20 hours of prototype game development “John Lake”

At university we recently received the task to quickly develop a game based on the theme “hope is the path to disappointment”. We had a maximum of 25 hours of disposable time for this task.
I was teamed up with Emma Matson who did most of the design and all the art and animation.  Together we developed the following game:

I wrapped together an easy to use engine using SFML and wrote a simple tile/collision-loader for Tiled tmx […]

Sketch Dump 5

This is going to be my last sketch dump for a while. I’m currently working on getting a portfolio done which means that I will focus most of my energy on doing digital work. Some of these sketches will return in digital and fully rendered form eventually, but I can’t say when.Peace out!

Colour Study

I’ve been working on a character design and some other stuff so I felt like relaxing by doing some colour studies using Sycra Yasin’s colour wheel and drop mask. On another note, I have decided that I’m not going to upload such massive sketch dumps that I usually do. Rather, I’m going to upload my more refined sketches. Thinking more about quality than quantity. Those will go up in the following weekend.  Peace out.

How I designed and implemented NPC behaviors and quests in two days

Two days left until the project deadline for Yomi’s Bubble Adventure, four character models are fully textured, animated and ready for implementation. One problem, the system doesn’t work.
In the following post I will explain how we worked with the external editor Artifex Terra 3D which is, except for the loader, closed source. In Artifex Terra you can create terrain, edit terrain and place objects. Artifex Terra 3D have the option to give object-specific properties for […]

Sketch dump 4

Sorry about the portrait overload. A lot of my time has been spent learning how to simplify and exaggerate facial traits so that I can design more diverse-looking characters. Interestingly, it has been a lot easier to design male characters than females despite that since I began drawing I’ve always liked drawing women more. Not sure why to be honest.This page is excellent for reference material on how to stylize characters. http://www.characterdesignpage.com/ I’m going to continue with this stylization practise […]

Object-oriented 3D sound system using FMOD in one day

In this post I will describe how I created an object-oriented 3D sound system using FMOD in the time-span of one day. This 3D sound system was used in our experimental Tower Defense game. It is mostly designed towards our Tower Defense game but many generic-usage functions was kept in mind when designing it. It is therefore free from other libraries except FMOD itself and could be integrated in any project.
The inspirational sources for this […]

Sketch Dump 3 + Portrait Sketch Process

 For last two weeks I’ve mostly practised poses through the use of various croquis website I found on sycra.net which has probably the best resource page for artists ever. Additional thanks to Sycra for the paper texture.  

Adventures in multithreading

In our current course “Advanced C++ for games 2″ we have been working on a software rendering engine using windows GDI were no other abstraction layer or libraries are used. The latest feature is to implement and understand multi-threading, so for this we received the following homework:

Move all state data from WinMain into Globals class.

Basically, a lot of initialization and temporary variables are still in the main function which was moved into a Singleton class “Globals”. Simple.

Implement background worker threads […]

Optimizing Bubbles

Once again we have been asked by our university to display a game (Yomi’s Bubble Adventure) at the annual gamex exhibition at Kista in Stockholm. This is due October the 30th so before that I decided to fix some bugs, minimize memory usage and improve stability. First up is a ninja-fix for the message system used by components which is using more memory then it should. The original system looked like this:
First we had […]

The process

To be honest, I never used to care much about environment drawings and paintings until quite recently. I found it to be easier and much more stimulating to design characters. But I have decided to push myself to draw things I’m really bad at in order to improve those skills and subsequently the skills I already tried to improve.So I’ve begun to draw/paint environments.    As you can see, I usually make a physical concept sketch which I tHen redraw digitally […]

Multiplication and addition through binary operations

In order to get more comfortable using bitwise operators such as & | ^ ~ in the course Advanced C++ 2 for games, we received our first sub-assignment. Performing multiplication and addition through binary operations only.
For addition we used the follow algorithm:

We have two integers, 39(0010 0111) and 23(0001 0111).
1. Perform XOR on them and store the results in a new integer we call sum. This will compare the bits of the integer and return a value were the […]

Sketch Dump 2

I’ve been practising a lot of anatomy the last 2 weeks since I finally got my hands on Albinus on Anatomy, an absolute god-send to character artists. But I’ve also done a lot of environment concepts in my sketch book so that when I’m able to spend more time on them, I can do so in Photoshop. Which I have. Currently working on the last of the four sketches you can see in this dump.TGIF!