Demo, Lightning, and Music

I've been trying to stick to a once-a-month update schedule for this page in order to balance out long periods of silence and having enough interesting stuff to say. I kept slacking on September's update until today when I realized I had to get my stuff in order quick. Tragically, my computer restarted part of the way through typing out my update so in addition to me trying to impatiently reproduce it, I may miss the deadline.

Demo

So for those who have forgotten, I'm currently working on our company's main demo to be used at next year's Game Developer's Conference as well as the primary sample for how to use our new technology in the next major release of our product (Gamebryo). I've had to work on a ton of stuff that I've never experienced before and it's been really challenging. There is also a lot of pressure to deliver and I'm building the thing on top of technology that has not been into production yet so it's unstable and very rough around the edges. To add more to the pressure, my efforts are supposed to be what guides this technology to completion, which is a scary thought.

On the other hand, I'm growing professionally and getting a lot of opportunity to do creative stuff. Additinally, things are finally starting to come together to a point where the stuff that the demo is doing now is really exciting.

The main reason this is on my mind is because I gave a presentation on it yesterday. I was up until 5:30 AM on sunday polishing things up so that the presentation could really make a big impact on people. Unfortunately, the presentation didn't go nearly as smoothly as I'd hoped; I ran into some bugs and there was a lot of dead time as presenters transitioned between computers. However, I think the content of the presentation was compelling enough that everyone still came away impressed. I still feel a little dissapointed because if it had been presented better, people should have been blown away. I'd love to show some screenshots of it, but sadly I can't because it uses intellectual property that doesn't belong to our company that we aren't released to share. Sorry.

Lightning

Although I'm still cranking away at Connexus at a snail's pace, I diverted a little of my spare time to play with textures and shaders to see if I could come up with an interesting lightning effect for use in the demo. Although I'm by no means done, what I've got so far is pretty cool looking. I made a quick animated gif of it to share:

Unfortunately, it doesn't really do the effect justice when you can see it in full color and detail animating at 60 frames per second. But whatever, that's the basic idea. This effect can be parameterized so that the speed, color, texture, and path of the lightning can easily be reconfigured once the main effect isI' implemented.

Music

I've been thinking about what I'm going to do about music for Connexus recently. I downloaded a program called Musagi that makes it really easy to make cool NES-sounding music, which I've enjoyed playing around with. I'm not sure if any of the songs that I've made yet are really compatible with Connexus, but it's been fun anyway. I also have this unfortunate tendency to make the first half of a song then quit. So if you like music that sounds like it was made for a NES and don't mind abrupt endings, you can check out some of the stuff I've been working on:

Opus 2
Opus 6
Opus 8
Opus 10

For any of you who are curious, the word "Opus" is just a generic word for a piece of music. Also, if it only seems to play the first few seconds of the song, that is probably because the quicktime browser plug-in bites and I hate it. You can hear the whole thing by right clicking the link and saving the target to your computer.

Well, that's it for me; See you next month.

Siggraph and stuff

So the exciting thing that went on this month was that I attended Siggraph 2008 in Los Angeles. For those who do not know, Siggraph means Special Interest Group in Graphics (specifically computer graphics). Although there is an organization called Siggraph, the term is generally used to refer to an annual conference where tons of nerds get together and show off all their cool stuff. The conference has gotten pretty big and now covers a wide variety of topics beyond just computer graphics. You can see research presentations for new technology that you might see in cutting edge games and movie graphics five years from now.

Anyway, I won't actually dwell on Siggraph too much because I already wrote up a summary for work, and I don't feel like doing it again.

In a nutshell, I learned about some of the graphics techniques used in Halo 3, Crysis, Starcraft 2, learned about texture tiling and tile theory, learned about natural material simulation, and global illumination using photon mapping. I watched 8 hours of computer animated short films. I created some Dueling Monkeys stickers. I learned about creating materials, foliage, and volumetric effects for movies. I met some game industry people and talked about engines and stuff.

I also got to see the StarCraft 2 trailer in a movie theater with movie resolution and theater sound.

In other news

In order to keep things visually interesting, I collected some screenshots of stuff I've been doing at work recently.

This is a screenshot of a demo I did a little work on for GDC 2008. I modeled, textured, and animated the power core structure in the center of the room.

This is a shader that just takes two textures (in this case, sand and gravel) then blends them in an interesting way to get more natural transitions.

