blog.dfyb

I’ve completed my dish. The front of the dish has a layer of a translucent yellow under a layer of a translucent gray — the yellow bled through for a neat effect.

The underside is a bluish green to give a bit of contrast from the top and the stand. I may take better pictures and replace these cellphone pics later after I get the dish back.

The current project for metalsmithing is a dish — we are required to make a dish and a stand for the dish; we also need to utilize enameling, which is basically coating metal with colored glass (by melting powdered glass). Most people are making circular bowls — I chose a different shape.

For the stand, I wanted to mimic some sort of sleek wooden table.
Continue reading ‘Metalsmithing - Starting On Dish’

Despite my LittleBigPlanet level being very much a proof of concept, it has found itself a spot on 1UP’s 10 Favorite User-Generated Little Big Planet Levels (So Far).

LittleBig Train Heist has over 12,000 plays so far. I’m looking forward to finding the time to make some refinements and upgrades to the level

My eventual goal is to create an ambient wall piece that I’d have around my apartment as a sort of interactive decoration. I was thinking I’d have it change according to music or vibrations. Well I have some preliminary work done — I have the arduino communicating with a tri-color LED bar, which is powered through an external AC adapter. Currently they change colors by having each individual color (RGB) fade in and out with pulse width modulation. I gotta give thanks to Jesse for an example layout using a zener diode (to protect the arduino) and a darlington transistor array. Next steps will involve buying a microphone and vibration sensor to start toying around with different potential interfaces.

LittleBigPlanet has finally arrived! I beat the story levels in a single sitting with a friend in co-op, and I must say, it really surpassed my expectations. The story levels in LBP feature some of the best platforming this generation.

I have finished the first version of my first level — I call it LittleBig Train Heist:

You start off chasing the train in the car. Once you reach the train, you’ll jump from the car to the train’s caboose (and my level will even snap a screenshot of this as you do it). Once in the train, you make your way up to the engine while you avoid obstacles. There’s a switch at the front of the engine: if you fail to pull the switch down in time, you’ll face certain death; but if you do manage to grab the switch in time, it’ll send the train on an alternate track to lots of prize points and the finish.

I’ll be publishing it online as soon as the servers are up. My PSN handle is dfyb, so you can add me as a friend and easily find it.

Anki is a piece of software I’ve run across recently. Basically, it’s a nice flash card program.

Here’s a shot of the back of a card.

Here’s a shot showing the cards in my chapter 8 deck. Since I’m primarily using Anki for learning Japanese, I’m using the included Japanese template — I type the kanji in the ‘expression’ box, it will automatically fill in the kana reading in the correct box, and then I would type the meaning (in english). For other templates, you’d likely just have a front and back (’expression’ and ‘meaning’).

What makes Anki special is its ability to schedule when you’ll see the cards again. If you didn’t know the answer to a card, you’d click the corresponding button and it will put the card at the back of the virtual stack. If you knew the answer well, it will show you the card again in a couple days — as you continue to produce the answers easily, it increases the time before showing the card again. So in essence, the better you know the information, the less you see the card — inversely, if you don’t know the information well, it will test you often.

While Anki’s strengths excell in learning things over a long period of time, such as a language, the software is very flexible and I anticipate using it to study for a variety of subjects — if you’ve got an upcoming test, you can utilize Anki’s ‘cram’ mode. You can record audio as part of a card, you can include images in your cards, and each card is doubled — one is production, where it provides the info and you produce the item — the other is recognition, where you see the item and you recall the information. If you have a smart phone, you can even access your list online — it even synchronizes your progress. If you ever need to memorize something, I think Anki is the perfect tool. You can watch videos that further explain the software on their website.

http://ichi2.net/anki/

I got a week-long ban from neoGAF because I said that Super StreetFighter HD Remix should have been canceled. Turns out that one of the mods thought that was “trolling.”

My comment was a legitimate opinion — I actually do think they should have canceled the game. HD Remix is yet another remake of SF2 and it was intended to come out in 2007. Here we are, nearing the end of 2008, and the game is still not out yet. This wouldn’t be a huge deal, except it’s a budget-priced downloadable game and this extra year of development time is surely costing Capcom more money than originally anticipated. Not only that, but the sprites have literally been downgraded from what was originally shown (someone else was banned for simply stating this fact). At this point, the game’s art is comparable to poorly drawn saturday morning cartoons.

This was an example of the sort of quality we were promised by Capcom. They claimed this was an in-game sprite. But this is what T-Hawk in HD Remix ended up looking like –

Notice the reduced quality in shading and the outright omission of detail in things like his belt buckle. This is a flat out different sprite. All of the sprites they had been touting as in-game and real were replaced with these lower quality sprites.
Continue reading ‘neoGAF mods are silly and SFII HD Remix looks awful’

Started on some of the armor and accessories today. I still have the mouth piece horizontal because I’m not done adding details. The shoulder piece will be attached to the arm after I’ve completed the model’s main body. I still have some work to do on the head and the rest of the body is still very rough.

I’m currently working the head — trying to find nice muscle lines for the face. It still requires more work, and I’ve obviously not added the details yet.

You can better see the sort of mask I’m building toward in this close up picture of my sketch.

Update: a bit more progress, and an image showing how the model looks with smooth shading (versus flat shading) and an example texture projected onto the side.

This will be one of the characters from our 2D sidescroller project. It was originally a concept for the Half-Life 2 mod I was planning to do, but I like the design enough that I think I can find a place for it in this 2D game project. It will likely be an advanced enemy character (boss or miniboss).

