My Work

Have you ever come across something so incredible that you were hooked for quite a few days before you could get it out of your system?? .. well happens quite frequently with me.. :D. The other day i was going through the http://lfgcomic.com/ site and found a paper toy schematic. The toy looks like it is made of cubes but it was really cute.. so i went ahead and took a print out and started making the toy. On the toy schematic i found the website which does these designs and bam.. there i was in a fairy land of paper toys.. these are really amazing and i really enjoyed making mine.. ive' made two but with the black and white print out.. i really like the hellboy paper toy and i think it should be on everybodys' todo list to make one such toy :) check out your favorate one at cubeecraft.com and make it yourself.

It's been a while since i blogged.. but well ive' been busy... traveling a lot .. First up iv'e bought an Yamaha R15 Bike Second .. iv'e bought an awesome pc.. 22' lcd, ATI 4870, 2GB ram, 200GB + 500GB hdd There you go.. thats' my gaming rig now... :) Dont' have any pictures of this though. And my first trip to kerala let me put it this way.. Kerala is amazingly beautiful!! if you want to visit some special place to enjoy the nature... has to be kerala.. Waynad

:) could do better......

Well if you remember the patapon clone i made for pyweek6, it was a bit of a flop.. i was kinda able to capture the art but not the game play. For some weird reason the keyinput seems to behave oddly, sometimes just vanishing and not giving the user proper feel for the keying. Faults with the game: 1) No visual cues for errors 2) No visual cues for correct key press 3) skewed improper timing stuff. 4) Game doesn't seem to do anything with the correct key presses? (actually it uses it for attack speedup.. i guess i should have worked on making it look more obvious). Despite all these errors if you would like to try out the game here is the windows version link. RoboMinions(Win32)

Time and again i've been hitting this road block... "unable to find good textures for the game", previously i had problems with 3D models.. but thanks to ac3d and blender now im' confident that i can create 3D models myself.. but textures are still a big problem for me. The other day i was trying to complete a small game level in blender when i hit the road block and i was reallly pissed. Then i realized that i am pretty good at imitating stuff present in other paitings/drawings. Which i proved to myself with patapon clone that i made..(not exactly a good game but ya it looks pretty good). So any way i started looking at folliage in other games...(crash bandicoot) and made a texture for the bush thing.. it's not perfect.. but does the job :D You can use this texture if you want.. for free ofcourse... and ya.. im' putting this up coz i could't find textures when i was searching for them.

The path tool is really nice for drawing smooth curves.. well thats' if you are ok with randomly popping vertices here and there :)

Learn to ignore whats' being said during the training sessions.. .. !!!

In my previous post i said that the rhythm game that im' developing for pyweek is in Development well.. there are still some things that need to be modified and fine tuned.. but you can try out the version i submitted for the contest here It's not as perfect as i wanted it to be.. and it's not as entertaining as i thought it would be but it definitely will make a hell of a typing tutor :) The windows version will be up soon.. mean while you can install python and pygame and check the game out.

If you have been paying attention to the latest psp games that have been coming out.. you are sure to have come across the rhythm game called PataPon. This game has and interesting art style and a lovely game play. If you have seen the hundreds of youtube videos floating around.. you will notice how fluid the animations are, just amazingly beautiful. I don't have a psp but damn.. i would love to play this game.. well any way.. PyWeek was upon me with the theme as Robots. Well.. since I wanted to play patapon badly i somehow wanted to use pyweek as a pretext for creating a game which felt similar to PataPon. Robot Minions was the instant idea that came to me. Since i'm at home and my work start a few days after pyweek ends... i thought this might be a good chance to experiment and try to build something which resembles PataPon :) My laptop hasn't been in best of its' shape... troubling me with minor issues like sound.. (ya the sound isn't working any more :() So you...

