Category: Game Development

The last weeks I have been very busy trying to finish my game.

The experience so far has not been great. I’m using a Java library called Slick for rendering and basic container for my game. While I was developing my game I have figured out that a lot of the stuff I have made is already present, but often not supporting the exact function I need.

Some of my code is also quite old and naive, and it does have some bad quirks that I have now hopefully fixed.

Anyway I have now added sound effects for many of the mechanics in the game, and it became even more fun. Sound is actually very hard to get perfect, and I have in some areas settled for not perfect since it would take me way to long to find something better.

As far as my other summer programming is coming along, I have got QT and OpenCL cooperating nicely and my prototype program seems to send the stipples to their correct position, what is left of the main tasks is rendering the stipples. Once that is done I will focus on making a GUI for specifying options for the stippling. This includes.

– Scaling up image to have more weights for the stipples.
– Selecting stipple size.
– Specifying threshold for weight value in initial random distribution of stipples.
– Specifying iteration number.

It is alive!

My blog has its first post, and all is well.

As a first post I’d like to share the current status of my game as well as some interesting CG topics I would like to look into during summer.

Artifact

My game is called Artifact, and it is an arcade style game. For those who have played Ambrosia Software’s Barrack, my game is very similar, and it was major inspiration for creating this game. The game itself is pretty similar, but introduces some different challenges and a system for better resource management, making the player more in control of the resources he or she has access to.

At this moment the game is fully playable and quite fun. What is left is balancing, and adding sound. The big issue is sound since this is a topic where I have no experience. Hopefully there will be some progress in that domain during summer, so that I can release the game itself this fall or winter.

Summer CG

During this summer I also have some projects that I’d like to finish. During the last semester I implemented a weighted k-means algorithm for creating stipple images. The algorithm was made using GPU through OpenCL for computation. The algorithm worked nicely in Mac OS X, but when transfered to Windows(the assignment used a windows only application) it stopped working properly and instead started crashing when I used above 200 points, though I had tested it on the same graphics card in Mac OS X with 5000 points. Since I had no time to fix it during the semester and I really want to make it work, this summer I will try and create an application to turn any image or animation into a stippled video or animation. I have decided to make it in C++ and QT since I feel I need to be more comfortable with C++.

I also want to test the image space ambient occlusion on some models, and see how well it would function for different types of games.