My first project in metalsmithing was to create earings out of wire — I chose silver. We had several restrictions — they could be no less than 5 pieces and no more than 7, the longest piece had to be 2 inches long, the design could not be semetrical, and we could not bend the wire.
…To check out more pictures and read a bit on how I came up with this design, click here!

Right now the sides are 2 inches tall, but I’m going to be changing that to a height of 1 inch — I’ll either cut what I have now or just redo the sides from scratch. The thinner profile will give a more substantial look to the box. The lid will rest on small tabs that I’ll be adding to the inside of the walls. and hopefully be flush with the top of the walls.

My current assignment in metalsmithing is to make a box. We have some restrictions and some flexibility. My box won’t be very functional as a box that holds things, although I think it may work out to hold candles — regardless, I’m primarily concerned with the asthetic over anything else. We are required to have a single piece wrap around to make the walls of the box. We also need to utilize at least three surface detailing techniques. My current plan is to sandblast a design around the sides — I haven’t decided what to do for the other two techniques.

Here you see the wall piece with the lid template put on top. I’m in the middle of cutting that lid piece but don’t have a picture right now. I’ll update the blog with more progress and cell-phone pictures.

Using Construct, I’ve made a few different small tech demos just to prototype different potential gameplay elements. This one was created to prototype homing missles that could explode in clusters through a chain reaction. It was expanded to prototype different options on the fly and some very basic distortion. Most of the graphics are photos of classmates that were posted on the class forum — a more entertaining option than simple game graphics and it got a few laughs during the presentation.

You can download it here.

hold space to fire missles
press z to set it to explosion particles
press x to set it to distortion
press c to enable max’s defense system

In my game class, a 3D chess set is the first thing you learn how to do. I was already familiar with maya, so I took the opportunity to experiment with bumpmapping and more advanced lighting. Back in high-school, I had worked with very basic bumpmapping, but this chess set features more substantial material imitations. There’s some texture projection issues, but considering how little time I spent on it, I’m pretty satisfied overall.

I’ll be moving Raket (the 2D sidescroller game) to Construct. It will likely take a while to port all the work done so far, but I think it will be very worth it. Construct is open source and free of charge.

Construct has quite a few advantages over my current engine as well. It’s hardware accelerated, so I’ll be able to have more going on on-screen. It also supports shaders, so I’ll have easy access to lots of nice visual effects. Construct can handle some primitive 3D objects that I can incorporate into my 2D game. I’m excited to start working with Construct for Raket and will keep the blog updated.

I won’t be giving daily updates, but I want to give frequent updates. I’ve replaced the colored squares with simple robot characters. I’ve added the ability to shoot the projectile and the projectile will bounce off walls a set number of times. You’ll notice that some projectiles are glowing while others aren’t — the glow notifies you that it is on its last bounce and will blow up the next time it hits something. The blurry brown thing is a bat in mid-swing. Players can use that to hit a projectile in the direction they are facing — hitting with a bat also increases the speed of the projectile.

One other thing I’m doing while making this game is familiarizing myself with more advanced techniques. Player movement is handled in a more complex, but precise manner. I’m also using an external text file to store options — this not only makes it possible for people to adjust how the game plays themselves, but it allows me to tweak things on the fly for easier testing.

Project 1 guidelines are as follows:

1. Animation Project –

Create a screen based animation piece using Macromedia Flash (with Photoshop, Illustrator, and/or Final Cut Pro). You may also use Max/MSP, Pure Data, or Processing.

As the first project doesn’t need to have a special interface, I’ve decided to do a game — a quick game project in about 4 weeks. Due to the extremely short timeframe, the game will need to be simple. My priority will be getting the game mechanics right — art will likely be detailed enough to be functional, and not much more. As a kid, I loved playing the barebones Mario Bros. game.

The player movement was that of a platformer, but it was a versus multiplayer game. This sub-genre is older than Super Mario Bros., yet it has still been relatively uncommon after the original Mario Bros.. I’ve always wanted to make a multiplayer game like this, so that’s what i’m doing here. My aim is to create something relatively simple, but fun enough to keep people wanting to play it. Mario Bros. accomplished this in part by adding enemies and letting the players jump on eachother, as well as jump from below to throw the other player into the air and into the enemies. I won’t be making a Mario Bros. clone — my approach will be giving players a simple, yet somewhat dynamic projectile and the ability to counter that projectile; it’s a simple idea, but I think I can turn it into a fun little game that is a bit different than other games people have played.

I’ve just started it today, and so far I have two players that can both move and jump.

It looks very basic right now — the players are the bright colored squares (which I didn’t realize were colored like Mario/Luigi until someone pointed it out :P). It’s obviously not nice to look at right now, but it’s a start, and I figured I might as well share it so you can see how a simple game can progress from start to finish.

Well I took somewhat of a break. I tend to do that sometimes — after it gets to a certain point of completion (in this case, a working controller, despite all the wires and PCB just hanging loose), I tend to stop working on a project for a while if there’s no deadline.

For most of the wiring and soldering, I finished months ago and I either didn’t take pics or I lost them.. but I finally got around to mounting the PCB and getting it all enclosed. My wiring job was a quick one — barely planned out, as at that time I was just testing to see if everything worked. Except for the main ground line, I ended up just sticking with the quick and dirty wiring job instead of redoing it, so it’s pretty ugly inside.
…To check out more pictures, click here!