September 17th, 2009
So, a week since my previous Next Level post and the project has come to completion.
YinYangYou, our game, is a top-down two-player race to collect energy and skew the balance of the playing field. By throwing orbs into their opponents’ “holes”, each player can increase the amount of ground they control on the opposite side of the board, eventually claiming an entire side and winning the game. A range of exotic energy pickups, such as time control and hole switiching, add variety and tactical elements to the gameplay.
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Subject: Programming Tags: Next Level, Other Abertay Students, Team Be, Whitespace, XNA, YinYangYou
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September 7th, 2009
This week I’m taking part in Next Level Dundee. Next Level is a digital media collaboration project, which basically means I’m meeting some new people and developing a game with them in a week. Scary idea.
We pitched our games to the other participants on Friday, having only just managed to meet up the morning beforehand. Luckily we’d managed to agree on a game design through online meetings on Skype, but there were elements that we didn’t fully decide upon until we met face to face.
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Subject: Programming Tags: C++, Next Level, Other Abertay Students, Pitch, Whitespace, XNA
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August 2nd, 2009
Me: “But Abi! Surely I should work on bug fixes rather than implementing Depth of Field.”
Project Manager: “No, Hazel. You must work on awesome graphics effects.”
Me: “Sweeeet.”
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Subject: Programming Tags: C++, Dare To Be Digital, Depth of Field, digital colony, Full Screen Effects, Graphics programming, HLSL, pollen, shaders, XNA
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July 20th, 2009
Although I’ve really only been sharing bright and shiny screenshots of our game, it actually progresses from a sunny farm through to a dark and creepy forest. Naturally, this meant it was time to focus on implementing a coherent lighting model for the level. At the moment we’re working with ambient lighting, two directional lights and two spot lights per short section of our game.
In addition, I’ve been looking at methods for shadowing and shading. Each bee is an intricate model, but scaled down it would be easy to lose a lot of the detail. As you can hopefully see in the following images, shading adds some depth and makes the bees appear far more three dimensional. Continue reading »
Subject: Programming Tags: C++, Dare To Be Digital, digital colony, Graphics programming, Lighting, pollen, XNA
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July 15th, 2009
I like how colourful this game is making my blog look! We’ve had the ability to add post-processing effects to our game easily for a couple of weeks now, but have only just considered what to do with that. Inspired by some of the effect from rendering fur over the weekend, I created some examples of a brushstroke shader in effect the game. It’s good having a colourful 3D environment to play with like this.
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Subject: Programming Tags: dare to be digital, Dare To Be Digital, digital colony, Full Screen Effects, Graphics programming, HLSL, pollen, Post-processing, screenshots, XNA
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So, a week since my previous Next Level post and the project has come to completion. 
