Month: August 2009

kinda green

It’s been odd these past couple days for me to be so dang “glass half full”. Tho I think it’s related to a) forementioned great project; b) wifey and I finally reached 100% on Lego Star Wars (those who play know that isn’t easy); and c) completing an independant game called Iji.

To those who play, Iji is a classic side scrolling platformer with great writing, great music, and a main character you can believe. Tho what really got my bacon was the ending stats screen which said I killed a huge number of enemy characters I didn’t need to. This is after an entire storyline devoted to the idea of the insanity of having to kill just to get your voice heard. It really hit me how greatful I am knowing I don’t have to make decisions of that order of magnitude in my real life.

While I’d like to say my kill ratio was just because I’ve played games so long, the fact that I can look back and see many places I could have just run makes me think I should not be playing such violent games.

This week’s buzzword: Augmented Reality

Since iPhone 3gs came out with it’s compass everyone has been talking about augmented reality. So we jumped on the bandwagon. In two weeks I’ve made a full on game for augmented reality on the iPhone complete with skin animated butterflys, full UI, and fairies with fast beating wings. And it’s fun, too!

We can show as many butterflies as we want- it shares the animation results and only processes it once a frame. I really like the engine I wrote over this last couple years. It’s sad that the other projects it’s been in haven’t been very commercially sucessful. This project is different- it’s not being held back anymore. Now that it reads Interface Builder files directly it doesn’t need a secondary user interface engine.

This time around we finally have an honest to goodness technical artist. Every 3d house must have one, and we have a great guy!

Dunno when the publisher will release it but I’m excited about how fast and well we made it!