A character and environment I created for the demo I'm currently working on. All this stuff is just proxy so it will get replaced in the end. he has a very humorous run animation.

There are a few more screenshots of the same stuff in the gallery, but I accidently put them in the gaming set instead of art, and I can't find a way to correct it. Also, Flickr sucks and gives me the 'this photo currently unavailable' BS for everything I've added. Great.

Whatever, I'm done.

Triangle Game Jam 2008

There has been a bunch of interesting things happen over the past few months. I really wish I had posted about some of this stuff closer to when it happened so I could remember it better. Oh well, take what you can get.

Triangle Game Jam 2008

Definitely the most interesting thing that I've done recently is participating in the second Triangle Game Jam. This time I did a lot more than just participate; I was actually the lead organizer of the event. Being the organizer was stressful and there was nothing fun about it, so that's not really exciting, but the event itself made it all worth it. I also updated the Jam's webpage to have pages for each of the games that were made.

Each of our Game Jam's has an agreed upon theme that all of the games adhere to. The theme for this year (which was actually my idea) was 'mad libs' - each person creates 3 lists of words containing 5 words each. One was a list of adjectives, one was a list of nouns, and one was a list of verbs. The morning of the event, we would have a program randomly generate potential game titles and we would pick out the ones that sounded the most interesting.

Double Beer Blaster

I proposed a game based off of the randomly generated title "Double Beer Blaster". The inspiration came to me because I had played Circle of Death (the drinking card game) recently, so I thought "why don't we make a drinking video game?" Drinking games make for an interesting game design premise because so many of the traditional game design rules don't apply and there are some additional restrictions incurred. In drinking games, there is no winning or loosing. You are driven by a single objective - to drink - and incurring a drink is a weird mix of both a penalty and a perk.

Actually, I'm getting off track here. If you want to read more about Double Beer Blaster, it has a short write up on the Games page of the Triangle Game Jam webpage. The point is that it was really fun to work on and we made it in approximately one weekend.

The IGDA meeting

So the Game Jam went down in May. We made 4 awesome games. About a month later, the local chapter of the IGDA held one of their bi-monthly meetings and the meeting was dedicated to presenting the results. It was really gratifying to get to show off all of our work, and to see people get excited about what we had done and the stuff we had created out of it.

My job

I've had a shift in my job responsibilities recently. Instead of working on tools (which is my traditional job responsibilities), I'm going to be working on next year's GDC demo. This means that I am actually going to be making a game at work now, which is both exciting and intimidating. Wish me luck with that; I'm sure I'll need it.

Connexus update

If anyone knows or cares, I'm still working on Connexus. Some very interesting things are happening. Specifically, a few friends and a few of the people in my office are pitching in to make AI players for the game. The thing that is cool about so many people making AI players is that we can make them battle each other. I'm actually going to try to set up a tournament in September with brackets and everything. At work we might even have a 'credibility points' betting pool. I still haven't updated the graphics, so there isn't much point in posting screenshots. If you want to know what it looks like, there are links in the post I made last October, which also conveniently discusses the results of the first Game Jam (and you can download the game I made - yay).

Sprite art

I have not had much time to do anything artistic recently. Most of my free time I'm ether working on Connexus, or not motivated enough to work on a project. I did get to do all the art for Double Beer Blaster, but in general I've been missing art.

While I was browsing the internet a while back, I came across this webpage that has some tutorials on creating sprite art. I was honestly not very impressed with his example animated game sprites; I thought to myself, I bet I could do better than this. It looked like fun too. So in a fit of inspiration, I tried to make a short pixel art sprite animation.

I learned the hard way that this is not as easy as it looks. Even on a very small scale, each line ends up being a lot more pixels than you think it will, so you end up taking forever to fill in each frame. In short, I learned that making pixel art animations takes lots of time and can get pretty mind-numbing. I can't imagine having enough devotion to creating a full game's worth of animations.

That being said, I did follow through with the one animation I wanted to make. I kept track of some of the stuff I did along the way, so I'll present each of the steps I went through here.

I started with a quick prototype animation using stick man to get a good motion

Next, I previewed some body shapes and decided whether to make a male or female character

Next, get a sense of the outfit

Create the pixel art for the base pose to figure out colors. Zoomed in 2x. Finally: ...

The finished product

So that's all for now. Later.