Unity 3D: Rollmites

Rollmites is the name of a game project I started after college. A Rollmite is a little robotic creature that rolls into a ball and transforms into various forms. Rollmites live in an abstract world built out of pinball and pachinko parts.

Rollmites is a 3d action puzzle game that plays like a cross between mini-golf and pinball. To play the game you start by powering up its rocket booster, aiming, and launching it into the air, it then curls into a ball and moves like a pinball. You must try to destroy all the enemies on the playfield, which stand in different places kind of like the different holes on a golf course. When you destroy an enemy you gain its power. Each enemy represents a type of movement.  When you gain a power, you can only use it for a set amount of time before you return to your ball form. Each power is a different form that moves in a unique way: Jumping into the air, rolling like a wheel, bouncing like a top and drilling into the ground, gliding like a paper airplane, and flying like a jet. Powers can be used one after the other to advance the rollmite around the field. For example you might activate jump and launch upward, then active glide and glide downward towards an enemy, then smash through that enemy, gaining wheel power and using it to spin up a hill towards another enemy, and so on.

Jump man

Flying man

Roller man

The game is turn based, when the rollmite stops moving the turn is over, you do not have direct control over the rollmite and must aim it carefully and use the powerups you gain at the right time and in the right order to get a high score. It is a fairly unconventional game and really needs to be seen to be understood:

At the end of each turn you lose 1 'battery points'. If you drain your batteries completely you die and must restart the stage. Every time you destroy an enemy you gain 0.5 battery points. Thus it gets harder to survive as you run out of enemies to destroy.
 Once you have destroyed all the enemies and are down to 1 remaining, the remaining enemy turns into a portal that when entered, transports the player to the next stage, or a bonus stage depending on the score.
 The bonus stage is an endlessly long, randomly generated, pachinko machine board that you fall through until you fall into one of the exit portals on the sides of the board. As you fall you can press a button to pulse a force field around you that can push you off of the surrounding surfaces and project yourself in different direction. The goal of the bonus stage is to collect bubbles that float up from the bottom of the screen as you fall. bubbles contain powerups which can be used in the next stage.
Rollmites was a very ambitious project for me and eventually fell by the wayside as I began working full time. It is playable currently but still needs a ton of work.

Board game: Dragon's Gold

I challenged myself to design a board game that was skill based, and used real physics as a game play mechanic. I started the design process by gathering a bunch of small objects of various shapes and sizes and a chess board. I had chess pieces, marbles, wooden cubes, and a pile a change. I sat there and played with the different objects, like a kid might do, just observing how they moved and interacted. I would try to get something interesting to happen, and then make up rules. I stacked a bunch of quarters and flicked another quarter at the stack and saw that I could knock quarters out of the stack without knocking the whole stack over. I kept flicking coins at the stack, knocking out one after the other, and it got shorter and shorter. Sometimes the stack would shift when a coin was knocked out, becoming unstable, so that on the next flick of the coin it would topple over. There was enough happening here to make a whole game around it I thought. I would gradually refine the rules and game board over about 8 months.

The game board went through many redesigns and name changes. I was originally calling it stack attack, then column crash, dueling column, then finally dragon's gold.

The first board was drawn and colored by hand using drafting tools. I used the cardboard back of a sketch pad. I then bought a sheet of clear vellum and some decorative wood trimming to make the board. The glue I used to paste the vellum to the board, melted the marker color and smudged it pretty badly once I had glued it down. I might have been done with this project but that accident made me want to remake the whole thing digitally and not worry about messing up many hours worth of work.

And Here's the redesign I did with Inkscape, which is basically an open-source copy-cat of Illustrator. I got the graphic printed as a laminated poster and pasted it to a wooden board. I then added wooden walls around the center region (painted bright green) to keep the coins from flying off the board.

Up until this point I had not considered selling the game, but people seemed to really like playing it so I had to think about how a consumer who has never met me might think of the game. My art style and theme choices were basically whatever I though looked cool and I had little regard for creating a coherent theme or visual narrative. So the next thing to do was to come up with a story for what was happening in the game. This would mean I would have to, yet again, redesign the game board...

I drew another handmade version of the game, this time on high quality paper, inked it, and scanned it into the computer. I then traced the drawing in Inkscape to come up with what you saw at the start of this post. All in all the project took a huge amount of time, but it was worth it, the final product really does look like something one would buy at a store.

Unity 3D: Beat DNA. a music game experiment.

