Whats going on !?

So it’s been quite some time since I last blogged, a lot of stuff happened since, so it’s about time I’d blog again. The experimentation project in the end didn’t turn out to go very well in the end. Problems within the team and lack of motivation caused us to get behind schedule and deliver a game which wasn’t really remotely finished (at least, to my standards) but I guess my expectations we’re too high to begin with. Nevertheless I did finish it to uni expectations, and the only thing left to do is write a document on how best to incorporate Ogre3D within a game (engine). I finished some courses as well luckily; I did a course on Path Planning and Crowd Simulation which was really cool, and I retried for Motion and Manipulation, which is essentially a robotics course mostly related to planning paths for robots that have a certain degree of freedom, forward kinematics for robot arms (and thus also skeletons in games), high level collision detection and the grasping of objects and such. The course has a lot of things in common with other courses like path planning, but also computational geometry and virtual worlds which itself is mostly about physics and network related aspects of virtual environments. Having finished that course which was actually my last one, I am now preparing to begin my Thesis project

Blues for the red sun

I realised I haven’t posted in a while so here is a status update

I’ve installed a twitter add-in on my blog to keep you up-to-date on small blog related things, surfing the hype. I think its a rediculous concept in-all especially when it is used by large commercial news website and others, because I really don’t care if they just placed a new news item on the news site. I discover new news when i actually visit, so adding twitter is just out of context there. I like the micro-blogging aspect though, but people abuse it to enlighten us followers that they are taking a crap. I try not to abuse it, and make it relevant to this blog so that it keeps interesting. So much for that

Concepts

To elaborate further on my previous post about rapid practical game design, here is how it turned out with my current project. The context is that the tourist roadsign system currently in place in Utrecht is inconsistent and isn’t up to standard. They are planning a new tourist roadsign system in the city, that is going to be placed in this year and they would like a game that connects to that. The game has to encorporate four core values: Historic, Talented, Innovating and Personal. Given those core values, we’ve depicted three goals as restriction for our design: Exploration, Utrecht and Learning.

In the end we ended up with three concepts which we pitched to the city of Utrecht;

Misdirection

Justa quick addition:

<p style=”font-style:italic;text-align:justify;”>

So theres the secret to fooling wordpress into using italic if the <EM> tag is overridden by the CSS you can’t edit because you don’t want to pay for it

A new Ludum Dare is coming up also in the weekend of 17th – 19th of april just so you know. It will be the 14th time it is being held, and I am obliged to enter the competition now, since I failed to do so the past three LD’s. If i ever manage to find an excuse for not competing this time, it ought to be really really good Go check out www.ludumdare.com for more info.

Rapid Practical Game Design

As promised, I’m going to elaborate on the process of game design we’ve used for our new to create game as part of my experimentation project. I’ve pro-creatively called it Rapid Practical Game Design and what it basically achieves is proper design results in a very short time. It requires very intense collaboration between the programmer,  the game designer and perhaps an artist, to create several prototypes over a certain short period, for instance one prototype each day of the week. The goal in the end is to destillate one or several game designs from the small prototypes by combining (aspects of) them.

Settled and Back once again:)

Hey guys, Im still here

I’m almost fully settled in into my new apartment, which turned out very neat and stylish to my opinion. The only thing lacking now is a proper internet connection which is bound to arrive within two weeks, so im working through mobile Internet at this moment.

Long time,

Hi everyone, its been a while. Next to gaming my ass of on Fallout 3, Mirrors Edge and Gears of War 2, i’ve been grinding uni and working a lot, and I found a place to live so I’m in the process of moving on my own as well. Busy, busy, busy

I’ve quit my job as a game developer as of today, because I want to spend more time on uni and finish my master on Game and Media Technology. Its going reasonably well, I hope to do my experimentation project in the next two semesters, as well as some seminar on Path Plannig. Currently I am doing a course on geometric algorithms (Computational Geometry) which is somewhat hard, but very cool since it involves geometry. I then only need to do one more course before my I can start graduation project.

Remember Remember…

Its going to be november soon, so It’s time to look at what games might be interesting to buy this holiday season . I’ve picked my top five games allready, so here they are with Dutch release dates.

Viva Pinãta graphics, demystified

So we’ve all probably heard of Viva Pinãta for the XBox 360, which was released fall 2006. It has a quite distinctive and remarkable graphics style; very colorful ofcourse, but also very detailed and rich in stuff happening on the screen. It’s a kids game obviously, and the game itself is not primarily aimed at people like myself who enjoy the virtues of brutality in Gears of War. However, the graphical techniques used in Viva Pinãta game are pretty cool; in fact, the game was nominated for an award for outstanding achievement in visual engineering. The pinãtas have a nice paper-mâché-like fur and the grass is done in a similar style.

Back.

Hey everyone. Since I didn’t post something since the beginning of august, I might let you know that I’m still alive here I’ve not been into XNA much lately, since the project I was working on at work has been put into the fridge for now. I have been doing research on the capabilities of the Wii with the Wii devkit for our first Wii title which is going to be in production within a month I hope. I shall be talking about some technical stuff on that as well, as far as the NDA is not limiting that ofcourse.

I’ve also started taking classes again at university, so all in all I’m quite busy. The class I’m doing is called motion & manipulation, and is concerned with forward kinematics, motion planning, collision detection, and more.

I’ve been thinking about the blog and my activity on it, and I’ve decided to broaden it up a little, also commenting on whats happening to games and the industry in general. I play a lot of games, and I’ve got some strong opinions about them that I’d like to share, so stay tuned!