slots

I made a slot machine in actionscript for school, but it wasn't very good. This is a stripped down version. The fruits are rendered with actionscript's drawing commands; I drew them in Photoshop first with the curve tools, then transferred to code by counting grid spaces. It was tedious but I like the results.

tic tac toe

A not very smart tic tac toe game.

play with my heart

I made a little flash toy for school that makes use of bezier curves:



use the mouse to play with my heart

news

Apologies for the lack of posting lately to those who are still visiting. I've started a new project! It is a minimalistic platformer in XNA. Here are some mockups:



It is very Knytt Stories-inspired. I'm aiming for online co-op for two players with somewhat experimental gameplay (more details on that once it is better defined).

The physics based platformer game project is now on hold. It was a difficult project to work on and I want to do something that has a better chance of being completed. I still want to make that game, so I will likely pick it up again later.

Posting will probably be light until the end of the semester. These are my goals for the next few months:

• work out the design of the XNA platformer and get some serious coding done
  
• post some the school work that I did last semester
  
• update the flash game I made for school last semester and make it public
  
• finally make an update to Polyworks

a walk at night

This is an excellent third-party level for Knytt Stories. It is short but the atmosphere is fantastic.



You can download it here. Direct download link here.

back from the dead

I've finished another semester of school. I will be posting some of my work soon, but for now here is an animation I discovered in my old files:



It was made in QBasic using arrays of colour values for the frames. It's my earliest character animation (unless you count ascii graphics). The file is dated February 2002.

flash platformer physics

I've been experimenting with platformer physics using the Flash version of Box2D in order to familiarize myself with ActionScript. I gave the character the ability to hang on edges and climb ropes by using joints in ways they were never meant to be used.

click to activate and use the arrow keys to control the character

yet more physics animation

Here is a better example of a physics-based walk:



It's still a bit crude but it's approaching something that could be used in the game. The animation system controls the rotation of the box that the feet are attached to, the feet being IK handles that control the animation of the legs. The walking animations are played when the appropriate keys are pressed.

In other news, I'm starting to see the true enormity of this project, and scaling my plans down accordingly by stripping them of unnecessary features. Fortunately, I hadn't posted about those features so there is nobody to disappoint except myself. I think this may strengthen the game though, by removing distractions that could obscure its core.

jumper 3

I don't normally have the patience for these types of games, but Jumper 3 was fun enough to keep me playing until the end. In it you control Ogmo through over 50 stages, switching between five separate forms with different abilities. For an additional challenge you can try to collect the coins and medals. I really liked the simple graphics and the music, as well as the general atmosphere created by the story and setting.

I personally would have enjoyed this game more if the controls were a little easier. The way Ogmo accelerates when moving horizontally makes it hard to predict his movement, and each of Ogmo's forms have different physics properties which make it even more difficult to learn. But overall it's a very polished experience.

more physics animation

I decided to try integrating physics right into the character editor. I'm not completely sure yet if it's going to work the way I expect it to, but the plan is to have both the skeletal animation and the physical movement of the character controlled through the animation system.

For example, consider a character that is made up of joints and quads and attached to a box which is connected by a revolute joint to a circle (as in the screenshots). The walking animation would animate the joints to make it look like the character is walking and it would also animate the motor of the revolute joint to rotate the circle so that the character moves along the ground.





I'm still working out the complexities but I think this system has a lot of potential for awesomeness. It is basically a way of doing data-driven character movement, which gives character creators a lot of freedom without having to write any code.