Here is how the art style in the game might look. I have copied the art style of the background from the patapon game(for psp). I used gimp to imitate that background, drew the ninja character i was working on.. and here it is.. im' kinda liking it .. i hope to start off working on the game as soon as possible. Drawing this concept gave me a chance to learn a thing or two in gimp. For example the curved lines (trunk of the trees) are drawn using the create path tool in the gimp. Similarly the distorted tree leaves are created using the filters->distort->curve thing. Amazingly simple to use and i was able to get the desired results in the image. Just imagine that ninja running around slicing enemies... aaah.. the beauty of imagination :D

If you are anything like me.. you would be really exited about games like ninja gaiden2, devil may cry4, etc. These games belong to a sweet game genre called hack-n-slash, these basically require the user to frantically keep pressing keys to get combos of attacks and to clear off hoards of enemies. It requires speed and co-ordination, i know not everybody is as exited about these games as i am.. but any way.. .. i wanted to try out the severing the foes limbs concept... you know.. just slice through the enemies and leave their body parts flying around kinda thing. I know it sounds very evil but then... i think its' pretty cool. What better premise for you to slice your enemies into pieces can you get other than that you are a ninja and you have to kill the bad guys :) Well here are the concept drawings i'm planning to use for the hack-n-slash game that i might be developing (fingers crossed!) Oh btw.. the first character is inspired from a ninja drawing submission under cartoo...

The game developers conference 08 held at san francisco. For those of you who don't know what it its... it's the place where game developers show off what they are working on.. give presentations about the technologies being used in the latest games. Presentations to developers about how to develop for a platform etc. But basically a place where the game dev companies show off their games etc. So the stuff i liked about GDC08 are: 1) M$ announces community games for XBL. Any member of xna creators club can create a game and submit it for XBL MArket place. Essentially what this means is .. if you have a XBOX360 with you and you are itching to develop a game for it.... you can do it using the XNA. But first... the XNA game studio doesn't come with the stuff required for the 360. You can buy these components from XBL Market place. ($100 per year) pretty cheap if you want to get started with game dev for consoles right? 2) Gears of War 2 has been announced (exclusive for Xbox36...

Im' done with the game.. well at least most of it.. to summarize the features of the game... The Good: 1) You can control the speed of the flight using (1 and 2 buttons of the wiimote) 2) It uses wiimote for input (the reason i started writing this game) 3) Random Levels, Random placement of mines. 4) You can shoot or try to bypass the mines and barriers. The former option gives you extra points. 5) Intuitive control scheme for hero control (hold the wiimote side ways, tilt left to move left and tilt right to move right, A to attack, 1 to move at max speed, 2 to move at low speed) 6) Sound effects Bad Part: 1) No story :) well i really couldn't think of one... 2) No motivation for traveling at high speed other than that it's exiting. 3) The levels are harder as you go on.. but currently it just has two types of enemies, that too stationary.(barriers and mines. It still is quite difficult to get a good score.. but you know its' like a play and forget kinda game.. want t...

It's not a you know.. people game.. it has a hero (a flight) which can be controlled by human and enemies. So here is the list of the characters i h ave in the game. Hero of our game. Just a flight.. ya but it has infinite ammo :D so ya... it's pretty awesome This is the barrier drone which basically just stands on the way at the end of each level. The problem is it's not alone. Blast through them by shooting at them or just evade them and move on. This is a mine.. just that it flies in the air.. you know like air mines... Just like the barrier drones.. you can either evade them or blast right through them.. i'm pretty sure you will mostly choose blasting through them... trust me its' easier that way :D This enemy is not yet implemented in the current version of the game.. but im' thinking about a random flying thing just makes it ever harder to get a high score in the game.

Today i spent most of the time trying to get the right menu i.e, the first screen. Wanted to keep it basic.. and black and white but could not stop myself from putting in the color for representing not connected and connected. Works pretty well, should start working on getting the game object take input from the wii remote. Currently the menu shows if there is a wiimote connected or not and when its' connected the user can press "A" to go to the game screen. Kept things as simple as possible just to get a feel of how to use wiimote in the game. And for the viewing pleasure here are some screen shots.

I have been working on a simple 2D game lately. To be frank .. this is actually a clone of a game i played as a kid on some console. .. well as you can see.. i really have no idea what the names of the game and the console are.. this game came in free with the console.. this was the one of those cartridge using consoles. Any way.. so you control an aircraft with the joystick (this console just had a joystick with one red button) and use the red button for firing bullets. The path is just a linear one with solid obstacles on the way and choppers and tanks which just roam about on the way across the screen and if you hit them you die, you can pickup fuel along the way and as the levels progress, the path becomes narrow and the speed of your flight increases. It was a pretty addictive game, i used to play it for hours and hours together just for the heck of it.. i never even kept track of the score. Any way... the game was an 8bit thing but really used the colors very well. So how do i b...