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2012-10-23

Tech demos

Looking through the stuff on my website, I realise most of the projects I upload seem to be competition entries, and smaller projects.

I spend a fair amount of time playing with 3D technologies I find interesting, and make a lot of tech demos to try out various ideas that may or may not be used in my games. I'm thinking it would be an idea to upload some of these here just to show off some of the more shiny things I have been writing.

Most of them will be unfinished, and probably a bit buggy. Also, since I work in Linux, there may not be any windows binaries available until I can sort out my cross toolchain.
2012-03-30

New Website

Just about finished rewriting my website from scratch. I have kept the general layout and colour scheme, but it now uses some html5 stuff so it may no longer render correctly on old browsers. I have only tested it on Firefox and Opera so far.

Most of the new work had gone into completely re-writing the website back-end which I will probably be the only person to see. I wrote it as a fairly complex web app using jQuery and AJAX. This may hopefully inspire me to upload stuff more often as I only seem to update this site after 48hour competitions.

I have also written a game-tracker to track events from flash games. While I do use Playtomic for some games, I wanted something that does not need any setup to add loads of small games. I still need to write a front-end for this.
2012-01-04

Dragon Progress

I haven't done too much to the core game for a while. The current stage is to add the walking animations to the dragon, also the landing and taking off transitional animations. I decided to make them mostly procedural using inverse kinematics to accurately place the dragons feet.

The base code had evolved mush since my last post. For some reason my laptop has problems with SDL so I have removed that dependency. This was mainly to test my networking code in Chaos Arena.

I have been meaning to migrate some of my projects to github for a while now. My current version control system uses subversion on a flash drive for portability. Probably not the best solution.
2011-12-23

Ludum Dare 22

I should probably mention the latest Ludum Dare competition on here too.
Batkeep is a castlevania style platformer game. Unfortunately I ran out of time, mainly due to only spending about 12 hours on it as I was uninspired by the theme and had trouble deciding on a core game mechanic.

I used flash again so it is easy for people to just play it without having to download anything and avoid cross-platform problems that plague c++ development.
2011-08-21

Ludum Dare 21

My entry Stormcrow is a top down space game where you have to escape the galactic police who enjoy using you as target practice.

The game is again made in flash due to it being the most portable option.
I actually stopped before the deadline for this one, which is a first for me.
2011-05-06

Ludum Dare 20

The 20th Ludum Dare 48 hour competition was last weekend.
My Entry can be played Here
2011-05-06

Timelapse

I have rewritten my timelapse script to include webcam support.
The script is designed to create time lapse videos to document my progress in Ludum Dare competitions.
The script uses scrot for taking screenshots and mencoder to compile the created images into a video. I have also written a python script to capture images from a webcam along with the desktop screenshot that the timelapse script uses.

The script can also scale each screenshot image for you to keep file size down.

I originally had a bash script for webcam capture, it used the video4linux driver with mplayer, but that ran into a problem of the webcam shutting down after around 80 images. The new version is a short python script that uses openCV.

The webcam script is an optional addition to the timelapse script and can be replaced with an alternative script if you have a better one.

Download the timelapse script here
Download the webcam script here

Usage:
to capture just the desktop every minute:
timelapse capture -t 60
or screenshot size at 50% and also using wcapture (the webcam script).
timelapse capture -t 60 -size 50% -cam wcapture
The script can then convert images into a video
timelapse compile timelapse.avi
2011-02-19

Hall of Contradictions

Submitted an entry to the So Many Rooms jam.
The game is a collaboration with Alan Hazelden. I manly just created the graphics.
Play it here

The concept art I made for the game:
2010-09-16

Re-writing my website again

Finally got round to rewriting my website over the last couple of days.
This is a major redesign of how the entire thing works, and how it looks. I did write an alternative style sheet to see if I could get it to look like the original.

One main reason for this was due to the fact I have been writing Flash games. Embedding flash into the old setup was horrible and very hacky. The results sill messed up the layout. Another reason was to be able to post updates to the projects, and to allow feedback.


2010-09-10

Result!

My Ludum Dare #18 entry Graviton came 4th!