After 24 hours of solid development, we successfully created a Tower Defence game controlled by the Kinect, it was really good fun, especially when testing (although I have to confess it became a pain having to stand up and move 3ft away from the keyboard to test it, so we may have implemented mouse functionality too…).
The game turned out quite nice, with map generation being left out in the end (though we did have forests drawing randomly on parts of the map, they offered nothing to the game), a lot of the art resources were sourced from Lostgarden which were incredibly useful, so massive thanks to them!
The Three Thing Game 24hour session starts tomorrow morning, and I’m working on some map generation stuff at the moment, forests are nice if I can get the trees to order correctly. Things are going pretty well, for myself at least – I can’t get hold of any other members of the team so I’m on my own for now, which is annoying because I really wanted to work on the agents behaviour today which was Mikes speciality.
I’ve tidied up last years UStream channel a bit ready for the weekend, now all we need to do is go live! I’ll post up an embeded player of the stream tomorrow morning before things kick off so keep an eye out for it!
Other teams will be streaming their development session too, so keep an eye out for those (I assume they’ll be on twitter #threethinggame)
A few days ago I wrote about Three Thing Game and the Kinect Tower Defence game we intended on making, since then, we’ve got the ball rolling a bit and some code which does things (but nothing interesting). We’ve also had the Thing Auction, where every team was given 530 credits to bid on words they wanted (or if nobody wanted to bid, your team would be stuck with that word, this happened to us twice..).
Our team got assigned the words “Fruitcake” and “Word-Processor”, we also spent all of our credits so we could use a wildcard, so we can have whatever word we want, a wise choice it turns out. These words initially were a pain, but we’ve came up with an idea which ties in really quite nicely with the Tower Defence aspect of it all, but I don’t want to give away any more spoilers just yet!
Other teams are working hard (I assume) with their games at the moment, #threethinggame is being used on twitter, and I’ve also noticed Lindsay Cox and his team are blogging about their game a lot. The Codeplex site for the project hasn’t be active recently due to other commitments, but from now until Sunday expect updates often.
Quite recently I put up a post about Random Map Generation and my first attempt at it. The results were interesting, but not great. At the time I decided to leave it there and focus on my project for my third year amongst other coursework (which, by the way is coming along really well, I might even make a video about it). Since then, things have changed a bit and a competition entitled “Three Thing Game” was announced earlier this week.
The competition is quite a simple concept, based on three words alone, make a game, we will work throughout the week and have a final 24hour session at the end of it all. The competition ran last semester (which I did not enter due to work commitments and the inconvenient timing), however I did enter the competition when it ran this time last year with a few friends, we decided to not do any work until the 24hour session (as we wanted to make a challenge for ourselves, and we thought we’d have more fun), we also decided that streaming us live on the internet whilst being geeks for 24hours would be a cool thing to do, so we did exactly that over at my UStream channel and a few people watched us.
We didn’t really make anything worth noting last year – I partly blame my 5 hour shift at work I had halfway through, along with our lack of serious approach. However, this year I decided to get the weekend off work and have another go at it, I even intend on working on it before the final 24hours this time! Last year my team included three friends – Jack Middleton who was responsible for artwork, and keeping us up to date on the Formula 1, Rory Spencer and Mike Dean, who were programming along with myself. The words we had to work with were “Spanish, Kumquat, Bike Ride” – making a game on these three words in 24hours proved harder than we thought, we ended up producing some shoddy 2d RPG which made no sense, but in our sleep deprived state thought it was hilarious. I’ll try to dig it out sometime and release it… not that anyone will want to play it. (It is worse than BolloKong – my finest piece of work yet).
I’ve done my exam for this winter on Languages and their Compilers (which was surprisingly not bad), I’ve wrote a report on my Wireless Game controller project and I’ve applied for an internship in San Francisco! Now that I don’t have much to do (until lectures start tomorrow), I thought it’d be nice to work on something fun (rather than my project which desperately needs work, but I can finish that quite quickly now). I read a few posts about RPG games and how dungeons can be procedurally generated on the fly to offer a unique user experience, something you may find in roguelikes. That was pretty interesting, but I thought how simple it was, so I wondered how random maps are generated for RTS games, and games like Minecraft.
Initially I wanted to start off simple, so generate one fixed size map and leave it at that – no joining of parts or anything like that. I began to do a bit of research and found a nice page on noise generation, well, it was nice once I applied a nicer stylesheet to the page to remove that god awful background and make it easier to read.
After reading the article, I had a rough idea of how I could implement a simple 2D random map generator, so I began working on it. So far I’m using two textures (Grass and Water) and lighting them slightly differently to show a “random map”. It’s in its infancy at the moment and I do intend on adding things such as trees and what not as I generate the random generation algorithm more.
Bollokong is a game I made in college the months before I went to University. Some would say it is a god awful game, and I would tend to agree. Imagine being in a corn field with a 23storey building in it (I was quite specific on the number of storeys, it is integral to the game). Pretty abstract concept right? Well, yeah it is, but it gets more abstract… imagine an ape throwing bananas at Paper Aeroplanes with V8 Engines… Wait what? Yeah, V8 engines… How the paper managed to withstand the weight of a V8 Engine is explained in another game (concept) named Mysticala which revolves around a character named Joe Suncombe and his hatred towards all things paper based, but this isn’t relevant.
The idea of the project was to make a game based on Pong, Asteroids or a top-down racer, I completely missed the point and went with Bollokong. I decided not to focus on graphics, or gameplay, or storyline, or audio, or gameplay.
The game did however have a story, which was quite in depth thinking about it, here is a brief overview: