This was day 1 for the Alternator Brisbane Dev team. The amazing thing is nothing exploded.

So myself and 3 other people are looking after the Brisbane side of the Alternator Game project for the ABC. The project is going to run for about 6 months. I’m going to endeavour to document the whole thing and drop out updates. I want to make the whole stressful and insane process a little more stressful and insane by being as open as possible.

And so the video above. This is our first clean, build, break, fix, network, install day. And the funk music makes it sound a lot more awesome. We’ve moved into K Tower in the Valley with Defiant Development. A brand new studio started by Morgan Jaffit.

More info to come, as we wind down from all the red cordial of yesterday.

Music by Kutiman “The Mother Of All Funk Cords”
You can buy his stuff here And you should because he’s awesome.

I finally had a weekend off so I put together this face tracking PONG demo using openCV. It’s just like the original PONG. But. With. Your. Face. There should be a nice HD version at Vimeo. I try to explain what’s happening in the video so watch it to hear what’s going on. Strangely enough keeping composed while trying to smack cubes with your face is a little tricky.

March was insane. I got back home and the next day was the first class of the year. And I haven’t stopped. Every project I was working on came to a grinding halt. Which was a little annoying. But there is great stuff coming down the line that I’m looking forward to getting out there. GFSGames has their first lot of 3rd years and they are awesome.

But next week is the mid term break so it’s scramble to get ahead time. No rest for the wicked or the convenor.

MattD

theFIELD by matt ditton (AKA polymonkey)

This is my entry in the Jan 2010 comp running over at experimentalgameplay.com. The theme was 100 things. You can play it at the link below.

theFIELD

The game is called theFIELD. And it’s quiet meditation on cube collection. Turn the lights down, breath, relax and push some cubes.
Controls are UP DOWN LEFT RIGHT and SPACE. Hopefully their use will be obvious.

So far it’s taken about 5 days to get it to this point. I got the gameplay nailed down in the first day and then it’s been tweak this, tweak that for 4. I even spent half a day on a possibly pretentious title screen (but there are 100 letters in the title). The music is by the wicked Joel (JiveMaster) Bird

I must give a big “dude your awesome” to Shawn Eustace, who when I asked for comments gave me a page of things I didn’t even see.

Comments and criticism are warmly encouraged.

In which I test the uploading of a Unity Scene. How hard can it be?

‹‘−’›

Please view the full post to see the Unity content.

Getting this working took 4 hours. Not the scene. Just the posting to the web part. I’m not getting that time back.

But for all who come after, know this. thequietvoid is hosted through godaddy.com and at current they do not support the .unity3d file type as a known file. So after following the instructions from the Unity site. Installing the WP_UnityObject plugin. Making the changes to the functions.php that would allow .unity3d file uploads. Still nothing worked. The advice I found was to change the web.config file so that .unity3d is an allowed mim type on the server.

But web.config in the root has been hijacked by wordpress, so everytime I changed the xml the site stopped working. Sigh.

So how does it work at the moment you may ask ? Well, and don’t try this at home kids. I renamed the .unity3d file to .jpg. Made the change to src tag in WP_UnityObject and viola, the HACK IS ALIVE.

But it’s not right and I’m sure it’s going to break things if the scene try’s to access the browser. So now I have to go through the process of getting this fixed.

Bugger.

UPDATE: later that night

Ok, now it works. I had a nap. Thought on it. Fixed it. The trick is I just had to add a unique web.config file into the wordpress upload folder allowing the webserver to serve out the file. There now it works correctly. Before I forget this is the secret ingredient. Adding this to a file called web.config in the wordpress upload directory fixes the last of the problems.

I was working at Pandemic Brisbane for about 3 months before we merged with BioWare and Elevation Partners invested 300 million into the company. Two years later Pandemic and BioWare were sold to Electronic Arts for about 800 million. About 18 months later the Brisbane studio was shut down. Today the LA studio has also been shut down. Read about it here.
It’s interesting to note that John Riccitello left EA in 2004 to form Elevation to buy Pando/BioWare to then go back to EA in 2007 and buy Pando/BioWare from Elevation. According to this article he made 4.9 million from the deal (the second time)

And the image up the top? Well the high point on the left is when Pandemic was bought at $60 a share. And it’s been an impressive ski slope ever since.

48hr Game Challenge from Monkey Something

I’ve just had the best weekend I’ve had all year. I got 5 hours sleep. I ate nothing but crap (apart from Kieran’s pies). I lost it in front of some students, and we made a damn cute game.

This is Thunderheads Garden. You play a happy raincloud in the garden of the mad giant Thunderhead. You spend your days growing sunflowers and watching the happy bunnies multiply. But when Thunderhead gets angry he flips the world to hate and you have to use the flowers as a gasoline trail to wipe out the evil bunnies.

So it’s like a family game. And it’s for 3 players.

I’ll get a web version uploaded after another nap.

This could be a mistake.
Almost on a dare I put together a bunch of friends and we are all in the 48hr Game Making Challenge. GameOn/QUT/iCi/Acid and the amazing Truna have put together an impressive event. There will be 17 student teams and 3 pro teams competing over this weekend. I’m in the Monkey Something pro team and all 6 of us have never made a game in under 9 months, Actually I average 2 years to make a game. So 48 hours is going to be a stretch.
There will also be 3 very brave teams from the (Griffith Film School) Games Design, where I lecture. Milk n’ Pickles, Sick Fish and Immigration Office will all be part of the first public appearance of the Griffith Games students.
To make things more interesting nearly everyone on the 3 separate pro teams have worked together. So this could be the weekend for long held grudges to surface.
You can read about it here http://www.48hrgamecomp.com/ Over the weekend it will be blogged and streamed live at that address. Or you can rock up to QUT Kelvin Grove and check it out. Any time of the weekend really. We’ll all be there.
Those who are about to game salute you.

Up to speed on the game? Ok now look at this video. And read this post, it’s long but it’s worth the effort. That’s the toolset for Love. He wrote that. It’s awesome. His ideas on development are inspired.

I’ve been following this for a while now, since I saw this article. But the reason for posting about it is that it looks like it’s getting close to release. And I can’t wait.

Swarm (working title) from matt ditton on Vimeo.

In the mad panic at the beginning of semester I totally forgot to post this video to the game I’m working on. Swarm is all made in openframeworks for the iPhone. There are also a bunch of support tools that I wrote in processing as well. More info soon.

Pandemic Brisbane closed it’s doors yesterday.

I joined at the start of DAH2 and in the four years I was there I experienced the best working environment that I’ve ever known. If there are better teams and better people out there then I pray I find them one day.

At the end of DAH2 when THQ took the license back, The Bravo Team picked their name first so we became known as the Alpha Team. We moved upstairs, Bravo started up their game and we just kept working. That first 9 months of pitching and experimenting and trying to nail the game idea was amazing. It changed the way I work, the way I look at the job. The respect we had for one another was impressive. That doesn’t just happen. It’s built, day by day.

I equate it to a band that just kept playing, every month we got better. You’d know how every person would play. You’d know how everyone could shine. We got tight and the product was amazing. One day people will see it. And it’ll be seen for what it is. The best game we’ll all never finish.

Your faithful tech.

MattD