Senior Design, GSP-490

Last week I finished my senior design class in my Game and Simulation Programming (GSP) degree, class GSP-490. I was worried because I was very busy with Deadly Chambers I had made the bad decision of doing a senior project alone instead of in a group/team as advised. This meant everything was on me. Documentation, design, programming. At the decision point I was too consumed otherwise to commit to anything but what I thought I could handle myself.

The good news is it went well. Grades are in and I got a 90.04%, just eeking out the A. This was a wonderful surprise since I had accepted the fact I was probably going to get a B. Luckily everything with my game fell into place at the last minute and I completed the game (for the most part).

PING! is an action game where you control a ball. You decide which direction the ball should turn when it hits something. Concept was by Bill Nagel and me. It was programmed in XNA Game studio 3.1 (C# FYI). I did all the art assets, programming, source control (using SVN), etc. myself.

Here are some screen shots of my game.

Start Menu

Dynamic Camera Fly at Level Start



Countdown to Start



Game Play Example



Win Condition, PING!



Menu Integration

Laser Shotgun

This is my newest creation. If all goes well, it will be added to Deadly Chambers. It is a shotgun that shoots lasers!



It was made using Blender and Photoshop. I rendered an AO layer and saved it, then a light layer, the blue glow, by rendering only the light on a dark material to the same UV map. I combined them in photoshop with some metal textures, photos, hand painting and some layer effects. I really like how it turned out.

Portfolio

Technically, this post is because I have a deliverable for my Senior Project GSP-490 class, and the website they ask us to use can't upload images. I'm not really satisfied with my design, but I've got lots more other stuff to do (bad grammar intended).

It's Live: Deadly Chambers

We finally released the game!!! It's called Deadly Chambers Beta. It's available on Android GL ES 2.0 compatible phones, like the Droid, N1, Incredible, Devour, and a few others.

It's "beta" because Rob is going to Google I/O this week and he wanted it in the market before he goes. Makes total marketing sense.

I have to say its really fun.

Tower In Action

I'm finishing the tower level tonight. It's mostly the little things that take the time. I had to make a quad for every torch, some for portal detection, etc. Here is a shot of the tower level being played. This is the stairs.


Here you are in first person mode standing on the roof.


That is a Verizon Droid phone if you're wondering.

Tower Power, Shared Texture Space

This is the lightmap layer of the tower level for the game I'm working on with Rob of Battery Powered Games. This is the final level, the Tower, where the big show down with a magical wizard takes place. The game should be out in a month (estimated release second week of May, 2010). It's called [NAME TBD].


I've been using blender solidly for about half a year now and I have developed a number of tricks. My favorite trick thus far is baking textures with shared texture space. Essentially I design a symmetric scene, set up the lights and UV only part the model. I then use this part of the model to create the rest of the scene, but I push their UV's out of the main UV space. This is a trick, since Blender won't bake the textures for these faces (when they would normally cause problems), and they are technically in the same place if texture mode set to repeat.

Here you can see the UV texture space. The faces pushed to the top are part of the stairs design, while the parts pushed to the right are levels.


In this image you'll see that the stairs have essentially the same texture mapping from one level to the next. What is really nice is that since they are the same, they share the same UV texture space, I reap the benefits of the resolution only doing it once. It might seem really weird but its backfaces only. This means you see through geometry from one side, but not the other. So you can see the stairs through the walls so to speak. It's so natural to me, but I expect some won't know what they are looking at.


Here you can see I've highlighted the portions of the texture in the main UV space. Pretty good use of the space I think.

Fun in 3D, Tron Style

Rock Giant

Rock Giant Tron Style

This is my latest model for NAME TBD. Obviously not going to use the Tron style version, but it gave the developer a laugh.

Low Polygon Characters

Here are a few shots of the characters I've been working on lately. They are a combo level boss. The knight is the first half. Once you beat him, he takes on his spider form.

He should be appearing as the level two boss in the upcoming Android game.