I have been messing around a bit with HTML5 Canvas lately, trying to see what all the hub-bub was about. I must say, it is pretty neat and Javascript (V8) runs quite fast on Google Chrome. V8 is not as fast as native code generated from C/C++, but it is also not as slow as many scripting languages like Lua or Gamemonkey.

My first test while learning HTML5 was to produce a retro underwater visualizer. I was heavily inspired by the beautiful aesthetic of aquariums and wanted to capture its 8-bit nature. The art assets were taken from my game. You can flick/move the screen with your mouse and the camera moves with physically modeled momentum. This visual has been tested on Firefox 5, Safari iOS 5.0, Google Chrome, Opera 11.

This project took me about half a week to create. Most of the art assets were made by Mike Hussinger.

[ View Here (HTML5) ]

The beat shatters the sphere and ripples the vertices in hues of magenta and cyan. Fragments on screen become audio-reactive and dance to the wonderful music of Rei Harakami.

This new visualizer was developed in my own personal 3d engine. It is coded in C++ and uses OpenGL for the graphics. The fmod sound library provides FFT spectrum data of the song. I enable certain elements of the visualizer to react to the frequencies which causes it all to dance wonderfully.

It’s been over a month now since I’ve started working as a programmer at Q-Games. And indeed, it has been very exciting, satisfying and educational. I am currently stationed on the PixelJunk team, doing mostly graphics for the upcoming PS3 title, PixelJunk LifeLike.

It’s hard to describe what Lifelike really is. Baiyon, the musician and visual designer of the title, described Lifelike as an “amoeba of life, reacting to your music”. I would not consider it a “game” in the traditional sense of the word — it’s more like an organic musical instrument that grows and responds visually to the sound. But regardless of what genre you want to place it in, Lifelike is one badass title.

I wanted to spread the word and announce that LifeLike was voted 1up’s Most Innovate Game in E3! Very exciting news indeed! Below is a recording of the game in action at an E3 press conference:

Yesterday, I landed in Japan to embark on my new life as a programmer for Q-Games, an independent video game studio located at the heart of Kyoto, Japan.  Q-Games is perhaps best known in the states for their Pixeljunk series of games (such as Eden, Monsters, Shooter) on PlayStation 3′s PSN platform.

Kyoto is indeed a beautiful city. It is alive with the wonderful colors from the spring season’s bloom of cherry blossoms. As the former ancient capital of Japan (before it was changed to Tokyo), Kyoto is a exquisite blend between ancient Japanese heritage and modern digital life.

I am extremely excited to be in the game industry. And to be part of the famous Q-Games studio is truly a dream come true. Nevertheless, I will keep you all up to date on my endeavors. Cheers!

Lately, I’ve been mega-engulfed in simulating flocking behavior using the Boids algorithm. I’ve implemented it before, but this time, I wanted to take it to the next level by adding a trailing ribbon system that caches the previous positions of the boids and renders them out as connected line segments.

The positioning of the boids not only follow traditional flocking rules (separation, alignment, cohesion) but are also influenced by pseudo-random vectors provided by a 3D Perlin noise function. Adding Perlin noise gives the boids real-life “emergent” behavior as they swarm and swirl in random directions. The boids also have a tendency to lean towards the origin so that the boid simulation stays confined within a volume.

The cool blue geometry in the center is simply a triangle fan (GL_TRIANGLE_FAN) that uses the positions of the boids as its vertices. The vertices are offset by the center of the boids so that the object continually stays in the origin of the 3D system.

The camera is implemented using a mass-spring physics system. I wanted the camera to continuously follow the boids and point towards its center. However, I didn’t want the camera to move around erratically and make the viewer nauseous. Adding this mass-spring system allowed for smooth camera movement while following the flocking system nicely.

The simulation was coded in C++ using the awesome Cinder library. Music by Toe.

