IGAMEMAKER.COM

Quick Octane render of Vader’s Tie Fighter with a model off of Blendswap

jhuculak — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 00:52:59 +0000

Sometimes it is fun to just grab someone else’s model and do a quick render. This model was done by Benjob and I rendered it in Octane. This one is using octane beta 2.52 and about 4000 samples using pmc.

Finished Uncharted 3 SP and it is great; but not as good as Uncharted 2 IMHO

jhuculak — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 06:18:32 +0000

I just finished playing Uncharted 3′s single player and it is a fabulous game.

Big action moments, great story telling and plenty of action. It was a fantastic roller coaster ride and hugely inspiring. My hats off to the Naughty Dog guys! From a game breakdown standpoint I don’t really have much to add to the breakdown from Uncharted 2 that I did a couple years ago.

Uncharted 2 is one of my favorite games of all time and is still the best in the series to me. Two things made Uncharted 3 not quite reach the Uncharted 2 level for me. First the story is more focused on your relationship with Sully than it is on the female character dynamic. To me the complexity and difficulty in doing a good romantic plot in the second game made me more impressed. Secondly I found the overall execution of the single player not as polished. There were great moments but there were a lot that were boring run at the camera missions that seemed to repetitive including some Max Payne like dream sequences that didn’t really pay off. With all that said, Uncharted 2 is one of my favorite games of all time so I still heartily recommend Uncharted 3 and I haven’t even dived into the MP/COOP yet.

TED – Inspiration at its finest

jhuculak — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 04:51:24 +0000

Watching a video like this encourages me to make more how to video’s to get more people, young or old, into making video games. How many other industries offer inspiration from a 6th grader?

I have settled in my new job and I’ve been playing with Blender’s Ocean Simulation features and plan on getting back to making my own games and tutorials again soon. Here are some sample images and videos:

Here is an isometric tile test render using blender’s ocean sim.

Review: Designing for Mobile First @LukeW

jhuculak — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 05:31:26 +0000

I picked up a video master class from O’Reilly called Designing for Mobile First by LukeW to help me understand mobile constraints. The course is focused on good mobile websites or applications in general but the rules can be applied to games. My favorite thing about it is his focus on minimized design, focusing on reducing to critical content only and putting that content ahead of navigation. If you want a preview of the content check it out here.

Short version

I’m going to say up front that I enjoyed this presentation and thought that it was worth the time and cash investment.

Who is it for?

Personally I think everyone should have an interest in design aspects. The course is great for anyone new to mobile web design as it is a good overview of the practical issues and solutions available as of early 2011. If you are looking for technical specifics, implementation details or a step by step how to make your application work you should look elsewhere as this course really focuses on presenting a very design focused, implementation light presentation. I was up for that and therefore found the course rewarding from an analytical and a design point of view as it provides lots of data to backup the points made. It reminded me a little of the great book Don’t Make Me Think in that everything he said sounded a lot like common sense (the truest form of “good design”) but did I know it was common sense before I heard it? That is the best type of design discussion, one where you nod your head in agreement the entire time.

Key things I learned

The following are thoughts I had while watching the course, most of which are related to the topics but some of which might not have been Luke’s points and if I am wrong, blame me not him!

Mobile web is probably bigger than desktop in terms of customer base or will be soon
Unique features are available and accessible for web
Designing for mobile first is probably easier than the other way around as it forces you to design simple things
Design around maximizing content and have navigation as the secondary thing
Support full client experience including input on the device, old rules do not apply of it being limited/hard
People use the website frequently even if there is a native app, so don’t mess that up!
Small options or difficulties can have a huge impact on usage
Mobile browsers are arguably more compatible with each other than PC’s history. HTML5 and CSS3 are fairly safe to assume.

What was missing?

I wish that there were more references or links to implementation details for the content. I’m fairly new to web development in general and some fast pointers or tips for people who don’t have “web legacy” would be great.

What does this change for IGAMEMAKER.COM?

I’m wondering if I should focus on some HTML5 based games in order to maximize exposure of my games. No app store, no platform limits and due to time constraints the games that I can make are fairly limited in feature set anyway. With both Unity and Unreal outputting to flash, how long is it before people are authoring to WebGL and canvas for games? Perhaps that is the best place to start. Build an audience and then make unique clients if the games are popular. I might look at doing an online version of my Tic Tac Toe game and perhaps a mobile version of my site.

I am thinking of a turn based Tic Tac Toe game as a “Hello World” application and how I could do it with a minimal amount of work. For example getting rid of AI completely and only letting you play friends and keeping it super clean.

Dipping my tools in the Android development pool

jhuculak — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 05:29:42 +0000

I just picked up two books on Android development from O’Reilly and have just started reading them.

Head First Android Development by Jonathan Simon, and “Early Release” title meaning it isn’t out yet.
Learning Android by Marko Gargento

First off I love that O’Reilly ebooks are DRM free, relatively inexpensive and high quality. I decided to start with the Head First book initially and so far it is a really quick read (just under an hour and I’m at about page 150). I think that Learning Android has a bit more meat to it and I look forward to contrasting the two books at some point in the future. For a really quick read and an overview of how to do applications the Head First book is where I would recommend starting, but as an experienced developer I think I will prefer Learning Android. The reason I picked the Head First book is that it is a good, fast read and works well as a visual learning tools since I am often in distracting situations and can’t focus on meaty technical content. The head first series is much more consumable in those situations.

Tonight I’m installing Eclipse, the ADT tools and the Android SDK. Tomorrow I hope to write my first native Android apps for my Sony Arc phone. Perhaps my Tic-Tac-Toe application to start and then something meatier.

