pyromuffin

Hey bros and anti-bros, I've got some news. This might be the last post for a while. Or at least the last post that is video games related. More on that later, but first! Super Hairpiece I made this game along with some friends at the PurpleMonkey Gamejam some time last month. The game is about throwing a toupee on to a procedurally generated bald spot on a guys head. You should try it out. Here are the links: 64 bits 32 bits It's also got a nifty screenshot mode so you can take hair-larious ( im so sorry ) pictures of your styled dude. Woooo super hairpiece! What else? That job thing I got a job at Infinity Ward, the guys who make some Calls of Duty (or is it Call of Duties?) making their video game programs work! That means I'm actually posting this right now from an apartment in Woodland Hills, CA. Yeah, I moved to the west coast. Sorry boston dudes! We had fun though, there's no way I could have gotten to where I am today without

Hey guys, BOSSMODE is coming along. Here's a video of me playing five instances of BOSSMODE at the same time against the first boss. Pretty cooooool huh?

Hello brothers and sisters, I bring you news of video games. BUT FIRST! The particle shadow maps must be seen. VIEW THEM.  VIEW THEIR SPLENDOR. This video is long, but it is not required to watch the whole thing. ok. time for  BOSSMODE BOSSMODE is a game that is all boss fights. It's also networked multiplayer. I'm trying to make a game that is a cross between raiding in WoW and Shadow of the Colossus. You move around by applying a torque to a cube. And when you shoot microcube death primitives, it also applies a force back to you. Use this to your advantage. The engine is basically done so now it's on to ~content~. Which is boss fights. Which is allllll self contained game design. isn't this great? is this awesome y/n?

Awww yeah, I made some neat particle systems with volumetric shadowing! This first one uses the technique here:  http://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/samples/5_Simulations/smokeParticles/doc/smokeParticles.pdf The hardest part of this was definitely implementing a GPU radix sort. My recommendation: don't. The hard parts are always, always in the details (calculating those local offsets, I know right). Particle Shadow Mapping Because the technique above is kind of bad with multiple viewing angles (note that I don't pan all the way around the particle system here), I ended up implementing a different technique:  https://developer.nvidia.com/sites/default/files/akamai/BAVOIL_ParticleShadowsAndCacheEfficientPost.pdf Particle shadow mapping is rendering the particle system into a 3D texture and then using a compute shader to propagate the light transmittance though that 3D texture. This one is a lot more stable and also probably faster. It still requires sorting for the fina

I've done many things since we've last spoken, old friend. Let me regale you with a story of days long since passed. Most recently, Shitty Fish During the ~Great Boston VR Bender And Game Jam~ I worked with the talented Mark Stock and Jim Susino of the Boston VR meetup. We produced a game called Shitty Fish. The goal of the VR jam was to produce games that used Valve's prototype head mounted displays. The prototype HMDs are something like 1200x1k in each eye? I'm certain those numbers are wrong. Oh and they're also low persistence at 90 Hz. The Valve guys said that making the desired frame rate is of great importance, and suggested that we target a graphical fidelity reminiscent of Quake 3. With these guidelines in place, we three set out to build a video game in which you are a sea snake. In Shitty Fish, the game is entirely controlled by the rotation and translation of your head. The idea is to slither. By displacing your head in a slithering motion, a s

So I didn't do a game last last week because of PAX East, which was crazy and I'll get to that in a moment. The game for this week is Riftwars Arena! Riftwars Arena is an online multiplayer 6 degrees of freedom deathmatch game. You fly around in your spaceship and shoot other dudes. You can fly down in the lower part to be near obstacles so that you're harder to hit. You can fly around upside down (what does that even mean?) and you can flip and roll and do all sorts of cool aerial maneuvers. You can probably tell that this is heavily inspired by  Descent , which is probably one of the best old games ever. How do I play this? Well, here's the thing. You can't.  wtf man? Ok, so I know that the whole point of the game a week thing is to make a game that people can play every week, but this time, James, the other half of PixelRouter VR (btw, I am the other other half now, and will be releasing all future collaborative titles with James under that

