This is a call to arms. I’m a finalist in a video contest to win an iPad. I worked in the game industry on a AAA game and now I want to work for myself. Help me make it happen.
Another year, another Gamma indie game show deadline to motivate me. My game for last year’s edition never really came together. This year the topic is coincidentally something I’ve already been thinking about: one-button games. It’s an interesting exercise in constraint-driven design. Adam Atomic and Danny B’s excellent Canabalt has been mocking me since its release to try my hand at a one button game. While Canabalt and other one-button games seem to work with the constraint by having only one action you can perform and simplifying the gameplay…I decided to go the other direction and make a platform game where you jump and walljump and climb and wallrun, but all with one button. Like the now-ubiquitous context-sensitive button that I first saw in the Zelda game, Ocarina of Time.
The vision for the game absolutely clicked for me a couple days ago. Watch this space for updates on my progress. I’ve only got until the end of January to finish, so this will be either a quick success or a quick failure. Should be fun.
If you go there, some of the boxes on the interface will make more sense. The text boxes under “Left Image” represent the matrix that is used to process the left image (red) and the boxes under “Right Image” are the same thing for the right image (cyan). The constants from the above page can just be plugged into them to produce that kind of anaglyph. I’ve got several presets already coded into the program to save some typing (use the Anaglyph Method drop down menu). I’d suggest just loading a preset and playing around with the values to get a feel for what does what.
As input the program needs a crossview 3d picture. Those are the ones that are viewed by crossing your eyes. I’ve found a lot on flickr and they seem to work pretty well. http://flickr.com/search/?q=crossview
If you have any questions, bugs, or just want to heap generous amounts of praise on me, drop a comment in the box. I’ll be back soon with a review of Braid and further thoughts on GAMMA 3D. Stay glued to the intertubes.
It’s been quite a while since I’ve updated the page. I sure am glad I migrated web hosts and installed and themed this spiffy blogging software.
Updates. I’ve got a couple projects in the cooker. First, a short-form comic that I am hoping to have drawn and lettered sometime before the end of days. I’m planning to describe my totally hacked-together process for creating the art in a future article.
The second project, which I’m not too sure about yet is GAMMA 3D.
It’s an indie game party/show held in Montreal at the Society for Arts and Technology. Last year’s theme (GAMMA 256) was to create an entire game in a very small amount of pixels: 256 pixels square. It certainly sounds like an interesting constraint even if most games of the 16-bit era ran at somewhere under that. The most interesting games, for me, were the ones that took the constraint to an extreme and made truly tiny games.
This year’s theme is 3d anaglyphic stereoscopy. That’s a damn mouthful, but basically it’s the technology popularized at the 50’s movie theater: 3d glasses with the red and blue lenses. I’ve heard of a few games and video card drivers that support this mode on computers today. It’s a neat effect. Which is where the show’s golden rule comes into play. “Your game must use stereoscopy in a way that is integral to the game play. A game that simply uses stereoscopy as a visual effect will not make the cut.”
Tricky. I’ve got some thoughts down and I’ll be making a rambling post about it soon. In the meantime, if anybody reading this blog has an idea of how to pull this off as more than just an, admittedly pretty nifty, effect, drop a comment in the box below.
I spotted the Video Game Name Generator Contest over at the always-hoppin’ TIGSource. After losing nearly two hours of my life reading these hysterical names that the program comes up with, I decided that I’d go ahead and enter the contest. Problem is, I only found out a week before the deadline. I gave it the old college cliche but didn’t make it in time. I did relearn a lot about Torque Game Builder and I think I’m going to keep playing around with this project until I get my mini development studio set up. Keep your eyes peeled for an article on that topic soon.
In the meantime, I present to you (the one person who visits my site…hi mom!) ARMORED SHOCK PREACHER!!!
I’d suggest just loading a preset and playing around with the values to get a feel for what does what.
