Games I’ve made
Save Your Pets is a game I worked on for the 4th Triangle Game Jam, where the theme was ‘placing blocks’.
Guide your humans to your exit while preventing your opponent from doing the same in this competitive Lemmings-style game.
My team was relatively small this year:
This is the game that we made at the 2nd annual Global Game Jam (Jan 29..31, 2010). The theme was Deception.
As a incorporeal assassin, you possess and control the bodies of innocents to further your mission of destroying rival assassins. It’s a networked multiplayer action game, where you attempt to deceive the other players into thinking you are just one of the masses, while trying to spot others when they slip-up.
Sunny Day is a game that I worked on at the 3rd Triangle Game Jam with Mike Daly, Rett Crocker, and Brett Brown.
The theme for this jam was Music Video Games, to come up with a game idea based on or inspired by a song (note: not creating rhythm games).
A little girl goes for a walk. When the sun shines on her, she is happy and spreads happiness to all those around her. When she is in the shade, she is sad. You control the sun, who wants to make the girl as happy as you can. You do so by positioning the sun so that the clouds beneath you don’t end up shadowing the girl.
Space Fish is a game that I worked on during the first Global Game Jam at the Raleigh-Durham site with Nick Darnell. The theme was ‘As long as we’re together, we’ll never run out of problems’.
It’s sort of a physics-sandbox game, where you can use your StarBeam to grab red or blue stars and fling them around.
Mindy the Space Fish is a persistent omnivore which will exist until the end of time. You are Mindy’s minder, feeding her pesky Red stars and keeping her from eating the pretty Blue stars.
As Mindy’s minder, you are free to ignore her. However, if you want to stick around with Mindy, your life will be full of problems.
Pixelated Martini Roller is a game that I worked on during the second Triangle Game Jam with Nolan Walker and Vincent Scheib. Brad Acree did the awesome title screen artwork and the music is by STU.
You play an angry drunken olive off to discover the meaning of live, or something…
Practice Poker was the final project my team did for the Software Engineering class at the University of Missouri – Columbia back in 2003.
The project page is available at http://www.auia.net/school/poker/.
A simple puzzle game with retro graphics
I don’t remember why I titled it T27, although it might have taken 27 minutes to make the very first version. All in all, I spent about a day playing around with the concept and here you have it. The main idea was to do something fun and fast with ASCII graphics so I didn’t get bogged down making it pretty.
You play an owlish character (it’s hard to portray fine details in a 4×4 ASCII grid) who must defend himself from evil invading cubes. Your owl has the ability to grab cubes from the sky or throw them back, although he can only carry cubes of one color at a time.
These cubes come in a variety of colors and ones of the same color don’t get along well. If three or more cubes of the same color come into contact, they get into an argument and explode. Use this to your advantage and save the world!
After a number of grabs or throws, the screen will start to vibrate, indicating that another wave is approaching. Your owl can do two more things before the next wave comes, but he is fighting a losing battle, as the cubes never stop coming.
I took the Enabling Technology class and worked in a group on the aMaze project, which provided a maze game to children with visual-impairments. A 2D maze is simulated, and the child can walk around inside the maze using a keyboard, joystick, or Sensable haptic-feedback device. Footsteps, simulated cane taps, and environmental sound sources are modelled in 3D, allowing the child to navigate by sound. There is also a visual display of the maze and current position, which can be used for debugging or disabled if a child has partial vision and wishes to try it by audio alone.
The EVE group at UNC has a bunch of foam cubes that they use to construct interesting virtual environments, and we thought of asking a few children to come in and try walking a real maze and the virtual maze. Some children would do the virtual maze first, and others would do the real maze first, and we could find out if they felt more prepared for the real maze after doing the virtual one.
The experience ended up snowballing (with the help of many) into a Maze Day with 51 visually impaired students and 55 adults visiting the UNC Computer Science department to view all of the class projects and previous research, instead of just aMaze. Maze Day has since become an annual event, and will be held again towards the end of April.
Pictures from preliminary testing
Our aMaze team had a station with 3 computers, one with a keyboard, one with the joystick, and one with the Sensable Phantom. We also made a real maze (complete with wolf and elephant sound sources played back at the bends of the maze) constructed in a room that matched one of the virtual mazes that were being shown. By navigating the maze using the computer beforehand, the general consensus was that it was much easier to navigate the real maze. Maze Day was a lot of fun, and we were proud to be a part of it.
All CS students at the University of Missouri – Columbia are required to do a capstone project in their senior year. My group decided to make a game console for an arcade cabinet and a game to demonstrate it.
The capstone project is broken into two semesters, with the first semester spent on the design process and various state educational requirements they couldn’t fit into any other class like IP law and ethics. The class doesn’t meet during the second semester, with the time instead allocated to group meetings.
Our team (EONGames / Arkanerdz) consisted of:
The console was based around a BlueStreak ARM SOC running at 77 MHz, with a 512×384 framebuffer (visible display region is smaller), and plugged into any standard arcade cabinet with a JAMMA connector.
The game we made for our system was ‘Super Magical Happy Fun Kill Time II’, which is a Leprechaun themed 2D shmup written in C.
I have placed the project presentation from semester 1 online, but the prototype hardware ate itself after the semester 2 final presentation when someone plugged the JAMMA connector in backwards. The polarity key in the JAMMA connector of my old cabinet fell out at some point, and no-one noticed, but thankfully it happened after we had presented for the class! When I get around to it, I was thinking about making an emulator for it to show off the game, or just buying a new SOC board.
VR Pong was developed for Engineering Week 2003 at the University of Missouri – Columbia . Every year, about one thousand students of all ages (K-12) come to look at exhibits at the Engineering department during E-Week.
