Gravitass - Archive Playthrough

Here's my archive gameplay footage of Gravitass (Macintosh, shareware, 2002)>

Gravitass is a Mac only search and rescue game I made in 2002. It has an unusual time-travel mechanic based on ghost data. 

The video shows a 100%(ish) playthrough of the whole game.

Monsteca Corral - Archive Playthrough

I've been making video playthroughs as a way of archiving my old games. This one is Monsteca Corral - Nintendo Wii, 2010.

This video should be linked to a playlist of seven videos, showing every level in the game.

Eyeball Manager Talk

I presented a short talk on writing an eyeball manager in Unity3d to the Brighton Unity Usergroup -  http://www.meetup.com/Brighton-Game-Collective/

I thought I’d try putting the slides up here. The text probably isn’t coherent enough, but the main point of the talk was to look at how much character you can add to a game object just by making their eyes move as if they are conscious of their surroundings.

Space Ribbon reveal

I've been messing around with an idea for a procedurally generated racing game: One player (can be AI) flies a spaceship which vomits racetrack out of its rear end as it zooms through space. The other players drive along this road and try and catch up!

The prototype is producing some really fun, vertigogenous courses. It will probably work best as quick-fire races 1-2 minutes long with scoring done over several races.

Anyway, here's a video of 4 AI drivers chasing me down:

Not sure when something playable will be available - it has some rough edges, no scoring, no sound and I need to attend to the graphical styling before unleash it, too.

Watch this space, but don't hold your breath! :-P

Caravan Defender

It's been a long time since my last successful game jam - that was the dotBrighton Game Jam in september 2012.

In the meantime I have tried to do Ludum Dare a few times, working at home, on my own, but I never get close to a finished product in the time allowed.

So it was great to sign up for Kiwijam 2014 - they set up a maker space in Auckland University and did a great job of organising stray individuals like me into teams ready to attempt the impossible - make a game in 48 hours!

Kiwijam maker space - humming with energy on Sunday afternoon, as the clock ticks down - will we get our games done?

My team decided to use Unity3d - such a good tool for rapid prototyping - and eventually we went with the idea of doing an RTS game about creating and defending caravan trade routes, and although we didn't have time for graphical niceties, or game structure, we did get the game engine functional within the time limit.

Screenshot from the version of Caravan Defenders presented at the end of Kiwijam.

I've published the game on itch.io for anyone who would like to mess around with the system. There is no way to win, unfortunately.

Click here to play!

 Enjoy!

Markov Text Generator

I wrote this simple Markov text generator last week - mostly as an exercise in getting to know the Dart programming language and tools.

The generator works by being presented with a body of text, and it goes through the text, recording statistically what letters tend to follow on from the various sequences of letters. Then it uses this data to generate more text using the same statistical probabilities for each letter sequence. See this wikipedia link for more details.

For such an inanely simple algorithm, it is capable of coming up with beguilingly complex results:

Seeded with a 234k chunk of The Lord of the Rings.

I'm scheming on how I might use it in computer games... NPC background chatter might be one use, or libraries full of books - you could insert useful text on a particular page, and have the players get a clue about what to look up in the book to get useful results, rather than just inane babble!

But text is only a sideline - Markov Chains might also be useful in ai routines, random level generators - anywhere where you want to approximate a complex system without modelling all the underlying processes.

Spirals

I wrote a while back about how elegant spirals can be in computer games - in particular, they are useful if you want to iteratively cover a space with evenly distributed points, with the range expanding out from a single starting location and with one growing tip - I have used them in the past for searching for a suitable placement point in a landscape for a game object, but I'm sure there are many other applications.

Anyway, I didn't include any code in that post, so here below is a Spiral function that is ready to use. This is written in C# for Unity, but should be easy enough to convert to whatever you happen to be using.

Vector3 Spiral( float dist, float spacing ) {
float rad = Mathf.Sqrt(  dist / (Mathf.PI*spacing ));
float angle = Mathf.PI * 2.0f * rad;
 
Vector3 retVal = Vector3.zero;
retVal.x = spacing * rad * Mathf.Sin( angle );
retVal.z = spacing * rad * Mathf.Cos( angle );
return retVal;
}



'dist' is the distance along the line of the spiral from the origin, and 'spacing' is how far apart you want the coils of the spiral to be from each other (this spiral has the handy attribute of maintaining a constant radial distance between each concentric coil.)

To achieve an even distribution of points, increment the distance param by the value of spacing - that way points will be equally distant form their neighbours on the line as they are from the neighbouring coils.

Here is a screen shot of the points generated by calling Spiral( dist, 1.0f ) with dist = [0,1,2,3...] As you can see, the unit spheres are packed pretty close to 1 unit apart:

Changing the spacing to 2.0f and iterating Spiral( dist, 2.0f) with  dist = [0,2,4,6,8...] will lead to each of the unit spheres having 1 unit's space between them:

...Spirals!

