Personal Projects

______________________________________________________________________________

3D Civilisation

I decided to give myself a project over the holidays to keep my brain active. I've always wanted to make some sort of civilisation simulator so decided now was a good time to start it. This isn't exactly a game and it's not something I am planning on publishing or anything, just trying to simulate a group of people surviving, generating food, building houses. The player may join in with the world but will have as much impact as the AI characters. I'm hoping this will turn into a nice summary of everything I've learned at MDS so far, with AI, rendering techniques I didn't get to try out during class and perhaps some multithreading to increase the performance of the AI. We'll see how it goes...
The aim of this is to get AI that will make decisions by itself based on what it decides is best for the state of the village, instead of having a fixed set of commands or particular state.
Started building this using the OpenGL framework but have switched to DirectX again now.

So far I have only really been focusing on rendering techniques. The AI currently just moves to random waypoints and avoids obstacles. Skeletal Animation of my chickens is nearly complete, using Assimp, however some vertices are still flying off to infinity.

Christmas Update
I've changed all of the 2D billboard sprites into 3D models, still just chickens, humans and trees. Since week 01 I've mainly just been working on changing my DirectX framework to be more like my OpenGL one, as I much prefer that framework. I've changed the pipeline to suit a deferred shading pipeline. Deferred lighting is now working really well, although I'm not yet rendering the lights to a texture as objects. Once this is done the performance will be much better. I've recently also added grass to the terrain using the Geometry Shader. This turned out to be much more efficient than I thought it would be. I'm currently rendering 250,000 grass blades at a time and maintaining a decent framerate. Will switch to developing on my laptop from now on in order to optimise the game for that.

Start of Production
Currently featuring a couple of humans and their chickens, in a spiral forest.
Below are some screenshots of the state of the framework so far.

Added lighting and radial blur

______________________________________________________________________________

OpenGL Renderer

Started working on an OpenGL Renderer using Glew to handle the extension libraries for me.
Used this framework for the cloth simulation summative for Media Design School.

Got some inspiration while playing Arma 3 to try turning my OpenGL framework into some sort of flight simulator. Obviously nothing like Arma but it gave me a purpose and target to work towards with this framework, so decided to make use of my OBJ reader and imported a REALLY ROUGH helicopter and fixed wing model. Both the fixed wing and helicopter can fly at the moment but they require a lot more work. It's pretty horrible at the moment.

3rd Person cam

Fixed wing cockpit

Added "head" rotation independent of ship rotation

MDS - 2nd Year

______________________________________________________________________________

Do You Even Lift?

This is a local multiplayer forklift puzzle game for two players. Forklifts must work together to solve puzzles and exit the level, while the boss robot attempts to stop their escape.

Amongst other things, I am responsible for the fork lifting mechanic, the Boss robot AI, the Level select scene and writing shaders.

This game is also made using Unity with C#. We presented this game at the December Game Developers Meetup, 2013.

Team Members

Artists: Shawn Elliot, Dean Barile, Josh Rawlings and Natanel Apfel

Programmers: Chris Johnson, Ben Carnall and Myself

______________________________________________________________________________

Magical Train Adventure

The purpose of this assignment was to give the first years their first group game experience. The game had to be a non-violent game featuring a certain constraint. Our constraint was that the game had to feature an umbrella, or an object which was used in a way other than how it's intended.

The game our team decided upon was a cooperative network multiplayer game in which the players have to work together to control a train. Each player uses an android device as a controller to interact with the train on the server, running on PC. In order to achieve this we used Unity with C#. We presented this game at the December Game Developers Meetup, 2013.

Team Members

Artists: Lena Yaroshenko, Tom Lowbridge and Terai Tauvavau

Programmers: Steve Johnson and Myself

Our team consists entirely of second year students.

The following video demonstrates a driver controlling the height of the train tracks. Once the required upgrade is unlocked they take the train to space.

Each player has two scenes on their android device.

Inventor Device
Left:Inventors upgrade bench with mixing bowl
Right: Puzzle scene for combining elements to make upgrades

Engineer Device
Left: Engineers furnace - shovel coal to give power to driver
Right - Passenger compartment - they may get set on fire in the presence of umbrellas

Driver Device
Left: Driver Scene - move handle to make train go faster
Right: Handle controls height of train tracks. Upgrades required to move to space or underwater

______________________________________________________________________________

Decap-a-Weta

This assignment is a group project. The purpose of this assignment was to produce a game prototype while closely following a chosen Software Engineering Methodology. Our team chose to follow Agile.

I acted as Team Leader for this assignment. Fortunately I had a fantastic team who managed themselves well and thus required very little leading.

The project started by our tutor going around MDS asking people to put words into a hat which they thought would be really hard to make a multiplayer game out of. We drew the word "Weta". Our initial inspiration came from games such as Joust (1982).

The programming tasks were divided equally between us and, as our team consisted entirely of programmers, Ben and I created the art for the game. 

Decap-a-Weta is a battle arena game featuring people armed with javelins riding on the backs of wetas. The characters can climb walls and jump high. The aim is to get a higher kill count than the other players within the given time period. For the prototype we created two levels, each with a unique environmental obstacle which the players had to avoid. For the forest level, a giant eagle would attack the player from one of the four corners, while in the "Goo" level the players could die by falling into a fit of goo through holes in the level.
This game is created using Unity. For most of us, this was our first experience with Unity and C#.

Team Members: Ben Carnall, Chris Johnson, Steve Johnson and Myself.

Final Grade: A-

The screenshots below don't quite do the game justice, it gets very hectic with four players and the eagle.

______________________________________________________________________________

Physics

Final Physics Grade: A-

Summative 2: Cloth Simulation

For this summative we had to make a cloth simulation. 

The cloth below features collisions with the ground, sphere and itself. It can be dragged and torn with the mouse and is blown by the wind. The scene has adjustable wind levels using the + and - keys. The pin points at the top of the cloth (similar to curtain loops) can be moved closer to each other and further apart.

For this I used C++ with OpenGL for rendering.

Curtain Ring movement

Sphere collision

Cloth Tearing

Torn Cloth

Summative 1: Grumpy Birds

The aim of this assignment was to create a game of "Grumpy Birds" using the Box2D engine.

For this I used C++ with DirectX 10.

______________________________________________________________________________

Networking & Multithreading

This assignment was to make a game called "Candy Grab" using Networking and Multithreading.
In Candy Grab, players must run around a store collecting candy. Each pickup grants the player 15 extra health, colliding with another player or wall reduces their health by 5. Once the player's health reaches 0, they are kicked out of the store. While a large number of players may join the game, only 4 players may be inside the store at any one time, after this the doors are locked (blue squares at the top-left). If a player is kicked out of the store, the doors are opened again.
I wanted all of the major calculations to take place on the server side. For this to work efficiently multi-threading is used to process the player input and collision detection. Once a player joins the server, they are each assigned a thread. Each frame the client sends the user input to the server, each server thread will process the input of the player it is assigned to and, once all input has been processed. After this it checks for collisions between their new positions and responds to these accordingly. Once all collisions have been processed the final positions of each player are sent back to the client for rendering.
This design allows the client executables to focus almost entirely on rendering alone while the server manages the rest.

For this I used C++ with DirectX 10 for rendering.

Final Artificial Intelligence Grade: A+

______________________________________________________________________________

MySQL Database Summative "Undead Moa"

This assignment was to utilise MySQL to populate a database of student, lecturer, summatives and other information. This was a group assignment. We decided we wanted to make this database interface something interesting and fun to use, so we made an interactive cube interface. The cube can be rotated across the Y-Axis only and each face of the cube acts as a separate menu. This allows the user to have four databases open at once (one for each face of the cube), each rendered to a texture and placed on the cube.

The user can click on a menu item and edit the contents, this will save it back into the MySQL database.

We named the interface "Undead Moa" in honour of the old Media Design School intranet.

Team Members: Steven Johnson, Chris Johnson, Declan Wong, Harrison Thrupp and Myself

Database Grade: A

Undead Moa with two different databases open.

______________________________________________________________________________

Artificial Intelligence

The purpose of this assignment was to demonstrate an understanding of different AI techniques. We had to chose five techniques from a list and swap between these in the same executable. Other AI summatives included behaviour trees, minmax trees, binary trees, A* Path finding and solutions to Tower of Hanoi and Connect 4.
For this I used C++ with DirectX 10 for rendering.

Final Artificial Intelligence Grade: A

1: Obstacle avoidance: They avoid fixed obstacles, other AI and the screen walls. Large circles represent fixed obstacles in the scene.

2: Seek

3: Evasion / Flee

 4: Flow Field following

 5: Path following

______________________________________________________________________________

DirectX 10 Graphics & HLSL

The purpose of this assignment was to demonstrate a graphics technique using DirectX 10's shader pipeline.

I chose shadow mapping for this assignment. This demo features soft shadow mapping, adjustable bloom, adjustable colour correction, normal maps, a skybox and diamond-square generated terrain.

The light / shadow map texture can be seen in the top-right viewport.

Final Graphics Grade: A

MDS - First Year

______________________________________________________________________________

Battle Tanks

Our first team project at Media Design School. Final project for our first year. I acted as Lead Programmer on this project.

Battle Tanks is a local multiplayer game for two players or one player and an AI player. The aim is to destroy the enemy base using your tank. Each base spawns waves of drones. You need to push back the enemy drones and defeat the enemy tank, capturing waypoints along the way, until your drones reach the enemy base. Destroying entities grants you additional "Memory" which can be spent on purchasing upgrades and additional tank weapons.

My main role in this project was working on the navigation AI for the drones and enemy tank, as well as terrain generation, map loading and a couple of other things.

Team Members: Amy Harman, Ben Carnall, Mathew Hale, Jonathan Hill, Christopher Howlett

______________________________________________________________________________

Polygon Soup

3D Game using DirectX 9. Assignment was to make a top-down shooter similar to games like Robotron and Geometry Wars. 

______________________________________________________________________________

2D Pool Game

This game was made to demonstrate our understanding of collision detection. Made using C++ and GDI.

______________________________________________________________________________

Alby and the Solar Jetpack

First 2D Sprite game. Made using C++ with Windows GDI for rendering.

Aim is to reach the sun with your jetpack. Jetpack is solar powered and can be refueled by collecting sunlight from the clouds. Replenish Alby's hunger bar by collecting Lamb Shanks on the way.

______________________________________________________________________________

Battle Ships

First game at Media Design School
Written in C++
Artificial Intelligence included
        Player vs. AI
        AI vs. AI
Features manual ship positioning