[ Download (.exe) ]

In an effort to bring the classical Conway’s Game of Life in to the 3D realm, I have coded this sample 3D application in C++. This was also an excuse for me to check out the popular C++ library, Cinder. Great library.

Basically, what’s going on is you apply the traditional cellular automata rules in 3D space. That is, instead of checking the surrounding 8 neighbors like you do in 2D space, you check the 26 neighbors in 3D space. Doing so gives you the results above.

[ Download (.exe) ]

Over this past weekend, I’ve participated in the Global Game Jam 2011 event hosted at USC. Global Game Jam is an annual event where aspiring game makers from all walks of life congregate together to create a game in 48 hours.

The game we produced was called Sun God. In this game, you play as an omnipotent God which controls the weather in order to prevent the militant vegetarians from consuming the island’s endangered plants. The theme of this year’s Global Game Jam was “extinction”, and we felt that the mechanics and art direction of Sun God supported the theme quite well. However, there is no end-state of the game; basically the goal is to survive as long as possible.

The game was developed by Team Sol Train, which consisted of five people: two programmers and three artists. My role in the team was the lead programmer, game designer and sound designer of our game.

I truly believe that we did an incredible job scoping the game to be completed and polished in 48 hours. The problem that plagued many other teams was that they were too ambitious and thus overscoped their project. However, we were able to build mechanics that were relatively easy to program and test. We also allocated several hours for “polishing”, which consisted of playtesting and balancing the game.

All in all, I think we developed an addictive game that captured the deep human desire for omnipotence and purification. We did this by introducing chaos management, a mechanic that is extremely popular in many genres. The only difficulty was being able to balance the game so that the difficulty curve was inline with the player’s increasing skill level. After several playtests and feedback from our testers, we were able to respond and balance the game accordingly (although I would admit, the game still seems a bit hard).

Overall, it was incredibly fun and definitely an invaluable experience to be remembered. I hope yall enjoy the game!

[ Play | Official Entry ]

Well, graduate school is finally over and now I’ve been spending most of my time deciding what I should do next. In the mean time, I’ve been noodling around with mobile development on the Android platform.

This is my first attempt at coding an Android app, which I named Aquatic Pixels. Aquatic Pixels is basically a non-interactive screen-saver that depicts an aquarium in pixel art. The art was borrowed from my other game, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, and ported into this underwater screen-saver. Above is the app running on the Galaxy tab. This application is built on top of the AndEngine framework and will run on any device that has Android OS version 2.2 or above.

Currently, there is no interactivity with the scene. However, I plan to add updates which allow the players to interact with the scene. Perhaps, I might even develop some simple progression mechanics. Stay tuned!

To download, search for “Aquatic Pixels” on your Android Market app or go directly there. If you have a QR scanner, you can simply scan the image below with your device:

I am very happy to present to you the new theme song for the underwater scene of my flash game, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea. The song comes from the creative mind of Brandon Day, who is the musical composer for all the tracks in the game.

I apologize for not having made much progress in the past few weeks. I’ve been busy wrapping up the final weeks of grad school. But I do plan to get back in to full production once all the chaos has settled.

The screenshot above shows two types of the enemies that you can encounter in the underwater environment. I plan to have a total of 14 types of underwater enemies. Each creature presents a different strategic challenge to the player. I hope that by varying the features of each enemy, that it will provide meaningful choices for the player to make in order to progress through the level.

So stay tuned for some updates! I plan to start coding up some enemies very soon.

Using OpenFrameworks, I coded this wiggly little particle system that renders organic-looking tentacles in real-time. I was heavily inspired from the movement of underwater anemones and decided to try to imitate its behavior.

With 2D Hermite splines, I was able to render the curves in color-shaded line segments. The tangents and positions are warped slightly every frame using sinusoidal waves to give that life-like wiggly behavior.

Feel free to download it and check it out for yourself. Use left-click to spawn a large entity and right-click to spawn a smaller entity. Press R to reset the app and F to set it to full-screen. Enjoy!

[ Download (.exe) | Screenshot ]