Concept:

Beat DNA is a music game about sequencing notes together in 8-bar sequences. You can layer sequences, combine sequences and transform them in different ways to earn points and create rhythmic music. You are a 'Sonic Cell', a machine that collects and absorbs small clips of sound to create smaller Sonic Cells that play back those sounds repeatedly in a loop. In an abstract way it is an analogy for how new cells are formed from a sequence of genes, except the 'genes' in this game are sound clips, the 'cell' is a little machine that plays those sound clips.

The Sonic cell moves around the screen grabbing other 'cells' that resemble different musical instruments; drum cells contain a snare drum sound, cymbal cells contain a cymbal sound, etc. The cells you grab are absorbed and snap into place on one of the place holder slots on your Sonic Cell's tail. The tail has 8 segments, when all 8 are occupied by a captured cell, the cells combine to form a new Sonic Cell. The new Sonic Cell will float along side the player and emit a loop of sound. The more Sonic Cells you form, the more complex the rhythms, and the more points you rack up.

The silver and purple object is your Sonic Cell with it 8-segment tail.

Green objects: drum cells, orange: hi-hat cell, silver: cymbal cell.

Sonic Cell with captured cells.

Two mini Sonic Cells have been created. Each one contains a sequence of 8 sounds that loop continuously.

Unity 3D: Jurassic Rumble

Story

This game started out as joke idea, until me and a buddy decided to turn it into an actual game.
The premise for Jurassic Rumble is this: One day, during the time of the dinosaurs, God was watching the earth from his throne in heaven. He had become bored of the way things were progressing on earth and decided he was ready for a change. He would bring an end to the age of the dinosaurs by hurling meteors towards the earth. God called on Satan to help him, and Satan proposed they make a game out of it. Wielding golf clubs, God and Satan would stand on the moon and launch meteors at the earth, competing for the most casualties.

Game Play

The game is 2 player. The player chooses to be either God or Satan. Every turn the player launches a ball from the moon. On the earth, hundreds of dinosaurs walk around, keep in mind the game is supposed to be silly so nothing is a realistic scale. First you line up the shot by rotating left or right. Second you press the fire button to begin charging up power for your swing, then press fire again to swing the club. The ball launches from the surface of the moon and is pulled in by the earths gravitational pull, if you hit the ball right you can even put it into orbit! The ball hits the earth and rolls to a stop, ending your turn. When your ball hits a dinosaur, the dino will explode, propelling your ball forward. Points are added up until the ball comes to a stop. Each player has 3 balls. The player with the most kills at the end wins.

During your turn you can activate different power-ups depending on how many consecutive kills you have gotten on that turn.

Round 1: Player 2 is playing God. PL2 charges up a shot. 

The ball flies into orbit and bursts into flames.

The ball impacts 2 dinos, who explode sending the ball flying in the opposite direction.

Satan uses the Hurricane power-up.

3D Modeling: Household Objects

Common household objects was the theme of the final project in my 3D modeling class. I made a Gillette Mach 3 Razor.

Unity 3D: Tidal Fury

single player

two player split-sceen

Tidal Fury is a game that pits two boats against each other in head to head combat. The game was coded in Java using the Unity 3D game engine. This was a group project, my part was coding the game play, and modeling and animating one of the boats (the red one).
   The project presented many unique programming challenges; Realistic buoyancy for the boats, split-screen multiplayer, a mini-map, a cannon that adjusts for the rocking of the boat using a counter weight, a homing missile that locks on to a player when they are within range, and cannon bullets that skip off the surface of the water.
   One of the more interesting challenges was handling the 3D sound for both players. Unity 3D has built in code for handling 3D sound.  There is a sound source, an object that emits a sound from a specific location, and a sound listener, the object that picks up that sound and outputs it to the left and right speaker channels in a way that simulates depth. But, add another player, and you need 2 sound listeners, which is not allowed by Unity. To get around this we had a single sound listener for both players. When a sound is played, it spawns a sound source relative to the sound listener. So, if there is an explosion between player1 and player2, the closest player to that explosion is found, then the relative distance from that player to the explosion is calculated. This relative distance is then given to the sound listener object, which spawns a sound source in an equivalent relative distance from itself.

Player 1: Air-Boat Tank

Hybrid Pinball/Video Game: Making pinball popular again.

Problem: Pinball is no longer popular.

Overview:
Pinball is an interesting part of gaming history that is now dead in the eyes of the mainstream gaming audience. In a broader scope, pay-to-play arcade games are pretty much dead. Arcade games, like pinball, just can't compete with the kind of sophisticated play experiences one can have at home. However, people still enjoy arcade style gaming that incorporates new interesting ways to play, think DDR, guitar hero/rock band, Wii, Xbox connect. You could place all these into a category of games that offer a unique tactile experience, and they were all very successful because of that factor.

