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Here’s a quick mockup for the level I’m working on now. It is similar to the Bernal Sphere space colony design from the 70s, but only one of the poles is exposed. The other pole serves as the base of a spire that functions as the colony’s space port that extends through the center — this port will be crowded with all kinds of ships not unlike a crowded sea port today. These ships, cargo containers, and businesses located around the port will make up the level players actually interact with.

The shell of the colony will serve as an interesting backdrop for the players. The colony’s megapolis living surface spends most of the time in darkness, so the night life in this fictional colony thrives. As one gets closer to the poles of the colony, the gravity would be weaker — there will be sports arenas and water to take advantage of this lesser gravity. To clarify though — the shell is merely a backdrop and players won’t interact with these things mentioned in this paragraph (the players will be on the other side of the artificial ozone with all the ships using the port). I just want to make sure that, even if it’s not 100% realistic, things make sense.

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I’ve redone the code for the machine gun. Originally, I had used simple raycasts to detect whether or not a player shot another player. While simple, this method produces unrealistic results — implied projectiles hit their target instantaneously from any distance. I’ll probably still use raycasting for the long range sniper rifle, but for the machine gun I wanted something more visceral and realistic.

Now, bullet objects fly through 3D space — which means you can actually see the bullets and it’ll be harder to hit players at longer distances. When I make better art and effects for the bullets, I think it’ll look really neat.

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I’ve started making the team bases that will house respawn points and the team flag for capture the flag. It has proven challenging designing interior spaces for a zero gravity environment, so I’ve set that aside for a bit to work on other things. For the time being, I’ll have to leave them looking like Super Mario pipes haha.

You can also see something I’ve added to make it easier to spot players and differentiate between teamates and opponents (green vs red) — diffraction spikes (those colored lense-flare crosses). These also play into the stealth mode players can utilize.

Here’s an image showing how going into ’stealth’ mode will make you much harder to see (look where the red diffraction spike was). I want sneaky/stealthy gameplay to be a viable way for people to play if they choose so — there’ll be advantages and disadvantages to using this toggled mode.

I’ve also been working on more network code and have started adding sound effects to my game (yeah, the game takes place in space, but I’m going to have sound anyway and come up with some fictional sci fi tech to justify it). Going into stealth mode makes the audio a little more realistic, but not entirely silent — just heavily muffled. I may have a weapon that temporarily disables audio completely, but it’ll definitely be very temporary — a silent game is just boring, but I think using space’s silence as a gameplay mechanic could be fun.

Space Junk is a zero gravity multiplayer FPS I’m making myself in Unity3D — the game I mentioned in this post. I started about a week ago and already have it in pre-alpha — I’ve done the programming for a couple basic weapons and networking so players can already connect and play against each other. Of course all the art is placeholder art for now.

The only other zero gravity FPS I’m aware of is Shattered Horizon, but apart from zero g and nice visuals, that game is pretty basic (the only weapon is a standard assault rifle) — I’m looking forward to really exploring the gameplay possibilities zero g brings to the table.

The individual castle pieces can now break into rubble as a result of a big enough impact. In addition to that, castle pieces are essentially glued together more like a real structure would be — these joints can break under enough pressure as well. So what happens is that large structures can remain intact as they fall or tip over, but they’ll break up with the force of hitting the ground. You can compare this video with the last one I posted to see the difference it makes.

We’ve now begun swapping out the placeholder art so that the castle can start looking more like a castle, rather than a collection of building blocks. Pieces won’t simply crumble into cubes, either — each piece will have more realistic looking fragments.

I’ve just recently started on a solo game project as an outlet for creative game designs that don’t necessarily fit with the type of games I’m making with the ‘Pillage!’ group. I like working on casual games like ‘Pillage!’ but most of the game designs I come up with lend more to the hardcore gaming crowd — this won’t replace any other project. Too early to give many details, but I hope to make this game multiplayer and I’m pretty excited about it.

Raising the bar of my Unity3D GUI programming, I’ve created an interface similar to that of golfing video games for when the player will shoot the ballista in our Pillage game.

