My Work

Im' already a big fan of HTML5. I just love the power of canvas and the ability to be able to develop games for the web without the fuss of flash. This excitement reached the next level when i came across the pokki platform. The application just uses already available software packages like webkit, v8 javascript engine and are trying to do something like Chrome WebStore with offline apps only. The advantage though is better integration with the desktop environment. The fluid animation of the apps appearing and disappearing.. its' just beautiful. As soon as I discovered it i wanted to try making one of my html5 games available on it and thought "Closer" was the best option.. mostly because the other games weren't as good or fun to play. It was pretty easy to get the game running under pokki platform but making it polished enough for it to get published definitely wasn't. I have got the submission rejected twice so far.. nothing serious though and i think tha...

This months theme for experimental gameplay was slicing. I was thinking about a fast paced game but i found a game which was doing exactly what i wanted to do and was pretty damn fun to play too.. you might find it fun to play  http://www.gamesbutler.com/game/3140/Glow_Cut/ . So with that gameplay off the table i wanted to try something funny and ended up with this game called CSS (Combat Simulator for Skeletons) you slice through the skeleton to make parts of it fly and re assemble. You can click on it as well. The gameplay is pretty simple and i almost feel like i failed to make something good but im' posting it any way because that's what experiments are for. You try and fail.. that's the whole point of an experiment. You can check out the game at  http://balaji.me/vkrishna/css/ .

Here is some more artwork i did for the project. I think i should stop focusing on the art and try to get some actual game done now :) I still have to write export script for using blender as level editor. Once that is done i should be able to put together some good level to play with. I still have no clue what the story is going to be, im' inclined to take it to humorous side, but ill' have to think about it. BlenderSetup for Skeleton SkeletonCharacter   Props for Game Ps: If you do use the props texture please attribute it to me.

Ive' been working on a simple action game. I haven't been able to decide on the story or the level design. But i think i have got the basic gameplay working pretty well. I was also thinking about some mini boss character and witch doctor seemed like the perfect fit for what i wanted to do .. so here it is... The Witch Doctor colored character from prev post I still need to get these characters rigged up in blender, but right now im' having fun with the character ive' managed to rig in blender. Here is the video showcasing the combat. I hope ill' be able to finish this soon :)

A couple of weeks ago i was working on a presentation and needed to work on it at home as well. I didn't like the fact that i would have multiple copies of the same presentation lying around as i keep working on it. So i thought the best idea would be to use the Google Docs. The first problem i ran into was that there was no way i could add equations to a presentation. I know lot of papers require equations and it makes sense that the you have access to this tool when you create a document in google docs. But if you wanted to present that work at say a meeting there is no way to actually include that equation in the presentation. With all the push that Google is giving for the web as one stop place for everything, I must say i was surprised that these basic things were missing in the Google Docs for presentations. I did manage to find a work around for this thanks to the discussion forums but even that quickly proved to be a waste once i needed to deal with equations which had ...

This month's experimental gameplay theme was story. Telling a story in a game is kind of hard.. atleast for me, i've never done it before and was confused about what to do. Because almost all of the games that are out there use in game movies or audio or loads of text to get the story out there. Text obviously is the easiest way to do it. But I didn't want the user to have to read loads of text scrolling through the screen, I wanted to minimize the text as much as possible.. I did end up using text but i think I have managed to hit the sweet spot. The story is short and the way you play effects the story. Thanks to the JQuery and loads of plugins it has.. ive' been able to create what i think is a good story based game.. the story is kinda of lame though.. I couldn't manage to come up with a compelling story :( guess its' time i start reading some books :D. So here goes.. check out the not so awesome story in the html5 goodness.. @ http://balaji.me/vkrishna/inv...

Iv'e always been obsessed with putting in animations for the menus. We did put something together for Adrian , a game I worked on along with some friends at college. But the animations were pretty much predefined you could either slide them in blink them that kinda of stuff. It was pretty good, but in the recent times especially after watching so many iphone apps which have such smooth transitions etc between screens, And the wonderful ui you can create with html because of the javascript speedups Iv'e started thinking its' probably time to get this done right or at least to my satisfaction :D. The weird idea i got was to create keyframe animations for the UI and then use it as the menu. This is pretty much the standard way of doing things in blender game engine. You just move the camera around in a scene or make the ui elements slide in out of the view. I wasn't sure if i could pull it off in my own game. So I kept putting it off to try later. Then i came across a vi...

With this, i think i've got all the characters i need to get the basic implementation started but, there are still some things i need to figure out about how to animate the expressions, eyes where the texture of the object changes. The easiest way out seems to be to just create another texture with required things changed. i.e the eye expression and the mouth. But may be there is a better way.. creating multiple textures for small changes seems a bit of an over kill. The combat is very important and should be very fluid and fun to play around with. This requires a good co-ordination between the animation and the collision detection. Im' also thinking about easy way to create menus/animations as 3danim models. Yesterday i had to work on porting the 3danim exporter to blender 2.59 and i swear it was hard.. so messed up i almost lost the whole day. I hope i dont' have to do it again. I was able to load the model of ram in python using the anim3d library. I need to setup...

