Game Jam: Balls to the Walls

I've been doing a game jam with Spartasoft this weekend. Spartasoft, MSU's video game development club, holds game jams on a regular basis where the club splits into teams to make games in a 48-hour time period (or at least its usually 48 hours). Currently I'm on a team with two Media Arts & Technology majors, which I'm working on picking up as a second degree. I'm a Computer Science major, so naturally I've made a lot of the art assets.  I decided to post some of the stuff I made, being as it is currently 3:27 in the morning and I'm working on the homework displaced by the game jam.

The theme for the game jam was simply the word "save."  Our game is based around self preservation where the player is a sphere whose life meter is steadily draining.  The game is multiplayer split screen and the players control their spheres with XBox 360 controls.  Players survive by collecting health pick-ups and give themselves an edge by getting a variety of power-ups.  Our game is made with Unity3d and the art assets are made with Autodesk Maya.  The snail shown above is a negative pick-up that temporarily makes the player slower.

The shoe is the inverse of the snail and it temporarily increases the player's speed.
The rocket power-up launches homing rockets into all of the other players.  It's probably the strongest power-up in the game and will be placed in the levels.
The Chinese food grants a random power-up.   We're considering weighting it so that players low on health tend to get better power-ups.  In the last stretch of the game jam we plan on doing quite a bit of level design and play testing to tweak it so that our game becomes a legitimately fun game.

Manatees in the workplace!

So I have a few minutes in between work and my first class, so I decided to upload a couple of shots of the manatee model I've been working on.  It's a pretty basic model, but it's also my first.  If the game actually turns out nicely I can always go back in and redo certain assets when I'm better at Maya or know an artist willing to help out.  Furthermore, I found out that at Sea World they feed their manatees a variety of vegetation including lettuce, spinach, and cabbage.  So I guess I could have cabbage collection as a component of my game and not give false impressions of what manatees eat.  However, the jellyfish idea definitely isn't realistic because manatees have no natural predators.

If you notice in the picture above, I got the skin attached to the bones, which means that I can move my model now.  Hopefully I'll be able to post a clip of some animations next week.  Right before I posted this I was watching manatee videos so I could have a better sense of how they naturally move, which roughly equates into me loving my job.

Manatees!

As one might guess by the title I gave my blog, I am quite fond of a marine mammal known as the manatee. I currently work in Michigan State University's GEL Lab, where I help make video games. My boss is having me do an independent project so I can learn how to use Unity and Autodesk Maya. I'm a little overwhelmed with the fact that I'm diving into 3d game development in my first semester of college, but at the same time its exciting that I'm getting paid to learn tools I probably wouldn't get to learn until a lot later in college.

Anyways, my independent project is currently a game that I have currently titled "Manatee Quest." I have a simple 3d model done in Maya with a basic bone structure, although I haven't added any IKs yet. I plan to have the player swim the manatee around an aquatic environment and collect cabbages and other goodies. I'm contemplating having jellyfish as enemies, but that wouldn't be very realistic (then again neither would cabbages).

With regards to being realistic, I'm also contemplating adding some tangential learning features. I originally had a different game concept floating around in my head after James Portnow gave an awesome presentation at the 2008 Meaningful Play conference. That idea is getting saved for later and I started on my manatee project without even realizing how easy it would be to implement some efficient tangential learning about my favorite animal.

I'll try to post my game on this blog when its completed, which might be a while, and it might not be any fun (so don't hold your breath). This whole blog entry about manatees was inspired by my adventures on the internet last night when I discovered this gem in the Mongoloids online store:

Election Day!

This one is going to be exciting!  The fact of the matter is that we have two candidates that are both moderate and somewhat close together in position.  Between that and the fact that we're coming off of an eight year presidency, this means that the election is probably both going to be very close and result in a very fresh set of opinions in the oval office.  Personally, I'm a big fan of considering third-party options before hopping onto one of the big two.  Not that there's a whole lot of time left to decide...

EA Layoffs

So, I'm a first year student in college and through my studies I hope to land a job in the video game industry (which as many will tell you, is not as easy as one would think).  I've been happy to hear all of the reports saying that the games industry is "recession proof," as it is still going strong and is expected to see growth yet again in the upcoming holiday season.

However, I don't particularly appreciate it when I see this in the industry news on gamasutra.com.  Layoffs in one of the largest companies in the industry might have nothing to do with the industry as a whole, but it does not bode well for a student hoping to get an internship at a company like EA, which was well known for taking a decent number of interns.   At least I'm not in the auto industry...