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 ). 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!

What you’re looking at is a zoomed-in image from the game I’ve been working on solo during the summer. I first mentioned it here — and while not much has changed visually (all the art is still placeholder art that will be entirely replaced later), there’s been a ton of progress behind the scenes. Right now I’m still working on getting the foundation of the game done — things like letting the player change weapons, general movement, and systems that will make it easier to add more content as development continues. I didn’t want to talk too much about a game that hadn’t yet existed and repeat a scenario like with the Half-Life 2 mod I had to eventually cancel, but I’m far enough with this game where I think I can talk about some of the planned features and the direction the game is going in general.
…To read the rest of the post and find out more about the project, click here!

While trying to redesign my website, I came up with this easy way to pull off a nice effect. I’m not really sure what to call it. I’ve seen it used by others in a few places with nice results. It’s an easy way to create seemingly very complex and extravagant abstract designs and apply them to stock images.
…To read the rest of the tutorial, click here!

VJ Anomolee is a personal friend of mine who’s always working on nice emedia projects. His site shows some of these off and also provides links to other people’s projects from around the web. One link he posted that really caught my attention was LevelHead, an augmented reality game.

I’ll also take this opportunity to describe the other links I have on my blog.

Eric Lorentz – Friend of mine who’s into video production and digital music.
Max Kazemzadeh’s Artblog – My emedia professor
NanOmAnaLOg (日本語) – Friend of mine in Japan who does digital music. Shining Storm features his music.

dfyb folio gallery – Basic photo gallery–mainly with my photography. I will eventually move this to a more substantial website I plan on building for myself.
dfyb.net – My main website, which is currently just linking back to this blog. I plan on building this out soon.
raket – Placeholder website for my current game project. Links to the forums and devblog, which will be more active later.