I've been working on making the characters from http://www.sitasingstheblues.com/watch.html so i can use them in a game if i ever am able to make something good :D any way. without further delay.. here goes.. I've added the weapons as well, i've been itching to write some action game.. so probably will help me out with that. As usual i've been using Inkscape for designing these characters. I've rigged the other character i designed  in blender i have to do it for this as well... While making this characters i got an  idea about making a grey scale so i can change the color by setting the polygon color i guess its' worth a try because it makes it easier to create different characters.. :)

This is one of those things which is kinda straightforward to do, you get a username or something and add stuff in the database. There is a difficulty in discovering cheating scenarios but if we assume fairplay, it just boils down to a very simple thing. I was kinda lazy to do all the creating a db and writing queries stuff so I started looking for easy to use javascript based leaderboard service, sure enough I found  http://www.playtomic.com/api/html5 . I was skeptical about registering but once i decided to add the online leaderboard for my latest   game , I knew this would be the easiest way out. Turns out it is really easy to use it. The documentation pretty much covers what you might want and gets working pretty soon.  http://www.playtomic.com/api/html5#Playtomic.Leaderboards  this is the page i used to get the version you see in the game running. They do rely on code obfuscation to secure the app id and key but im' not sure if that really helps. But ya..it ...

This month for experimental gameplay project the theme was "Offspring" but the broader meaning could be used like growth. So I've put together a simple yet challenging game called "tgif+" short for "Thank God It's Growing" see what I did there? :). This is the first javascript project where i used jquery for handling the ui elements, I must say its' pretty cool. It is kind of an overkill for the project because i dont' use much of the library, but it makes the ui handling so much easier. You can play my entry here . I used Inkscape for creating the artwork for this game. Just love how the gradiants work. Along the way i even created a new logo for vkgamedev . New vkgamedev logo And now for the game screen shots.. i guess this is the first time where i have a "virtical" orientation of the game screen  :) Start Screen Gameplay Screen I haven't added the game music, pause button or sharing options as of now. I...

Most people use Flash for their 2D animation needs, but apparently some people do use the 3D animation software tools for creating 2D animations as well. The advantage?.. i think it has got more to do with preference than anything else but then again.. 3D authoring tools are good with for doing camera effects and rendering effects if you want to do any. I recently discovered that south park is animated using Maya, I always thought it was stop motion animation oh well i guess they had to move to make the process faster. The advantages of using 3D animation software for 2D animation in my Opinion Ease of adding rendering effects to the scene. Camera movement can be added easily (esp the z-axis movement) The multi-bone setup makes it easy to animate snake like objects (curvy hands, fire, smoke) So as i mentioned in my previous post, i've decided to rig the character in blender and here are the results.. The image to the left is the render shot from blender and the one to the ri...

So if you missed it.. here is an awesome animated version of Ramayanam.. http://www.sitasingstheblues.com/watch.html anyway i was really impressed with the character  design and thought it might be a good idea to try and recreate the characters for some game.. so here is the first step.. PNG version of SVG So i basically copied the character design, made an SVG with all the parts in separate layers so i can animate them ... let me say i intend to animate using blender by setting up armature and stuff.. 

Masked Man Tried getting something done with a character design.. done using Alchemy. colored it using mypaint.. :)

Iv'e been seeing a lot of foot over bridges to cross small channals of water here and there.. was kinda inspired to draw it.. so here.. goes.. speed drawing This is the first time i have been able to use my drawing tablet in linux, it works pretty well.. but im' still not sure if the sensitivity is handled well. So for now i just did a drawing without shading.

It's been a couple of months since i actually worked on any game.. .. i was not inspired enough to make one. That changed yesterday, i was checking the experimental gameplay project website and have been interested in participating.. so i saw the topic for this month and kinda liked it.. and started thinking about it.. As usual i started off with the simple gameplay mechanic that you have to stay close to the enemies to disintegrate them.. but not touch them. Like they say.. Keep your friends close, enemies closer. So i started off with the basic art and it kinda grew from there. Initial game concept As you can see the art is pretty basic and i tried to experiment with pixelated look where the pixels are falling apart but i settled with the enemies fading away as i wanted to stick with html5. There has been a lot of debate about html5 vs native apps but for simple games like this the portability is too good to let go :). I also tried the local data store feature offered by the html...

Since i've been seeing a lot of wind mills lately i thought ill' draw one.. :) The other interesting thing about this drawing is I used just one color to draw the whole thing. In one of the tutorials for drawing it was mentioned that people use darker lines for objects closer to you .. and it does seem to work.. in this scene.. at least i think it does.. :D

It's not true to the source material but i thought id' draw something up which i can color quickly with all the detail.. I like the way it turned out.. it does require some corrections with the legs.. but i like how it turned out..

some weird fighting stance that came to mind.. Was eager to just color and put something up.. so here goes..

