Vampire in the Village (Ludum Dare 33)

Wow, it’s been over a year since I posted anything. I can’t believe I haven’t done a game jam outside EA for that long!

Here’s my entry for the current LD 48 hour competition, the theme being “You are the monster”. No sleep lost which is always nice!

Ludum Dare link

Web build

All other platforms and source code

Vampire in the Village – as a stranger to the community, you must avoid causing suspicion while maintaining your health with a drop or two of blood. Gossip is your enemy, but a tactical bite can shut up the worst blabbermouth.

Controls are:
– Right-click to move and turn
– Left-click to pan camera
– Q to Bite a victim
– W to Charm the nearby villagers
– E to Glide faster than usual
– Space to re-centre camera

Townspeople have health and suspicion, which contributes to the collective town’s suspicion level. Reach the limit and the game will end. Charm can be used to remove some suspicion. When you get too hungry, your health will drop and you may die. Bite people to remain alive and satiate the hunger. Don’t move while biting or you won’t get the benefits! Biting causes quite a commotion, and should not be attempted in a crowd!

I’d love to know how you find the game, and how long you could last! Maybe someone will even kill the whole village! Comments welcome 🙂

Impermanence Major Project Breakdown

I finished my Final Major Project yesterday, after a few months of hard work! It’s a first-person puzzle platformer game called Impermanence, where you lead a character through a purgatory world full of souls. You have lights you can shine on normally invisible objects to make them solid. We intended to create complex story arcs for the game, depending on who you were leading and if it was past or future.

I worked with a great team of three artists from the Bournemouth Computer Animation course (Zack Goodrich, Jamie Bell, Kodie Williams), and a fantastic sound designer/ composer Billy Ross. Thalia was voiced by Kristyn Mass. I implemented their work and did all the programming in Unity, made FX, prop assets, lit the level, helped design the game, helped write dialogue and made some sound effects.

Currently I’d like to fix lots of things and add a trailer, but you can see my contribution breakdown for the game as it was handed in:

Showreel

Well I finally got round to putting together a showreel, perhaps 2 months later than I should have. It only took a few hours, once I had the rendered material! I used Premiere and After Effects, which were slow and buggy with 720p video, with which I’ve not worked before.

Projects in order of appearance (more info on each should be available on this blog, at least, shortly!):

1. BeatSprint
In second year, we have to do a group project. This is the first year they have allowed games. I pitched the game idea (which evolved over the first few weeks), and thus led the team. I also did most of the programming, in C++ and OpenGL (with a bit of Lua and Python). My team were: Tom Beaufoy – Programmer, Jack Bzowski – Art Director and Tongqi Ou – Artist. The user chooses a song and has to press only one button, to jump over the oncoming obstacles, which are generated to the beat of the music. The sun sets over the alien city, and foreground landscape is procedurally generated over the length of the song.

2. Charlotte the Necromancer
A character I created in a couple of weeks for a competition, using 3ds Max, Zbrush, Photoshop and Xnormal.

3. Billybob hits the Gym
Animation assignment, entitled “I Wasn’t Expecting That” and lasting 15 seconds. The Maya character/ rig was provided by my lecturer, Jahirul Amin. The environment I did to learn Maya’s lighting and procedural texturing (having come from 3ds Max).

4. Iron Man/ Audi
Modelling Assignment. This was mostly to learn Maya. 2000 quads each, for the Iron Man, and Audi R8.

5. Countryside generator
Scripting assignment. Done with Maya and Python. My first programming, so there are no classes or any more advanced concepts (maybe a lambda function or two but Python’s good at that!), and it’s very buggy. I’m quite proud of some of the procedures!

6. Billybob fall loop
Done for the same assignment as 3.

The music was pROgraM_vs._Us3R by morgantj, and is distributable under creative commons. The full song is available here: ccmixter.org/files/morgantj/30328.

Please get in touch if you like my work or would be interested in employing me.
Thanks for watching!

Road and Countryside Script – First Year Project

I didn’t want to do a grid city like everyone else. Skyscrapers were cool but I wanted interesting patterns. We had started learning python a couple of months before I started writing this script. I knew nothing of classes or object-oriented programming, so the entire thing is procedural. There was no over-arching design – I just jumped in with an idea for generating roads using vectors from polygonal shapes. I got a terrible mark for this project – probably because it is occasionally very buggy, and always very slow. I haven’t figured out where the bugs are yet but I think refactoring it with classes would make much more sense!

I made the terrible mistake of just running it with internal random numbers every time I wanted to test it, so could try 100 times without noticing that the roads don’t make T-junctions when they hit another road properly after splitting 4 times for example. I also put the separate parts of the script together very quickly – generating houses next to the roads was something I did while making the UI. I’m quite proud of the code that moves the road onto the landscape – although I probably should have done raycasting or something, I decided to implement a UV-coordinate-per-face type solution (barycentric coordinates) in 2 dimensions then reprojecting into 3D. Probably much slower! The landscape generation code itself is about 8 lines. The UI design is merely a thin veneer over the underlying implementation!

If you’re interested in any of the algorithms/ getting the script, contact me!