Games

Gravity Wells

gravity-wells-1

Dug up a project I had been working on a while ago that I want to revisit – a game prototype called Gravity Wells. The idea of the game is that’s it’s a somewhat typical 2.5D space shooter, except that objects you encounter have weight that deforms the 2D plane that the ship and obstacles sit on. The gravity wells that objects – enemy ships, asteroids, space debris, etc – create affect other objects and even the projectiles that the ship shoots. I had another thought that maybe the ship doesn’t even shoot, but instead has some sort of gravity manipulation device that requires you to fling objects into each other. Extremely heavy objects, a la black holes, could present some interesting options as well. This started as a quick Flash prototype for proof of concept but would be executed with webGL.

Ludum Dare 24

Ludum Dare is a quarterly rapid game development competition/event. You essentially have 48 to 36 hours to make a game from scratch based on a theme announced at the start, which is usually 9:00 PM on Friday. If you participate in the compo, you have just the 2 days to create everything yourself – code, design, audio, etc. The more relaxed jam gives you 36 hours, lets you work in a team, and is more lenient on the usage of open source libraries, etc. After submission the community plays and votes for their favorites in multiple categories such as graphics, mood, humor, etc.

For my first jam, I worked with my fiancée to create a short game. I naturally did the game development in AS3, and Erin hand-made all the graphics as actual cross-stitch, even down to the font. This round’s theme was Evolution, and there were 1406 entries, 400 of them in the Jam. I will admit, however, the concept based on the theme is a bit of a stretch.

You can check out our entry here and read the post-mortem here. It was a lot of fun and we even managed to tie for 10th place for Graphics!

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Star Gazer game

I took an independent study in which I was going to explore using a special 3D television, but due to complications involving having access to the equipment and information, I was not able to complete it. So instead I made a game created with 3D graphics from Cinema 4D. It was a simple idea that I’ve had for a while, so it worked out nicely.