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.