Manatee Quest: Latest Build

So I just got back from some awesome snowboarding and some ridiculous winter storms.  The snow was plentiful up in the glorious state of Michigan and it was great for boarding, but it was a pain to drive through.  Now that I'm home in Indiana, an ice storm's covered my entire city and the trees are all bent into weird shapes until it warms up again.

Anyways I've finally found the time to put an update out on Manatee Quest's status after concluding my first semester at MSU.

The above screen shot shows a close up to the cabbage I modeled in Maya. I've got a simple rotator script on them right now but I think I might write a script to make them bob up and down for a better effect. I also have a working counter that displays on the game HUD which is visible in the following shots.

Also in this shot is a cube that I hooked a rigid body onto and got Unity's physics engine interacting with the Manatee properly.  This is a result of fiddling with the Manatee's collider because Unity would not allow me to turn it's Character Controller collider sideways.  In the end I'm satisfied with the result, which you can see demonstrated in the final shot.

Game Jam: Balls to the Walls

I've been doing a game jam with Spartasoft this weekend. Spartasoft, MSU's video game development club, holds game jams on a regular basis where the club splits into teams to make games in a 48-hour time period (or at least its usually 48 hours). Currently I'm on a team with two Media Arts & Technology majors, which I'm working on picking up as a second degree. I'm a Computer Science major, so naturally I've made a lot of the art assets.  I decided to post some of the stuff I made, being as it is currently 3:27 in the morning and I'm working on the homework displaced by the game jam.

The theme for the game jam was simply the word "save."  Our game is based around self preservation where the player is a sphere whose life meter is steadily draining.  The game is multiplayer split screen and the players control their spheres with XBox 360 controls.  Players survive by collecting health pick-ups and give themselves an edge by getting a variety of power-ups.  Our game is made with Unity3d and the art assets are made with Autodesk Maya.  The snail shown above is a negative pick-up that temporarily makes the player slower.

The shoe is the inverse of the snail and it temporarily increases the player's speed.
The rocket power-up launches homing rockets into all of the other players.  It's probably the strongest power-up in the game and will be placed in the levels.
The Chinese food grants a random power-up.   We're considering weighting it so that players low on health tend to get better power-ups.  In the last stretch of the game jam we plan on doing quite a bit of level design and play testing to tweak it so that our game becomes a legitimately fun game.

Manatees!

As one might guess by the title I gave my blog, I am quite fond of a marine mammal known as the manatee. I currently work in Michigan State University's GEL Lab, where I help make video games. My boss is having me do an independent project so I can learn how to use Unity and Autodesk Maya. I'm a little overwhelmed with the fact that I'm diving into 3d game development in my first semester of college, but at the same time its exciting that I'm getting paid to learn tools I probably wouldn't get to learn until a lot later in college.

Anyways, my independent project is currently a game that I have currently titled "Manatee Quest." I have a simple 3d model done in Maya with a basic bone structure, although I haven't added any IKs yet. I plan to have the player swim the manatee around an aquatic environment and collect cabbages and other goodies. I'm contemplating having jellyfish as enemies, but that wouldn't be very realistic (then again neither would cabbages).

With regards to being realistic, I'm also contemplating adding some tangential learning features. I originally had a different game concept floating around in my head after James Portnow gave an awesome presentation at the 2008 Meaningful Play conference. That idea is getting saved for later and I started on my manatee project without even realizing how easy it would be to implement some efficient tangential learning about my favorite animal.

I'll try to post my game on this blog when its completed, which might be a while, and it might not be any fun (so don't hold your breath). This whole blog entry about manatees was inspired by my adventures on the internet last night when I discovered this gem in the Mongoloids online store: