Alex Roman has created an absolutely stunning CGI piece illustrating architecture art from a photographic point of view where main subjects are already-built spaces. Sometimes in an abstract way. Sometimes surreal. It’s absolutely brilliant.

This weekend, my friends and I cruised over to Austin to compete in this year’s Global Game Jam comp. We were given 48 hours to develop a game and we all felt that we did quite well given our limited time frame. Our team consisted of 4 programmers, 1 main artist and 1 character artist.

The Corporate Adventures of Mr. Mask is a game about a deceptive spy named Mr. Mask who endeavors to take down a corporation. To accomplish this daunting task, he must sneak past body guards with Fu-Manchu beards to get to the final sumo-wrestling boss. It’s quite badass.

This game is a Flash game which uses the flixel framework and it is hosted at: http://globalgamejam.org/2010/mr-mask.

During the development process, my friend Loren over at MutualDestruction hosted a blog which documented our 48 hour experience.

Anyhow, try it out and vote up if you like it.

Play it here! (Flash)

Above is a little test app I’ve created to show the deliciousness of the mass-spring damper system (also known as a harmonic oscillator). Move your mouse anywhere inside the box and it’ll swing the ball accordingly to emulate real mass-spring physics.

In this post, I will briefly explain how you can add a mass-spring damper system into your own engine to simulate cool swinging action.

Source code (Actionscript 3.0): [ MassSpringDamper.as ]

A limerick is a five-line poem which uses the strict form (AABBA). It is often intended to be witty or humorous. In this case, it’s a freakin’ hilarious commentary on a generic Zerg vs Terran match.

[Part 1 | Part 2]

During my winter break, I decided to embark on a glorious path into Adobe Flash-land. I have been coding my flash game for about a month and have been having a blast with the Actionscript 3.0 programming language.

As a programmer who has been developing in C++, I must say that I really enjoy using such a modern, dynamic language (although any languages besides C++ probably seems more “modern” than C++). It is great being able to develop a game that can be played on any browser that has Flash. And since Flash has been ported to such operating systems as Windows, Mac OSX and several Linux flavors, it is definitely a great way to tap into the PC gamer demographic. And if that isn’t enough, Adobe has also released a package that allows developers to bundle their games as native apps on the iPhone! What a great way to reach the masses.

Here is a video of a guy dressed up as an unicorn while holding a samurai sword. Although I am not completely sure, I am just going to go ahead and say that he’s Japanese.

I’ve recently taken upon myself to learn how to develop Flash games with Actionscript 3.0. Utilizing the Flixel framework, it was quite easy to quickly prototype a playable Flash game within a week or two.

Here is a game I am currently developing called Umi Island. It draws influences from such games as Plants vs Zombies, Pocket God, as well as some tower defense games.

I hope for Umi Island to be super awesome, as any game developer should feel about their game. But with school starting again in just a couple days, I am not sure how much time I can devote to this side project of mine.

Anyhow, if you are interested you can play the game here. Any feedback/criticism is welcome.

[Click here to play]