Look! Up in the Sky....

These are some shots of a game that I did for one of my Computer Science classes. The game play itself turned out to be a cross between Galaga (in that you can shoot down the meteors with heat vision) and Meteors(in that there are meteors in the game). In it you have to play as Superman and explode all of the rocks before they pass you. It's fun for a while, but like Galaga and meteors it can get kind of dull. I also got high marks on my graphics, which were all based off of Jim Lee drawings and animated together to make it appear as though Superman was flying. I ended up using C++ and SDL to write the game code because they were required by the class, but I think that if I end up making another game like this I would like to use Flash.

Free Time

During my free time in grad school I played around alot with different 3D programs like Maya and 3D Studio Max. This is a Ninja Turtle that I modeled and was rigging for animation in the Personal Learning Edition of Maya. Unfortunately, because it was free, Maya PLE has all those crazy watermarks all over it. I looked into it and found out the educational version of Maya is waaay better and now I'm updating all of my old PLE stuff. It's taking some time though. This is due to the fact that you can't open a PLE file in any other version of Maya! Oh well, back to the drawing board I guess. I'll be sure to post some of my new Maya stuff when it is ready.

The picture above is a scene from a game I made called Mars Lander. In the game, the player captains a spaceship which has suffered damages while landing on Mars. The ship is loosing oxygen and all of the ship's O2 canisters have been scattered over the surface. The player has to regain enough oxygen canisters to support his crew and dock with a landing port while navigating the strange terrain and gravity of the Martian planet.

One of the features that I included with the game was a condition where the player cannot go past a certain altitude or else he will escape the Martian gravity and be lost into outer space. This makes the game difficult because the oxygen canisters are buoyant and are slowly leaving Mars' gravity. The player's distance from the surface is calculated by the game and displayed at the base of the screen to invoke a sort of "heads up display" found in fighter planes.

In addition to floating over the planet's surface, the player can land on the surface itself. This is very difficult and can only be done on large flat areas. Once the player has touched down on the surface he can drive his craft along the terrain. However, if the ship is traveling too fast at the top off a hill it will lift off and begin floating again.

I'd definitely like to make more games, but for now it will have to happen in my free time.

Computer Stuff

This is an example of one of the things I had to do for my Master's Thesis. This is a smoke simulation, and you can see in the before shots(with the red smoke) that the environment around the smoke is acting as if it were transparent, allowing you to see through the obstacles (in blue). So one of the features I added was to visually correct the obstacles. You'll notice that the green obstacles are now partially blocking your view of the smoke due to their position in the foreground. This was done by arranging the graphics data by depth according to the camera in OpenGL.

The picture above was done for research on my thesis. I was testing out some cool effects done in smoke and this was one of the things I came up with...the spider cloud. I think I had just seen Spider-man 3 trailer or something so I thought it would be fun!