Weird Lightning

 And so it begins… well the interview process for me has finally slowed down enough for me to get some work done on some of my games (because those interviews are OH SO BOTHERSOME).  I’m working on a basic 2d game to experiment with a game design idea I had a few weeks ago.  Since I don’t have an artist and don’t want to resort to using one of the billion Mega Man sprite sheets out there I decided to put together my own.  Here is a sprite sheet for my upcoming game.

As you can see, I’m going for the uh… *ahem* minimalist approach (yes… that’s the ticket) .  Basically all of these sprites are a caricatures of a individuals that are a loose scale between good and evil (its hard to make out the Devo character but that’s me.  I’ve got a scale starting from evil to good with… Jason Vorhees, a mad max waste lander, anarchist punk, Devo, Joe blow, worker bee, religious family man, minister and the pope.

So what the hell am I making you ask?   The idea I had was for a game I like to call “Cloud Control” (you control clouds and crowds) which puts you in control of two clouds in the sky.  Opening up space between the clouds pours light on the citizens below, making them decent upstanding citizens.  Closing the space between clouds casts shadows which turns them into degenerates.  The goal of the game is to maintaining cities in the game to make them better or worse depending on the levels goal.

For example… A really simple level would challenge you to make both cities good and all you have to do is open up the sky and shed light on everyone creating an army of pope’s.  More challenging levels will make you have one evil city and one good city or maybe you’ll have to maintain a balance for as long as possible.  each city generates citizens depending on how good or evil they have become and send them to the opposite city.

anyway, I have no idea if this game will be fun or not which is why I want to experiment with the idea of balance as a gameplay element.  Should be interesting…

“A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly. All the speed he took, all the turns he’d taken and the corners he’d cut in Night City, and still he’d see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void…The Sprawl was a long strange way home over the Pacific now, and he was no console man, no cyberspace cowboy. Just another hustler, trying to make it through.”

- Neuromancer, William Gibson

So i’ve been very busy lately.  I’m regretably going to have to push back my release date for trample to another time.  Fortunately, the reason i’m doing this is because i’ve been busy going through the interview process with several game developers!  Almost every week I’ve had to take a test and for the most part i’ve performed very well on them.

When you program games all day at work the last thing you want to do at home is… program more games.  Game programming requires you to push yourself in several directions, the technical overhead for creating a game is extraordinary and doing all of the art, programming and music by yourself is very difficult.  Of all things, maintaining an independent project outside of work has been difficult.  Especially for a guy like me that also likes to read, work out, play music and travel (i’ve got 3 trips planned this month).   On top of all this I’ve been taking tests and interviewing with several studios which has eaten up virtually all of my time.

I have had time to play a few quick amazing games lately, namely braid (blow’s artistic masterpiece) and bionic commando.  Bionic Commando might be one of the hardest games i’ve ever played in a long time and i think most of the difficulty is due to its “old school physics”.  The gameplay programmers on the BC team played the old game several times and tried to reverse engineer every single aspect of the grapple mechanic they could.

both of those games a brilliant go check them out… i just wanted to make a post today so that people Didn’t think i was dead (although i might soon be if i keep going through these interview procedures).  Tonight should atleast be fun, i’ve got tickets to go see the boss!

Rock on cowboys.

So, I’m going to grab the bull by the horns here and set a completion date for “Trample”. By October 15th the project should be complete. Which will include 3 components…

Song creation and playback
-sample management
-song editor
-a player that matches syncs according to bps.

an in-engine animation creation system
- primative shapes
- changing size, position and color
- keyframe animation system.

real time jam feature (maybe with multiple users)

and if i have time…
video sample support

As of now i plan on using FMod, Crazy Eddie’s GUI and OpenGL to create this software. I’m looking forward to starting this project and i hope I’ll have something really cool to share with you all in a few weeks. Right now i’m setting up a list of tasks and a schedule to help keep me on track. Wish me luck!

Phil J

Hey everyone,

Well its been a busy month.  I actually completly forgot i had this website and then i was notified that some spammer was trying to add comments to my blog.  So i thought i might help the spammers a bit by actually creating content here that people would read.

TRAMPLE

I’ve just settled into moving to malvern and i’m setting up shop for some interesting new projects.  The new project is essentially a DJ animation studio (tentatively named Trample) which will facilitate syncing up abstract animations with audio not unlike this video.  I was inspired to make this program after i saw the cornelius video for smoke.

My intention is to create something on this level but also add a real time “jam” feature that will let people loop their samples in real time with corresponding animations that will speed up and slow down according to the speed of the sample.  So yea… look forward to that.  I’m still hammering out the details.

PODCAST

For a long time I’ve wanted to start a podcast in this are to discuss game news and etc… well I’ve finally met some hardcore game nerds that are willing to be my partner in crime for this endeavor.  Within a month or 2 we should have all the details sorted out and we’ll likely be hosting the podcast on each of our respective blogs.

One of the projects I always get emailed about is DirectXynth. Its the fruits of one of my independent research projects at Millersville University. Basically, its a software synthesizer written in C# using directX (hence the stupid name). You can actually do some really crazy things with it and i’m currently planning on adding more to it shortly.

I started this website a few days ago so it might be a while before i pick up some steam. Using WordPress certainly made things a lot easier. In a few days I’ll update the theme so it doesn’t look like everyone elses blog on the internet.

If you’re in the Philadelphia area there are some awesome shows coming up. I’m most excited for the 8bit line up coming to the rotunda in west Philly.

03/19/2008 - private sea, le loup @ the barbary
03/20/2008 - 8Bit Electro music. 6 different musicians (cheap dinosaurs, Nullsleep, Animal Style and more) @ therotunda
03/21/2008 - Crystal Castles @ making time (the transit).

Hey,

looks like you’ve have found my personal blog. This is mostly meant to host my code samples, music, projects and various other things…