Prototype Boss Fight Gallery

Prototype where polished art are getting integrated with bounding boxes for main player package :

  • iteratively tune animation play back for both player and bounding box transforms to feel "good"
  • tuning input controller to feel responsive
  • background, and boss assets are roughly instantiated and animated to give artist context to tune asset production

Complete gallery can be found at : https://photos.app.goo.gl/o5yDQZDeArgBmhxD8

There was a lot of back and forth with the art team, and generally turn around time was about 2-3 days between deliveries and getting a new build ready for us to progressively iterate towards the next step

This iteration was happening remotely, after work from our actual day job : but the speed and progression gave us momentum to positively move forward 

ECS Prototype Gallery

Gallery of rapid prototype development with white box bounding volumes :

  • Unity 3D
  • Entity Component System

IMHO the bread and butter of prototyping is :

  • visually acknowledging runtime events and physics state
  • structuring it so that's it easy to remix and explore possibilities
  • including polish for animation curves and transitions

Bonus if the with simple bounding volumes already look good prior to actual art polish

Full gallery available here : https://goo.gl/photos/9jAdyFbYVnNUkhr86

This was a fun scratch pad for mapping and logging function and events to UI, and each gif represented about a bus ride's worth of progress ~ 25 minutes

Prototype : 2D Game

Over Christmas break, my brothers(one of which is in the industry) and nephew(who just turned 14) wanted to do some off the books game development.  The above video, steps through the features of our ripest prototype.

What's cool is how my nephew got to experience building something hacker style : Through pivoting and ad hoc problem solving. 

  And the highlights on that roadmap were:

  • Basic control and movement.  Started out with a ball and worked on getting good horizontal movement with acceleration and deceleration.  Then moved on to add jumps and fall along the y axis.
  • To fire bullets, you must first spawn them.  This lead us to discovering this prototypes funnest game element; spawning the satellite weapons.  Realizing this completely changed our mental model: Every object in the game bullets; floor and wall tiles are effectively static bullets that never move.  
  • Collision detection.  We've made many false starts with other development environments(HTML5, Game Salad, Unity..etc), and getting stuck in tiles, or completely missing tiles was always an issue with higher speed transform.  Managed to get good results by incorporating acceleration into the collision calculation, and that got us 90% of the way there.

My nephew was familiar with GameMaker, so that became the platform of choice.   And I was surprised at how articulate of a guide he was in getting me up to speed with GameMaker's inner working.  

We managed to complete about a feature per day.  So within a week and some custom code slinging, we had a fun prototype.

WebGL Scratchpad : TriForce

Been checking out WebGL as part of my more recent Saturday Morning Project.  And as far as I can surmise, WebGL seems to be an interface that exposes GPU hardware buffers to the browser. And javascript in this context, is basically utilized to push floating-point values to vertex buffers, and shuttling them through the C(?) foreign-function interface into the GL library.

Here's the current code state of my fiddling  with a simple, bare bones WebGL context:

https://github.com/miketon/webGL

Here's a mindmap of my current understanding OpenGL functions and hardware registers:

http://www.mindomo.com/view.htm?m=fe720acc4ba34b7bb49c8524b427c768

There's a lot to love about the how graphics development on the web is trending.  It feels like a reset/re-invention of the industry ~10 years ago.

Impromptu : Live Coding

Impromptu is a live coding environment utilizing Scheme(a dialect of Lisp) and is a fantastic environment for prototyping.  Developed by Andrew Sorensen, how Impromptu access and controls your Mac is beautiful and elegant.  

And before discovering the advances in Javascript and HTML5, it was my favorite technical sandbox.  Here's a small OpenGL program I wrote while learning matrices to implement ArcBall rotation: 

https://github.com/miketon/Impromptu/blob/master/OpenGL_Basic_ArcBall.scm