Here it is:  https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B209xEE7EEixbHk4XzNfMUdzeDg&usp=sharing This is my first game a week game! You should know, you'll probably need an 360 controller, or something that fakes your computer into thinking that your controller or keyboard is a 360 controller to play this. Also, it's probably only going to work at full screen at 1920x 1080 or higher, though you can test your luck with this. CUBE DEATH PRISON is a four player cooperative (or not) twin stick shooting game! Murder cubes in the CUBE DEATH PRISON. Collect microcubes to bolster your Numerical Cube Murder Indicator . Avoid cubes to sustain your cubelust! Circle strafe to morph your true einherjar form! CONTROLS: LEFT STICK TO APPLY TORQUE LONELY RIGHT STICK TO PERPETRATE CUBE VIOLENCE RIGHT TRIGGER TO CHARGE ADVANCED CUBE ARTILLERY LEFT TRIGGER TO EXTEND LASER APPENDAGE RIGHT SHOULDER TO CALCULATE GRAVITY LEFT SHOULDER TO UNCALCULATE UNGRAVITY START TO HA

If you follow my tweet or face machines then you probably already know that I am going to be embarking on a video game making challenge. If you haven't heard: I am going to be embarking on a video game making challenge! The goal is to make one game each week, from start to finish. Included in that are menus, win and loss conditions, assets, and game mechanics. The point is to become experienced with making all the parts of a game, which is something I have failed to do thus far. In fact, (with the exception of game jam games) I have failed to actually make anything someone can play from start to finish in the past year and half of this weird game dev experience. Btw, I'm still working on Seth's secret game, and Bad Things Happen in Space has been put on hold, but is not cancelled. When Bad Things reawaken, it might take a different shape, but I still have the dream of making a multiplayer-space-panic-intrigue-simulator. Also I applied for a Unity dev job somewhere in Bost

Tonight, I will discuss the status of the three projects I am currently working on: [REDACTED], Riftwars, and Bad Things Happen in Space. [OMITTED] This game is a [REDACTED] simulator with some interesting twists. I'm currently working on getting [BLEEP] to navigate the [NOPE] and do [BLEEPY] AI things, like wander around, avoid nearby [BLANK] and find [REMOVED] and sit down. For navigation, I'm currently using Unity's built in navmesh, but I've run into a few annoying limitations on how much it can be scripted... like you can't specify a certain set of obstacles for a certain agent, and you can't have an agent be something that's not a cylinder (not everything in the world is a cylinder, I know). So, I'm thinking about using Aron's A* project , because it seems to be much more configurable. Don't get me wrong, unity's navmesh is powerful and easy to use, but I'm not sure I can get it to do everything I'll need down the line.

It is clear that I am unable to ever actually write about anything that I say I will follow up on, and also that I am bad at writing blog posts regularly, and probably in general. Tonight, I will talk about the stuff I have been working on since the last blog post, and also things that I am doing. Network Code Yeah, I ended up going with an authority scheme as hinted in Glenn Fielder's post: http://gafferongames.com/game-physics/networked-physics/  and his presentation on authority schemes here . The authority scheme specifies who acts as the sever for an object as they are interacting with it. This is incredibly not cheat resistant. Anyone will be able to pretend they own an object at any time and teleport around and I hope that my game doesn't become player vs player at any point because then it will be a real problem, or I'll have to switch to a different network architecture. Interpolation wise, I wrote up my own ~Hermite Spline Interpolation~ class, which

Hi! Long time, no post. Sorry I'm bad. I've been doing a lot of stuff, ok? The game is coming along. You can check out some more up-to-date-ish stuff by following my tweeter. I post things on there sometimes. I know I always promise I'll write follow up posts about things, but TOO BAD. I mean, I still might write a follow up post for the networking stuff. It's really complicated. Butt that's not what I'm here to talk about right now. The Bad Update Things Thing The BUTT is now active. The BUTT is your gateway to secret Bad Things Things. Careful, hand-picked data will be transmitted to you at the appropriate intervals. Do you wish to sign up for the Ever Eventual Bad Things Alpha, now known as the Bad Things Happen in Space Network Accelerate Climax? By being one of the first 2,000 home-brothers to activate The BUTT, you will be enrolled  in my consideration for the Network Accelerate Climax. 2,000 is  optimistic , it's more like two-zero for the upper l

Yeah! ~2014~ My new year's resolution is the same as last year's: 1920x1080. What's Bad in 2015? Space, duh. Space is a bad place, don't go there. At least not if you can help it. In these last two weeks I have done things! Bad Things! I have spent the last two weeks refactoring the item system and getting basic network synchronization working. And I spent some time fixing Unity's terrible RPC thing. And I registered for nvidia's cool Registered Developer Network, and got access to some stuff (that I can't use yet). ITEM SYSTEM ENGAGE The item system now uses inheritance instead of interfaces (because interfaces can't have virtual methods, for some reason (I mean, otherwise it would just be multiple inheritance (what I really want are mixins )). So, now all things that are items inherit from some super Item class, which also has a custom inspector that shows all sorts of cool, context sensitive stuff based on what stuff you selected. The