Graphic Design: Corporate Executive Club

This is the front and back of a business card I made while working for Corporate Executive Club (CEC). CEC is an Orlando based company that hosts social events for executives to meet other execs and people in a variety of industries.
The card was made using Inkscape, an open source clone of Adobe illustrator, and Gimp, an open source clone of Photoshop.

Hybrid Pinball/Video Game RPG: Silver Striker

Silver Striker is a hybrid pinball machine/video game. The only other example that comes to mind is the
Baby Pacman Arcade Machine
Silver Striker is a role playing pinball game RPPG. The RPG element of the game is your typical final fantasy/dragon quest style RPG with random battles, experience points, hp/mp, and so on. What makes Silver Striker unique is its unusual pinball controller, called the Striker Controller.

 
The Striker Controller works like the mechanical version of the Pong (arcade game) paddle. You grip the controller by the two handles and move it back and forth along the guide rail. When the pinball hits the launcher, press the Launch button with your index finger to send the ball flying across the play field. The Launcher mechanism works exactly like a pinball bumper. A typical pinball bumper has a thick band of rubber stretched between two posts, when the ball hits the rubber a switch is triggered and a third post, located in the middle of the rubber band, shoots forward pushing the band outward, stretching into a triangle shape. The ball is launched forward if it contacts the middle of the band, or it is launched at an angle depending on how far it is from the center, much like how the Pong paddle worked.

This is how a typical battle sequence would play:

You choose an area on the map from a list using the left and right buttons. You then watch your party of 4 warriors walk to the chosen destination on the map. During their journey to the chosen destination they may run into a pack of monsters and a battle will be initiated.
The monsters are arranged on the screen in 4 separate areas, each battle target corresponds to its adjacent area on the screen. So when the ball hits one of the battle targets, it counts as an attack on that region of the screen. As the battle progresses, the monsters move towards the foreground, if they make it all the way they will attack you and deal damage to your party members. Attacking the enemies knocks the monsters back into the foreground where they can't reach you. Some monsters have ranged weapons that they can shoot at you. Your Striker controller represents the position of the party member you are currently controlling, so if you want to dodge a ranged attack, simply move the controller out of the way, close range attacks however, can't be dodged.
The area behind the targets is actually lower than the main play field. You go into this area when you have charged up enough energy in your "melee meter". The battle targets are suspended on a bar going through the center. normally they are locked into position so they don't spin around the bar. When the melee meter is full they become unlocked so that the ball can pass through them and down into the lower play field. In the lower play field there is an array of targets called secondary targets. A certain number of these targets light up, to make up a region that represents the monster that you are attacking. As you hit the targets, the lights turn off and the region becomes smaller and harder to hit. Their are hidden bumpers below the combat targets that automatically launch the ball towards the targets, you can control where the ball hits, by moving the target region back and forth using the striker controller.
The top lane has a number of uses depending on the context. Normally it is used to charge your melee meter. If you hold down the launch button, a menu appears with a list of items, you can move through the list by pressing the select button. To use the selected item launch the ball into the top lane and hold down the launch button when it passes through.
So that's just a basic introduction to the game, there is a lot more in the design document.
I think pinball as it is now is out dated, but I wouldn't say it is dead. I think with a little creative innovation, future generations will enjoy it just as much.

First Animation!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrQsrbJNdB4

I'll have more animations uploaded to my Youtube account when I finish and scan them.

Board Game Design: "Stack Attack"

  Stack Attack was designed to be playable with nothing but a pile of loose change and at least 2 people, though the game can be played with any number of people. You start by taking about 6 pennies or more and carefully placing them in a stack. A dime is then placed on top of the stack. Players score points by sliding a quarter at the stack and knocking pennies out from under the stack without collapsing the stack. If you have ever seem the magic trick where a table cloth is quickly swiped from a fully loaded dinner table without knocking any of the glasses or plates onto the floor, then you'll have a good idea of how this game works. 

For every penny that is separated from the stack, you get to move your game piece forward on the board. Look at the picture of the game board below. Each player starts in a corner of the board. They must move from their corner to the opposite corner. When a player has reached their opposite corner they are in the 'Win' condition. The win condition means that they must try and separate the dime from the stack instead of the pennies. The dime must not be over-lapping any pennies after striking the stack with their quarter. If this player is successful they have won the game. If the dime is still on top of or overlapping a penny than the player must move backwards for every penny that has been separated. The player is then no-longer in the win condition and the rules are back to normal.

  The Diagram below displays all the different outcomes of a play and their rules. The white coin is the dime, the brown coins are pennies, and the gold coin is the quarter.