The thing I’m still lacking is the time to dedicate to these projects but hopefully having this all on my laptop will let me develop this on my commute to work.

Terragen: Two Planet Sketch

jhuculak — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 06:01:40 +0000

Haven’t had much time to do projects lately but wanted to knock out a quick image tonight. I’m not that happy with the result. I have to get a better grand space opera feel to it and find some great reference art for the next one. I also might check out World Machine as I have heard good things about it.

I whipped up this ugly orange planet in about 5 minutes or roughly 1/10th of the time the above image took me. I actually like it better even though it is rocking a 1980′s fractal space terrain look. Looks like I’ll have to dedicate some more time to get a good image and really learn the program.

Random Space Stuff – Terragen, Paint.NET and Octane

jhuculak — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 04:42:42 +0000

Thought I would knock out another couple of images tonight. I have a long way to go but the iterations are fun.

First up a space scene done in Terragen 2 with two planets. I took the resulting image into Paint.NET, masked out the planet, added some noise for stars and then a cloud layer to get some blue colour variety in the stars.

Art piece #2 was a 10 minute modeling challenge in Silo where I was going to try and get a ship to render into the previous space scene. Then it looked cooler as a wood model in Octane!

Doing speed art modeling is sometimes much more rewarding than writing code! However I get trapped in the rendering loop more than the asset creation. All told I probably spent an hour and a half on these tonight and about 75% of that was just tweaking renders and having fun.

If anyone has any artistic critique’s on these please send it my way as I have next to no experience making art.

Dabbling in Art: Terragen 2.3

jhuculak — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 05:22:58 +0000

Forcing yourself to do very short projects is always a creative motivator when you don’t have much free time. Today I spent about 5 minutes playing with Terragen 2.3 and about 15 minutes rendering. For 5 minutes invested you get some reasonably cool looking results.

Why Terragen?

First of all Terragen allows you to play with the technology with very few limits for free. Trying before you buy is critical. The second reason is that I found it more intuitive than my quick tests with Vue, so I thought I would play with it first.

What am I going to use it for?

I think I’m going to try and script a way of generating sky boxes if I find the time and I might also use it for rendering out planets for space scenes. If my tests go well enough I might pick up a license. The $399USD for the animation version is a bit steep so I will have to see if I get a good ROI on my investment before I shell it out.

Where can I find out more?

I think there are some really good examples here. Some are commercial and some are free.

If you are interested in the scene file that generated the above image here is the code in text (save out to mountain3.tgd and load with terragen):

Finished Portal 2 Single Player

jhuculak — Sun, 15 May 2011 23:18:39 +0000

Just finished Portal 2 and I wanted to put my 2 cents in on the experience.

I generally found the game easier than the first game until the last couple of levels. The variety in story was roughly as good, but less of a surprise because it wasn’t as new or fresh as the original. I think I finished the first game in about 4.5 hours. The single player in Portal 2 took me about 6.8 hours. Was it worth $50? Absolutely, even if I don’t play COOP I am happy with the purchase. Portal was still superior as a single player experience to me but I will have to give COOP a try before having a final verdict on this game.

All told, this was a great game and my hat is off to Valve for making a good sequel.

And now I will get into a little of what I think made it great:

Puzzles – Simple ingredients, great levels

Portal Gun – Awesome
Gels – Portal/Jump/Speed – Brilliant extension of core mechanic with great puzzles
Blocking Beams, lasers and gravity tubes – Plenty of level variety

Writing and Voice Acting – Great pacing and variety

First third of the game, same old same old, was getting tired of it and seemed forced
Middle third – Origin story with a human touch
Last third – Rivalry

That is it…a very short features list, well executed with great pacing. Less IS more and this game did a good job of extending the features without blowing it out to being ridiculous. If I had one complaint it would be that it was probably easier than the first game.

I do recommend picking it up.

Gnome Toss Unity3d Tutorial Project – Make a game like angry birds!

jhuculak — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 22:03:06 +0000

Time To Toss Some Gnomes!

Head on over to the tutorial site to play the game and if you are interested you can buy the tutorial project there for $4USD!

What is Gnome Toss?
Gnome Toss is a game about throwing Gnomes at pesky pigeons. There will be many more enemies and environments if and when there are new releases! Gnome Toss is IGAMEMAKER.COM’s third Unity based game.

Where is Gnome Toss at in its development?
The current Gnome Toss is a proof of concept heavily influenced by Angry Birds. It will be developed in the future into its own unique play mechanic targeting mobile devices.

Why release a tutorial project at the Proof of Concept phase?
I think it is a good starting point for your own project. I have several game ideas that differentiate from the standard Angry Bird’s play mechanic and I will be developing them separately. I’m sure other people have the same idea and could learn from the project file. If people support IGAMEMAKER.COM by buying this project file I will release more project files at critical milestones.

What does the tutorial project contain?
All the art, data, audio, unity files and project files to create what you can play right here.

16 C Sharp Files
21 svg (inkscape) vector graphic files
54 png image files for the game
12 unity files
16 prefabs

What software do I need to use the project files and how much are they?

How much? How does free sound? Here are the tools I used to make this all of which are free or have free versions:

What about tutorial files? PDFs? Videos?
I will do my best to create some tutorial information around this product but I would love to hear what you would like information about. I think the project file is the best way to learn. If you have a specific question or idea for a video you think would help everyone out, please let me know at jaysen@igamemaker.com! In the meantime check out my Vimeo site for other tutorials.

PLAY GNOME TOSS HERE!