1. Use the slider to decide your desired firing angle
2. Click the button to start the bar moving
3. Click the button again to decide the power of your shot
4. Click the button again to decide your accuracy (closer you get to the bar, the closer your firing angle will be to your desired angle)

Each of our three weapons (catapult, trebuchet, ballista) in Pillage will have their own simple mini-game for firing, and they’ll also have their own advantages for taking down the castle.

Visually, the game is still VERY primitive and incomplete — we’re putting our focus the core gameplay so we can have more time for gameplay refinement while we create and polish our art and animation.

My Digital Wind Chime will be at the Dallas Museum of Art for two more weeks — the New Media exhibition uninstalls on January 19th.

So we had started a catapult game a while ago, but paused development to do Poot! — with some fresh ideas and more experience using Unity3D, we’ve resumed development of our catapult game we’re calling Pillage!

I’ve been at my parents home for the holidays, and because my laptop doesn’t have 3D software on it yet, I’ve mainly been doing programming. I’ve never taken a programming class but I’m finding it pretty fun to teach myself. So far I’ve programmed the camera work and calculating/displaying your score — currently working on getting the ballista’s arrow to fly like an arrow should fly.

One important feature for our game is the level editor that Jesse has done — it will let anybody easily create their own castles and challenge friends to destroy them. Right now the level editor is in flash and it’ll spit out some xml code you can save and load up in the game. You can watch the results of our very first test bellow:

Things obviously need to be refined and tweaked, but this is a great start

Second print I did for class was 3 colors + black reductive. The typical method would be to cut some away, print a color, cut more away, print another color, and continue like that. The disadvantage there is that once you cut for an additional color, you can never print previous colors — so in the end you’re limited to however many prints you started with the first color and, if you mess up, you can’t go back and print more of the previous layers. A friend suggested I use a CNC machine in the sculpture lab. Luckily I had a sculpture card this semester and they obliged.

I converted the image I created in photoshop into Illustrator files (one for each color print) — the machine takes the Illustrator file and cuts it to spec.

I had a bit of trouble registering the prints because I was in a hurry, but I think it turned out alright (click here or scroll back up).

Third print is wood black and white and I cut it manually, although with the aid of a dremel.

I just had fun with this one. It’s a giant octopus on Saturn flying a kite singing “Haters gonna hate!”

I’ve always wanted to build my own furniture — I’ve always wanted to build a piece of furniture to my exact needs. My sculpture professor has given us total freedom for our final project, so I’ve taken this opportunity to make a coffee table. It will be 2ft by 3ft and about 1.5ft tall — main material will be half inch birch plywood. Though a bit hard to see in these images, the design has some sublte movement to break up the box silhouette — each panel progressively gets smaller and is rotated as you move down.

Areas of the panels are cut out to act as book shelves, and of course each panel can also serve as a thin shelf for things like magazines or a remote control.

My professor wanted me to again incorporate my new media background into the project. I’ve also always been very interested in interactive furniture, such as the daft punk table. I’d like to put RGB LEDs on the inside of the legs between each panel. If I use an arduino, I can have the colors gradually change and make it appear as if the colors are climbing or descending the table.

Down the road, I’d also like to add interaction with music — I could have each leg represent a bar in a music visualizer, where the louder the sound in a specific frequency range is, the higher the light will climb the table on that leg.

Here’s another view and without the LEDs.

As mentioned before, I’ve been working on a silly web game — we’ve now submitted it to a contest and could use your help for votes!

http://musegames.com/community/immunitychallenge/

Hold down left mouse button to build up gas, release to let yourself fly. Spacebar restarts level.

It would be a HUGE help if you could register and vote for Poot! If we get enough votes, we’ll be one of the five finalists.

Our game just got put up tonight and other games have been submitted for weeks, so we need a lot of votes to catch up. Registration is simple/fast and it would be GREAT if you could help by voting for Poot!

We’ve only been working on it for a few weeks and it’s definitely not finished (working prototypes are all that is required for the contest). It would definitely be nice to win the contest though.