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
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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; Read the rest of this entry »
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. Read the rest of this entry »
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. Read the rest of this entry »
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. Read the rest of this entry »
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