My Work

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...