XNA experiment: Swarming Plasma

Finally something I can say I made entirely myself, though I'm grateful for the help I received from the rest of the team on the way.

This simple project is a result of me wanting to make something that would resemble a living thing, or in this case a bunch of them. The swarming AI is very crude, but it works just fine for something like this. Though I say it myself, the result is quite beautiful.

I have some future plans for this one, maybe making it into a screensaver if nothing else. I would like to develop the AI further and add more objects that could interact with eachother, and create some sort of creative enviroment for all those things to play in. :P

The video will hopefully give a better image of what this is about:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jW7IhrRLGBM

Tailbot technology demo

The Tailbot was supposed to be one of the stars of our grand game for Imagine Cup '10, but due some misunderstandings along the process we are not holding very high hopes for passing Round 1.

Teemu did practically all creative coding in this one, I merely programmed the menus and made some very hasty placeholder graphics. The whole team took part in designing the game however, and the Tailbot and the way its tail is programmed is a fruit of one late night brainstorming session. Oh yea, this one too is programmed in XNA 3.1.

We still have lots of ideas and even concrete plans in store, and given enough time we could very well turn this into a full game.

Video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psPt0mg90E4

SDL Artillery - C++ practise

This is just a simple artillery game made for C++ and Advanced Networking classes using SDL, but it works quite nicely and is fun to play from what I've heard from our small team of beta testers.

This time around I did about 1/2 of the coding, including random generation of the map, collision detection, destructable terrain... Well, basically everything that has something to do with the map, including graphics. Those features are fairly simple, but they work.

I also programmed practically the whole networking part together with Teemu; I can take pretty much all responsibility of designing and building the protocol of data being sent and received. Teemu helped me getting all those great ideas work. :P

Video here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRg4SHe99vE

UPDATE:

SDL Artillery just became out first game with networking, and it works, too. :D

There were some issues using the networking on teacher's computer while we were getting the game evaluated, but we suspect that's either caused by firewall or the peculiar school networking.

Lost Flame - Global Game Jam game by TJR

Lost Flame is the result of a little under 48 hours of innovation and hard work in Global Game Jam 2010 @ KAJAK. We had an excellent team working on the game; not only we managed to create a complete game within the time limit, but also had fun working on it. Not to mention that Lost Flame was the only 2D game that made it into the Finnish Game Jam finals from KAJAK. :D

This time I can't take any credit for the code, a few minor ideas I contributed aside maybe. We all did our part in the game design, which turned out to work just as it was supposed to. Brainstorming session in the beginning gave as a direction and a basic idea to work on, and rest of the ideas we needed came along the way.

I made the graphics entirely by myself... And it shows, unfortunately, I'm no artist. Especially not given the time limit and a working environment that I'm not used to. But the graphics work well enough for the game and that's good enough for my first try at making graphics for a whole game.

Besides the graphics and design I spent some time working on the little necessary documentation needed for the GGJ entry.

The game and further description + instructions can be found here:
http://www.globalgamejam.org/2010/lost-flame

And a video here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkNW20loO7s


PS. They put us on a newspaper too, the online version is available (in Finnish) here. :D

Shiva: A summer project by TJR

Project Shiva is the first thing from TJR that can be regarded as a real game. It's basically a top-down space shmup survival with no real story so far. The game started as an ambitious summer project, but had to be cut down a little as the deadline for our school's competition we had entered started to close down on us. We worked hard for the last two weeks and it paid off, earning us the first place and a chance to attend Assemly Summer 2009.

The game got a nice response from the public, we were even asked if it's available on Live Arcade. :D

Shiva is a project where every member of our team of three has worked on pretty much every area; right from design to the code and graphics. Personally I can take responsibility for the in-game background generation, some graphics, some of the design and documentation, plus too many bits and pieces to list individually. Brainstorming was found to be very efficient when designing, and much of the game was programmed in a group.

We still have plenty of ideas to develop Shiva further, just need to find more time... One of those things is to make a small site or blog just for Shiva, to explain the game and the process behind it further.

For now, you can watch our awesome showreel on youtube. :P