Pollen iPhone Ants

November 14th, 2010


Unfortunately a few months ago Abi, Jess, Kieran, Ian and I went our seperate ways into further education and employment and the development of Pollen iPhone ceased. It became clear that scheduling development time on top of full-time employment was not realistic, especially without access to Unity iPhone at home, and that progressing as a start-up as our sole means of employment would not be financially viable.

Additionally, Pollen was a fairly ambitious idea which would require significantly more development time that various other ideas we had since come up with. Maybe we’ll get to work on them some time in future…

Here’s a (very) early development video of the climbing ants I worked on, from before we even had 3d enemies in the game.


.

For more content and artwork from the development of the game, check out Jess’s project blog and portfolio, as well as Abi’s portfolio.

Pollen Video

August 9th, 2010


I had forgotten to post this to the blog, so here you go:


It’s a little rough around the edges, but still a nice summary of what we accomplished in ten weeks this time last year.

Search For A Star Competition

March 10th, 2010


Shortly before Christmas, students in my class were invited to participate in Aardvark Swift’s Search For A Star, a games related programming competition split over several knock-out rounds.

Although the first round was taking place on the day before an exam, myself and two other students from Abertay took part. This round involved answering ten programming questions: 9 based on the C++ language and a final question focussing more on object oriented design. Continue reading »

Comms Library Progress

February 28th, 2010


Unfortunately my honours project is not particularly visual, so it can be hard to update this blog with my progress when I have nothing I can really show. However, progress is being made. The first component of the project, a communications and network library, was completed almost a week ago.

The most useful thing I can share is the class diagram this was based on. It’s rough, it doesn’t detail methods or member data, and it’s far from beautiful, but perfection is an easy trap to fall into. I thought it was better to have a functioning library and an ugly diagram than a work of art demonstrating a library which I then would have no time to create.

The current phase of the project is far more interesting in my opinion, and thankfully should result in something slightly more visually interesting. It concerns the division of the world, hierarchically, into microcells. This spatial partitioning, and more importantly the assignment of work to specific processors is fast becoming the major focus of the project, and I hope to follow up with more on that topic shortly.

EDIT: I have replaced the original diagram with a still-ugly but slightly more descriptive update (if you actually view it at a decent size, that is). The majority of member data and functions are still missing, but hopefully the few I’ve added will make my intentions slightly clearer.

Global Game Jam 2010

February 4th, 2010



Over the weekend, almost 50 developers in Scotland and over 1500 crazy people worldwide opted to forgo luxuries like sleep and rest by taking part in Global Game Jam. Perhaps unsurprisingly, you’re reading this because I was one of them. Continue reading »