Bog Beacon Redux

Monday Mushroom #54

Mitrula paludosa - Bog Beacon

I was so excited about finding a patch of bog beacons, that I blogged about them before I'd gotten any decent photos, so here are some better pics to go with this old post.

Mitrula paludosa - Bog Beacon

Bog beacons didn't make it into Skyrim - the follow up to Oblivion, but it does have several very fine fungi of its own including Fly Amanita and Collared Earth Star.

Mitrula paludosa - Bog Beacon

Bog Beacon

Monday Mushroom #15

Bog Beacon - Mitrula paludosa

Bog Beacon - Mitrula paludosa

I was really excited to find Bog Beacon growing in a ditch on the way to Benmore and Kilmun Paths Group meeting at Uig Hall tonight. I had never seen this species of fungus before, but recognised it instantly from having picked it many times while playing a computer game called Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. 

One of the really nice features of this game is detailed and fairly accurate models of many species of plant typical of temperate, northern hemisphere - many of the species are named and placed in appropriate habitats, so you can actually carry identifiaction skills gained in the game through to real life! 

Here is the Oblivion wiki page for Bog Beacon: http://oblivion.wikia.com/wiki/Bog_Beacon

I will need to return to the ditch in better lighting conditions to get some better photos.

Chainsaw

I have written a small chainsaw simulation toy for iPhone and iPad!

It's available for free with adverts and 4 textures to cut up, or for 59p with no adverts and a broader selection of materials.

http://itunes.apple.com/app/a-chainsaw-lite/id414880605

A more generic power tools simulator is in the works.

Monsteca Corral

The Game Gods blog posts were all a by-product of an extended - and particularly fruitful - game development crunch period I went through last year.

The main product of all that crunching was, in fact, not a blog, but a Wiiware game - Monsteca Corral. After all the crunching, the game is now complete and ready to be unleashed upon the world!




If you are a Wii owning, Wii Shop Channel browsing kind of a gamer, you should definitely boot up your Wii and buy it right now!

One thing that you can't appreciate from the Youtube video, and I haven't yet seen mentioned in any of the reviews, is the fact that this game runs at a smooth 60fps. This does make a big difference to the play experience, but also to the level of detail we could put into the graphics, which are pretty plain compared to most modern Wii games.

I think it was the right choice for this game. With contemporary dev tools, and large development teams, it is VERY difficult to write a game that runs at full frame rate on a console. You are constantly having to cut back on visual flourishes, and withstand comparisons with other games that are using two or three times as much processing power per frame as your game can.

So, please enjoy the smoothness! and roll on Monsteca II ^_^

R. I. P

The Game Gods series has come to a tragic end after the second of two mysterious .3mm propelling pencil deaths in the space of a month.




Perhaps its time to try some more robust - or less expensive - drawing tools...

Errors in Scale

It is easy to confound the fruit with the tree - then a fruit bowl becomes a tree bowl.

It is easy to mistake a mole cricket for a giant, killer bug-beast from mars then your wildlife documentary becomes a schlocky b-movie.

It is easy to pretend your bath-water is the ocean, then you might be swept away to who knows where?

Perhaps size isn't everything, but it should be regarded as a vital consideration never the less.

The Mythical Work From Home

I miss my old office. True, the roof was a bit leaky, but the furniture was comfy and the air conditioning was simply sublime.

Spirals

It is amazing how little use is made of spirals in computer games, they are really useful shapes - they can iteratively cover a 2d surface from a starting point in all directions quite evenly while still only having one growing tip, and they have an intrinsic beauty that is all their own.

Outlook

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Pots & Pachyderms

What is it that games designers have against pots? Why must they be destroyed? Such violence has already pushed the pygmy pot hippopotamus over the edge of extinction, and the teeny tinpot elephant (illustrated) is only holding on in the backdrops of a few of the older, pre-rendered point-and-clickers with their detailed but totally un-interactive scenery.



Perhaps the games designers are in cahoots with the archaeologists; who, as a profession, are well known for never deigning to deal with a pot that has not first been reduced to tiny, cryptic fragments.

Or perhaps all it takes is one very influential games designer (who should know better) to set a bad example, and all the others follow along, like unthinking little sheeple...

No matter! Pots, and the rich biota they support, deserve better treatment from modern game developers.

Wallow

Some of the time, wallowing around doing nothing in particular, can be the most productive thing you can do. Learn from it; grow. Become all that you can be - through inaction - as opposed to striving to become all you want to be - through action.

And don't worry, the world will still be here when you return from this hiatus.

Nasal Naval Combat Games Designer

A clear exposition of how a games designer - when inverted - can be employed in almost any fictional naval engagement as a battering ram - holing your adversaries beneath the water line and rapidly spreading terror through the ranks of any opposing fleet.

Although most games designers will do, this tactic will be most effective when the pointy-nosed variety are employed.

Screwed

This happens to all of us at some time or other. The important thing is not to be bitter about it.