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:
I was thinking of doing something Steampunk themed for Halloween, and thought I might spend a few hours prototyping a ‘raygun’ prop. This aether cell as far as I got, it would serve as the ‘ammo cartridge’ for the raygun, sticking out of the back at a slight angle.
It’s got a red LED, a cyan ultrabright, and a UV LED, and the fluid is a mixture of diet tonic water, vodka, and highlighter fluid, so you get a very nice eerie glow with the UV LED on.
One reason I didn’t go further is because Mighty Putty sucks. I had purchased some on sale at Target because it’s supposed to be waterproof, but it certainly didn’t form a watertight seal against my brass coupling and I’m glad I tried it here and not in an emergency plumbing situation! It also smells incredibly foul, far worse than other epoxies I’ve used.
Another thing I’d try differently next time is to omit the highlighter fluid. It does glow brightly, but it’s fairly opaque as well, making the mix look cloudy with the LEDs off and I think it limits how far the UV can travel too much.
After a very enjoyable week off, today was my first day at Epic Games as an engine programmer.
After 3 3/4 years at Emergent, I decided it was time for a change. It was a blast, and I’ll miss working with all my peeps at Emergent, but I’m still in the area and also looking forward to making new friends at Epic.
This photo (http://nickwong.smugmug.com/photos/132206567-M.jpg) made the rounds at work a few weeks ago, and general consensus was that not only was this awesome, we needed to try it.
So, we set out to make some bacon cakes and succeeded wildly (though not without a few hurdles along the way). At the weekly fooding, we ended up with two distinct designs.
Todd made a cake with a boneless pork chop core, iced with mashed potatoes and asparagus trim, and bacon bathed in a dijon sauce to top it off. The cake turned out excellent, especially the sauce, but apparently this was Todd’s 3rd try. The first two cakes didn’t have sufficient structural integrity (IIRC he was experimenting with bacon lattices to hold the potatoes in place rather than having a core).
I went for a sweet Jalapeno corn bread for the ‘cake’, with cheezy mashed potatoes for icing, and ‘bacon’ spelled out in bacon on top. It had quite a kick, and just a hint of sweetness, so it went well as a second course after the pork chops as an entree. The cornbread also looked for all the world like a yellow cake from a distance, and it could be cut like cake as well.
I don’t have Todd’s recipe, nor is mine exact, but here’s what I recall:
Take the standard Quaker cornbread recipe and double it. Replace the water with cream corn (about 1 1/4 cans) and just a bit of milk (add as needed to maintain consistency). Replace as much of the oil with bacon grease as you can (you’ll need bacon for later, so may as well fry it now). Add a small can of diced Jalapenos, a pinch of garlic salt, and maybe 1/2 cup of four cheese Mexican blend. Add an extra egg (and use both the yolks and whites).
I mixed it up and put it back into the cast iron pan that I used to fry the bacon, then baked it for ~35 minutes. If you’re making a huge cake, you could just use the round straight out of the pan (cut the top flat), but I went for a smaller rectangular form by cutting off the edges and serving those up straight.
Cook 7-8 medium Yukon gold potatoes fully peeled and coarsely diced until fork tender (Yukons have a nice taste and texture, but they’re kind of yellow and you might go with something a little whiter if you want it look like white icing).
Mash up with 4 tbsp butter, 1/2 cup heavy cream, 1 tbsp white pepper, and ~3/4 cup five cheese Italian blend (anything is probably fine as long as it’s a white cheese obviously). I also added 5 or 6 grinds of garlic salt to both get the salt needed as well as add a bit more flavor. Let it cool to where you can safely touch it before trying to ice the cake, if you don’t want to burn your hands. The cheese will make this set up very nicely and smoothly, it really does look like icing.
Crumble the bacon and decorate. Writing letters with bacon dust is harder than it looks.
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.
It can be downloaded from the Global Game Jam page for the game. I tried to keep a running progress log over the course of the weekend, with periodic screen shots.
Our team consisted of:
Technology: We used C#, XNA 3.1, the Lidgren networking library, and a PHP script for matchmaking.