People have been complaining that my drawings have been biased towards feminine gender.. so i thought ill' switch it up a little .. and started experimenting with some random ideas.. This reminded me about a documentary i saw on discovery about how elephants sometimes turn against their mahout. K .. enough talk.. here is the pencil shaded drawing of a clash ..

I thought ill do something kind of relaxing and this is what i came up with :) I could't really think about the colors and such.. but im' really pleased with the way it turned out. I tried shading it but couldn't really get it right.. any way here you go..

MyPaint is a gimp fork for artists.. and comes with some really nice brushes i tried out the modeling brush today and here are some random stuff i've drawn..

Ive' been working on a bunch of stuff.. like changing the blender version Geometry Wars to work on blender 2.57's game engine. This blender file is helpful if you are trying to develop a topdown shooter using blender engine. The mouse control is dependent only on the mouse controller and doesn't use any funny scaling stuff like it used to before. I have also started working on creating new 3d models but later on that. The other thing ive' been working on was this drawing of a swords man.. i wanted to have some dramatic pose with a sword.. but kinda ended up with this.. i want to add more detail to the armor, shoes and head.. .. so still a work in progress.

If you have played the game you know about the little sister.. and the big daddy and stuff.. just wanted to try drawing some girl with teddy in her hand and with crazy hair do.. ended up drawing this.. ps: forgot to put my sign in there :(

If you dont' know about Inkscape yet, it's a svg editor and if you dont' know svg its just a text based file format for describing an Image. Now that we have that out of our way.. lets talk business. During one of they pyweek contests, i came across a discussion regarding creating a level editor for a game. And one of the participants posted saying that he is using Inkscape as level editor. I thought to myself that I should be doing it too. But I didnt' know how the parse the file, i knew it was xml but did not know the tags, attributes etc that are valid for an svg. Then i came across a svg rendering library called squrtile . I looked at the code and saw that it was pretty straight forward. And now for the first time i have used svg as a level editor for my pyweek entry " Charged ". This made it way easier to visualize what i was going to see in the game and much more organized. In fact anybody can just pick up any svg editor and start creating there own lev...

The pyweek for this year has started and the theme is "nine times". Since iv'e been working on MuCap for a while now i wasn't sure i would be able to work on anything for this pyweek . But started thinking about the theme anyway. I wanted the gameplay to be very simple to pick up at the same time making the player think about how to complete a level. This is easy.. you make a puzzle game but how do i incorporate the theme? well first i decided on the gameplay "bounce a ball around". The theme says "nine times" so now i started thinking about ways to make the player bounce the ball 9 times before the level is complete. This was the thought process behind "Charged" the pyweek game im' working on currently. To make sense of why the user should bounce 9 times before finishing, i tried working out some kind of story.. say feeding something with candy coated with chocolate? (9 times bounce == more chocolate) for some time i was going to go...

After downloading fraps and recording some gameplay of MuCap i had to fiddle around with the video editing tools to find the right one to get the video done. It's not very well made, the transitions are rough esp the music, but i hope it gives a better understanding about how the game plays. Ps: i've never made a gameplay video before.. so please excuse the low production values of the video :D

Sounds like something you heard before.. yes .. "MoCap" is the word you might have heard :) so here is the idea.. i wanted to make some game using the music to trigger the actions on screen and the result is MuCap (Music Capture) with the tagline as "Capture the Music". I've been working on this idea for a few days now and it is turning out pretty good. I should admit though ive' spent a lot of time on trying to figure out how to create an ideal level editor, i even considered trying to automate it but settled with hand coding the levels. Just couldn't find the sweet spot for a good level editor, but "audacity" proved to be the best for the job. The art is pretty straight forward steps: Create graphic in InkScape Gaussian filter the object Paste a copy of the same object And presto.. we have the glowing object. I've tried to keep the art as simple as possible and it worked out pretty well. I've looked at various wallpapers from Deviant ...

I've come across this amazing drawing program called mypaint its' got better interface as far as the painting is conserned. The default brush collection seems nice and is pretty effective. I thought id' give it a try and here we are.. I've also been working on a game concept which is coming along quite well but im' still tossing around and playing with the gameplay/concept a bit. Hopefully ill' have something up soon.

So kratos from god of war.. need i say more.. :D its' not the exact same as in the game, i got rid of the chains and only one blade instead of two.

I was at a restaurant tonight and this particular scene captured my attention.. i didn't quite get the plants right and some of the other parts that were there are missing but this gave me a good excuse to test out light effect in the drawing.

i think i should have colored this but couldnt' decide on the best colors.. so just left as is :D. The shading didn't turns out very good. From My Work From My Work Update: Turns out i can just use the fire fox color scheme and it all turned out pretty neat .. :D

I've got a warhammer orc figurine with me.. always wanted to draw it but didnt' dare to do it.. but ive' just conquered the fear :D

Not spectacular but still i did it :D

It's been a while since iv'e drawn anything.. so thought it is about time i did it :D. So for the theme i thought id' work on some monster drawings.. as i haven't done anything on those lines till now.. and to tell you frankly i've not been able to get the scary look id' want to give the drawing..so i did a quick google and took inspiration from the dinosaur pictures.. and here's the result :D