reel of unfinished works

udk: edge detection shader

A few months ago I made a post process effect for UDK that uses the scene depth to detect edges. It might be overly complex but the results are pretty good.

It needs to be tweaked for any level it's applied to in order to adjust for scale, fog, and desired level of detail. This version was adapted to VCTF-Sandstorm, one of the maps that comes with UDK.





I used the shader provided in this post as the basis for mine, and this post helped as well. This is another example I found more recently.


Click for full image

It's also possible to use the alpha component of the scene texture node instead of the scene depth node (the scaling values must be changed too).

hand eye social

I'm in the back there somewhere
On Thursday I was in Toronto to see Capybara and Superbrothers present their games Heartbeat and Sword and Sworcery. It was the first Hand Eye social of 2010. I didn't get to see much of the presentation because the place was packed and I could hardly see over the crowd, but it was still pretty exciting. Both games look (and sound) very cool. I'm interested in getting more involved in Toronto's indie game scene, so I was very happy to be there and I look forward to the next one.

Read this for more info about the event.

udk

This semester I am working on a major project using UDK. I'll be documenting some of my work here. The project is a complete playable level which will hopefully be available for download once it's done. I'm part of a team of two and my primary role is to do the scripting that's required to customize the engine.

Some of the features I'll be talking about:

• custom vehicle
• custom weapons
• custom character
• animated materials

pulse+

This is a little game I made for school in second year. The menus were made in Flash but the rest is pure ActionScript. It could probably use a timer and the audio should be replaced, since it is not original.

new year, new template

I'm going to attempt to revive this blog over the next few months by posting more of my work, documenting the two major projects I'm working on at school, and maybe writing some tutorials. I expect to be pretty busy though, so whether or not I'll have time for all that remains to be seen. 2009 was mostly crap with a few highlights; hopefully this one will be better for me. 2010 is cooler to say at least.

The new template is a modified version of this. The colours and the header image may be subject to change.

mughal tomb

Another assignment from my second year at college - a perspective drawing of a Mughal tomb.

jetpack basketball v1.01

messhof has released an updated version of Jetpack Basketball, originally made for Bivouac Urbain in August. It now features the option to play against the computer. Not as intense as playing against a human opponent, but still pretty good. The only thing the game lacks now is the ability to steal the ball, which sounds like it's coming in the next update (edit: and it's here).

life drawing

I had the opportunity to do some life drawing as part of my drawing classes in first and second year. This is probably my best one. I can't remember how much time I had, but it was probably about 30 minutes.

character turnaround

This is a turnaround of a princess type character that I drew last year. She's based on Kumatora from Mother 3.

star guard

This game is a super concentrated kind of awesome.

bivouac urbain

game jamming inside the main tent. taken with my DSi

A few weeks ago I was in Quebec City for Bivouac Urbain, a game jam/game prototyping competition. I'm not too proud of my entry but the event was extremely awesome and resulted in some interesting games. My favourite entry of the ones I played was messhof's Jetpack Basketball, which I highly recommend if you have someone to play against. Also worth checking out is Stimergy, by Renaud Bédard (Polytron) and Heather Kelley (Kokoromi), a game about guiding ants using pheromone trails. Click the link for Renaud's post about it which includes a postmortem and a time-lapse video of the development of the game.

My simple and not very original entry was Spirit. The theme of the competition was "antithesis" which was pretty vague and prompted me to do some research. I found that a particular line from a poem by John Dryden came up repeatedly as an example of antithesis as a rhetorical device, so I based my game on it. I coded it within close to 24 hours, since I didn't get any work done the first night. It probably would have gone better for me if I'd been more prepared, with a framework in place and maybe some idea of what kind of game I wanted to make. Overall it was a good experience and I'm looking forward to my next game jam.

second year 3D work

I'm finally posting some school work!

I call this one a futuristic Mayan warrior. I started texturing it the day before it was due. Still turned out alright.





Low-spec lizard. At over 600 tris it's a little more high poly than I was aiming for. It was supposed to be a ZBrush assignment but I don't like ZBrush (pretty sure I failed the assignment).





A Mughal themed level in UE3. I didn't model the arches, but the texturing and everything else is my work. I wanted to avoid some of the trouble of importing models from Maya so it's mostly BSPs. That turned out to have its own issues though. I think my next level will be made primarily in Maya.

pikachu

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.