It’s been a few weeks since my last Escape from Alcatraz update, during which time I have implemented a camera system based on multiple fixed cameras, and point-and-click movement with navigation mesh pathfinding.
Escape from Alcatraz: Week One
The second year of Computer Games Programming at Derby University has begun, and as part of my Game Development Techniques module I am developing a point-and-click adventure game using the Unreal Development Kit (UDK) and Unreal Engine 3. The game, entitled Escape from Alcatraz, is based on Frank Morris’ infamous 1962 escape from the now defunct prison.
Project Maternity
Project Maternity was a 2010 Imagine Cup entry from Ninja Vikings with Claws’ (Dominic Bodman, Catarina Barros, Daniel Dexter, and myself). It made it to the second round of the competition — an non-trivial feat for first year students who had only a few weeks of development time..
Alien Swarm Holdout Mode
A big part of the Alien Swarm mod I’m working on is spawning aliens so that they attack in massive waves, rather than in response to triggers set off by the player. Luckily for me, the game’s SDK already includes a lot of this functionality in its incomplete Holdout mode (operated by the “asw_holdout_mode” entity).
Viewing Alien Swarm Models
Alien Swarm assets including models are all packaged into VPK (“Valve Pak”) files and cannot be accessed manually unless they are extracted with a tool such as Gibbed’s VPK Extractor.
Packaged models should be viewable with the Model Viewer but Alien Swarm‘s aren’t. That’s because the Model Viewer requires a proper folder/directory structure even if said folders don’t actually contain any models. Otherwise you’ll get a bunch errors.
Alien Swarm Mod: Dev Diary
Ninja Vikings with Claws (an indie game developer founded by myself and other students on my course) has started work on a modification of Valve’s freely available co-operative shooter Alien Swarm, and I’ve decided to document the development process.
Develop 2010 Expo Highlights
This year’s Develop conference in Brighton took place last month (July 14-15, 2010) and, while access to the conference itself carried a pretty hefty price tag, the expo that ran alongside it was free for anyone to attend. Headline-grabbing keynotes from the likes of Peter Molyneux and Tim Shafer were off limits to Expo-goers but a selection of smaller, 30 minute mini-sessions were open to everyone.
Harmonia
Harmonia was designed to be an asynchronous co-operative game for the Xbox 360 in which an experienced videogame player could support a less experienced player who was at the center of the gameplay experience.
Pseudo 2D Convex Hull Generation
While working with the separating axis theorem in a 2D XNA project, I started looking at ways to generate a tight-fitting convex hull around a sprite in order to implement more accurate collision detection than I would be able to with a standard bounding box.
Drawing 2D Primitives with XNA
As described on MSDN, drawing lines and other 3D Primitives with XNA involves defining vertices in world space, setting up an Effect, applying view and projection transformations, and finally making a call to the graphics card with a DrawUserPrimitives (or similar) call.