Game Developer Blog

Menu Screens

2006-04-11T09:14:00.000-07:00

Hey
I'm sorry about not updating this for like 4 months but I go to this place called school...yar!

Looking back at my logs for the past 4 months i've managed to:
Got my code up to release quality - just because something looks pretty doesn't mean it's finished!
A little more work on my engine (tangents and binormals for meshs, for those who understand tech-speak ;)) allowing for some fancy new themes...i deserve a bit of fun heh
Fallbacks for everything so the game still works on old computers with no vertex/pixel shaders.
Choosing rock, paper or scissors with gestures a la the game 'Black & White'.
Explosions and shockwaves for when faces are destroyed.
Extension of game logic so that games are played in sets of 3 as on the stree, rather than it continuing for ever!
Game can fall back from 3D sound to normal sound if not supported and even work without sound if your computer really is that bad!

And currently:
Some minor restructuring to have game screens for the main menu, options, credits etc

That might be a while with the forthcoming AS-level exams :(

I'm outta here to revise, peace out.

Rendering on desktop

2005-11-02T12:46:00.000-08:00

Also, during the half term, I had been investigating ways to have Rock Paper Scissors running on the desktop. Rendering behind the desktop icons is much too complicated (Windows hooks etc), but I think I should be able to replicate the icons in Rock Paper Scissors and keep it behind all the other Windows. It depends on time really; school work means I can only manage 2hrs a week and I have a non-game application queued up so I have to finish RPS at some time.

Presentation

2005-11-02T12:01:00.000-08:00

On Tuesday in half term, I was in Imperial College London giving a presentation on the robot project I worked on at summer school (disco was the best!) for a Silver BA Crest Award. Since we only had 4 days to work on it, we didn't get to add any autonomous control, so I presented Rock Paper Scissors as well. It generated a lot of interest with the pretty screenshots, and two friends from summer school kindof got addicted to trying to beat the AI! May I add that the highest difficulty beats people by about 70%?

Anyone can comment now!

2005-09-04T13:34:00.000-07:00

I found a setting for commenting - so comment away!

I might need to explain how Rock Paper Scissors works...
The face on the left (scroll down to the picture because I'm not duplicating it up here) is you and the one on the right is the computer.
You choose whether to play rock, paper or scissors (the choosing mechanism not finished)
The hands bob up and down as in real life, then fly toward each other. The losing hand disappears (at the moment just fades but once the game is in a stable state, I could make things explode) and the winning hand continues on to hit the loser face. If there's a draw the both hand disappear without any face being hit. And of course this is all real physics, making the game as realistic as possible, while having spherical faces with hands floating in midair :D Aren't games just great!
Then you carry on playing until you get bored, but when I get up to it, I'll put games in, so you would probably play 3 times and start a new game.

Please comment!

Score display

2005-09-01T12:48:00.000-07:00

I just thought I'd add that the score display not fitting in with the new themes has already been mentioned to me. I'll probably have to create my own bitmap score renderer instead of just drawing the score in text. Then I'll be able to draw the numbers 0-9 to fit in with the theme and it'll be cool.

Also, I forgot to mention before that the jerk problem I thought I had was nothing to do with Rock Paper Scissors and it's fine in full-screen on my computer so it's all good.

I've only done about an hour of programming since I got back from Imperial on the 27th because I've been catching up with my friends etc but I was trying to encode the HDR environment maps into RGBE format to improve the reflections on computers like mine which don't support HDR cubemaps. Unfortunately the Single16 type in DirectX is totally useless.
I downloaded the 169MB August SDK today (I'm still on April) to see if they've completed it, or I'll have to report it :( That download took 5 hours would you believe!

Remember if you don't understand any of the last part, other developers read this blog as well. Hopefully :D

I'm still alive!

2005-08-28T02:39:00.000-07:00

If you wondered why I hadn't made any progress on 'Rock Paper Scissors - The Third Dimesion', then that's because I've just been on a fantastic 2 week summer school doing robotics!!
I met loads of great people and I'm missing them all now :( but let's keep in touch!
ps Programming AI for games is much better than robots :D

Please comment on the game and ask questions about it. I believe you have to have a login to comment here so you can just send me an email. I'm trying to decide which email address I wouldn't mind getting spam at for putting it on the internet, so for now only my friends would be able to comment...

Have a nice day

Onto shader programming!

2005-08-11T13:05:00.000-07:00

Now I have 'themes' in Rock Paper Scissors I can make different rendering styles - the old non-cartoon effect wasn't very good.

Shader programming is much more fun than actual programming :D

New Image (as of a week ago)

2005-08-10T16:29:00.000-07:00

How could I forget to put this image up?!

As always until it's finished - the faces and hands are not artistically perfect :)

I got the background cubemap from the DirectX SDK - I'll have to try and get permission to use it.
But it is very nice!

Todo list

2005-07-31T05:35:00.000-07:00

In a moment of madness I though I'd write a list of what needs to be done on Rock Paper Scissors...so here goes:

Finish image processing framework - nearly done!
Animation of hands into rock, paper or scissors
Skybox with a pretty landscape that'll take ages to make :(
Letting the user move around with the keyboard
Being able to shoot balls at the game objects to ensure that collision response is working
Profile to eliminate jerk when launching hands and when objects collide
Buttons to select rock, paper or scissors
Engine programming before distribution
Distribute a beta version for testing
Letting the user affect the movement of the hand while in flight with the mouse
Exciting camera angles around play
Gestures to select rock, paper or scissors

Rock Paper Scissors - The Third Dimension

2005-07-16T06:20:00.000-07:00

First image on my blog!
You can see the new cartoon look of the faces in that screenshot - what do you think of it?
Ignore the random bright bits for now - I've started implementing the glow effect and as you can see - it isn't quite finished yet.
For the developers reading this, the apparantly black square at the top left is showing the glow render target that is being additively blended with the scene.
And I should probably mention that the background image is temporary heh!

The really good news is that I'm now using an XP computer so I've upgraded to the April update of DirectX and now I can get the animations working in-game! Very exciting but I have to actually make the animations first which is a pity because I'm not as good at modelling as programming :(

Now I'm working on the glow effect in the image processing framework I'm making to support the high resolution screen shots needed for the marketing!

Progress

2005-07-02T14:09:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone again!

A summary of the last week's work...editing wind sounds and hit sounds - now have 42 hit sounds in different categories! That may sound excessive but there are two collisions per 'play' (each choice of Rock, Paper or Scissors that you make) so they'd quickly become annoying otherwise. I don't want the you, the future players of our game, to be annoyed with it!

Also I've been planning the main game cycle in something called a Finite State Machine (FSM). The author tries to be funny when talking about the turnstile. The diagram is rather complicated unfortunately but if I need to change something about the game then it'll be _much_ easier than before! Yeah!

I'll post some screenshots when it's working again; it's not working at the moment because I'm taking out the rusty old prototype stuff and putting in my shiny new FSM :-) It may take a while...but I'll be back...

Since it's now the holidays, when Joe comes round we can re-record some of the old voices because I've now got a great, and FREE audio editing program called Audacity. That's infinitely cheaper than the $245.57 (VAT incl lol) Adobe Audition!!

I've tried not to use any jargon except FSM which I gave a link to...please tell me if I failed!

See ya...