthrilla, a fast-paced platformer featuring a jealous Chinchilla set on causing the extinction of tortoises everywhere who must race against intergalactic conversationalists trying to save them while dodging the hammer-head land shark.
Overall we created a fairly complete game (given the timespan) with relatively few difficulties compared to the pipeline and source control issues we worked through last year, with an astounding amount of textured 3D artwork given that it was created by a single artist. However, the gameplay style we attempted was far from ground-breaking and we could definitely have had a deeper look at the theme. I think when faced with 48 hours, especially during an event which only takes place annually, it’s tempting to choose a project you’re confident can work. Next year though I’d like to try something more experimental, even if it doesn’t result in something playable.
This years event involved fantastic feedback from mentors for improving the game, great coverage of the entire event from Square Go, and free pizza provided by sponsor Nokia. The highlight for me though was seeing all of the games at the end of the event, and in particular the entire audience screaming at a dying polar bear to go on and keep swimming. It was a great weekend and I look forward to the next.
All Scottish Game Jam games on the GGJ site
Summary from Square Go
My Flickr Stream
Video of Chinthrilla
Chinthrilla on the GGJ site, where you can download it or play online
Chinthrilla on the SGJ site
Global Game Jam is coming up this weekend, a chance to get together with other devs and students to create games in just 48 hours. One of the interesting aspects is not knowing exactly who I’ll end up working with, and that means being as prepared as possible to adapt.
Having freshly installed Windows 7 on my laptop (I usually run Linux) I’ve had to get hold of all the editors, tools and libraries I need again, and figured I would share here. Everything here is open source, free for non-commercial use or has a free trial version. Continue reading »
Shortly before Christmas I finally attempted something I’ve been planning for ages: I took part in Ludum Dare. If you’re unaware, Ludum Dare is an international, 48 hour long, individual game development competition where all content and code is to be created within the limited time period.
I’m really glad I took part and regret not doing so sooner. I was worried about having to create my own artwork and music, and that taking part would leave me exhausted for days afterwards and interfere with University work. In reality, I found having a game which I had created every part of incredibly rewarding and am quite proud of my artistic and compositional efforts, even if they’re nowhere near the level of the group projects I’ve worked on in the part. Additionally, I found that staying up for 48 hours straight would have been completely unnecessary and probably detrimental, and maintained fairly sensible hours.
I achieved much more than I had originally expected during the weekend, but definitely saw the jam as a chance to develop something cool with no obligation to continue rather than a competitive endeavour. That said, the community feedback has been one of the most awesome parts so far. It’s a really awesome feeling to have something I made actually described as “fun”, of course, but it’s the constructive criticisms on problems I recognised but didn’t have time to resolve completely, such as collision, elements I never thought anyone would play long enough to require, like an ending, and additions I hadn’t even considered, like your achievements affecting the game, which I am most thankful for.
In response to the elected theme of “Discovery”, I made a simple research sim game called “Let’s Science”. You take control of a lab and its scientists, and direct them to make a series of ground-breaking discoveries in order to become a world-leading research facility.
I worked in Unity, along with Paint.NET (graphics), sfxr (audio effects) and LMMS (music). I had hoped to work in 3D (having practiced my incredibly basic modelling skills in Blender) but didn’t feel this idea would benefit from it – maybe next time.
You can check out the game along with the other fantastic entries on the Ludum Dare site.