So, time and work as taken me hostage.  I moved back to Canada at the end of May 2011 and I've been working since then.  I also had to find a place to live and make it my own, this has taken a lot of time.  Now I'm in a rush at work and I have no time to do some programming at home, but I hope I can get back to it in a not so far future.  Let's see how life goes.

Little game dev break

I didn't post here for a long time, because currently I'm quite busy with preparing my move. I currently live in Germany, but I will be going back to my home country, Canada, next month.

I've also been looking for a job, in the gaming industry, but also in application development. So I've been working a bit on an app in C# to be able to have something else to show to possible employers than just game programming.

So I've created another blog dedicated to app development : http://capsappdev.blogspot.com/.

You can visit it and let me know what you think.

I will come back to the Golf game when I have some more time and when I'm settled back.

I'm looking for a job in the province of Québec... just in case anyone has any job tips for me ;)

Golf game... version 0.3 ;)

It's been a while since I posted, more than a month actually.  I've been pretty busy but I've added a handful of new things to my game.

The first thing you might notice is the UI.  I've changed the colours and the look a bit to make it less boring.  I'm not a designer, so maybe you don't like the look of it... I'm not sure myself, so if anyone has some hints about how I can improve the look of the UI, just let me know and I'll be very happy to improve it further.

The mini map takes a bit less space and the contour is generated automatically so it's not some translucent rectangle anymore.

I've added some starting blocks for fun and a basic implementation of shadow mapping which works only for the trees right now.  The resolution of the shadow map is pretty bad for now and all other objects are too small to be considered in the shadow calculation... but this will be improved in the future.

I've added collision detection to the trees and the distance blocks, as you can see in the video when the ball flies into the foliage of a tree.  The ball is also affected by the kind of soil it lands on, be it fairway, grass or earth.  The video also shows that.

You cannot see this in the video, but the terrain is loaded differently.  Before it was a model that I built in a 3D modeling software.  But not it's just a height map (I plan on having hills and everything later on) and a terrain map to define what is where... type of grass, tree, starting position...

Depending on how much time I have I will try to have a new post with more features soon :)

And like always, comments are appreciated :)

My golf game looks a bit better now

It does look a bit nicer, I've added a skydome so that it's not the boring "Cornflower blue" anymore. I've added trees, it's one model, with a random scaling. The trees are planted automatically upon loading the level, the positions are "randomized", where the terrain is "earth" and not on the grass. I've also changed the texture of the fairway.

On the physics side, I've changed the flight of the ball... well it has more to do with the "hitting" of the golf ball by the club. Before it was just "launching" the ball at the angle of the club, but now I take into consideration the angle of the club, the mass of the club head and the mass of the ball, to launch the ball, but also apply the right amount of spin depending on the angle of the club when it hits the ball. I've also added some physics when the ball is rolling.

I will now modify the UI and refactor some of the code under it.

Here's how the game looks like now. Comments are welcome :)

Golf, the beginning

I wanted to buy a book about physics for a while to learn how to make things behave realistically in the future games I wanted to do.  So for Christmas I bought myself "Physics for Game Programmers" by Grant Palmer.  I started reading it then and I was asking myself what kind of game I could make, alone, to use some of the things I've learn in this book.  It's the only physics book I've read so far, but I still recommend it.

So at the beginning of 2011 I started working on a golf game.  There is some physics, but not too much, so it's a good place to start.  I don't have to model complicated 3D things... except if I want to add a character hitting the ball.  So I thought, why not.

So far I concentrated on the UI, so it would be functional and would do what I need it to do... it's not very pretty I guess, but I will spend more time maybe in the future to make nicer textures.  There's also a mini map showing you where the ball is on the terrain.  This map is auto generated when the terrain model is loaded by saving an orthogonal view of the terrain in a texture.

What I also did is use what I've learned about the physics of projectiles in the book to model the flight of the ball.  I need to work on the "rolling part".  But for the "flying part", the ball is "launched" at a certain angle depending on the club you select and with a certain power depending on where you stopped on the meter.  Gravity is affecting the flight pattern as well as air resistance.  The wind, displayed on the UI, also affects the flight of the ball.  You can also affect the spin on the ball in two ways.  First by moving the cursor up or down on the ball, which would make the ball fly higher or fall to the ground faster and depending where you stop the "power meter" the ball could make a hook (spin to the left) or a slice (spin to the right).

It's only a beginning, but here's a video of what I've done so far.

Ninja game

For a couple of months last year I was working on a 2D tile based platform game.  I created an editor to help me build the levels.  The game features a little ninja going about a level trying to find the exit.  You also need to get new abilities to be able to access the exit.  I want to add some enemies at some point, but for now I'm taking a break from this so I can concentrate on a new project I started in the beginning of 2011.

The following videos are best watched in 720p and in full screen because the tiles are pretty small.

Here's an early version of the editor

and a video of the game play when I stopped working on it

Billiard game

I worked on this for fun in 2009.  It was never finished as a game, but I learned from it.  Mostly about lighting, user input and camera movement.  I don't think I will go back to it at any point, this was just to have fun and many things would have to be rewritten.

Setup completed

I've just finish setting up this blog.  I've been postponing the creation for a while, but now I thought it was overdue.
I will post here about the game development projects I work on in my spare time.
I'm hoping that people reading will post comments, questions and feedbacks.

First off, I'm using C# with XNA for my game development.  It's a good combination for a single developer I think... or for a small group of developers. It lets you do the actual game programming without much of the low level setup required by DirectX or OpenGL.