Words for young game developers and Northern Game Summit

Modern art using the GPU

Last week I attended the Northern Game Summit, an awesome event hosted in Kajaani Finland. The event gathered somewhere around 700 attendees who all got one thing in common – creating awesome games.

I was lucky enough to be invited there to keep three presentations around Unity and game development. My talks was around getting started with developing games, getting your games published to Windows Store and Windows Phone Store, and how to get connected using the cloud.

Most of my content was based on my Unity for Windows tutorial series – but the coolest thing was the networking and meeting some of the guys behind Angry Birds, Badland, EVE Online, Alan Wake and a lot of motivated startups and students with one thing on their mind – trying to create good games, and experience worth hours of gameplay for us consumers.

Somehow, Finland manages to create games that…

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How to program a Role Playing Game with Sprite Kit

Sprite Kit Lessons

For anyone that stumbles onto this blog, you’ll probably be interested in some “premium” video tutorials.  Assorted code snippets are great, but there comes a time for epic learning, and that can best be delivered with a real project and video tutorials.  My latest Sprite Kit lesson is 8 hours long (divided up into shorter 10-20 minute movies) and covers a long-time favorite topic of mine, Role Playing Games!. I’ll give you a brief overview of the lesson below, but you can find out more at the sales page.

Each level is a physics based world, one thing we will do early on is program our own debug borders around the physics objects. This way we can see exactly what the collision area is around the world, characters, etc. This was an easy option to turn on with Cocos2d, but unfortunately with Sprite Kit, you need to do a…

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2013-9-30 journal, design

ambient-melodic

While working today, I decided on something sort of interesting with one of the entities in the game.  It arose accidentally.

In Even the Ocean, there are entities which launch water very quickly. It’s magic water though (…or something!), and when you touch it, your velocity becomes the same as the water – so the bullets launch upwards, thus, you kind of get boosted upwards into the air when touching a bullet.

 

I can choose how many “bullets” each entity launches – I set the default to five. The bullets all launch at the same time, but have staggered velocities (i/n * max_vel, where i = bullet index, n = nr of bullets). The way I set the velocity of the player is: if on a frame of the game, the bullet touches the player, then increment a “push velocity” counter which will be added to the players velocity…

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Expert Knowledge Modelling in Unreal Tournament presented in CEDI 2013

ANYSELF

The title of the paper is “Modelling Human Expert Behaviour in an Unreal Tournament 2004 Bot”. It has presented in the Primer Simposio Español en Entretenimiento Digital (SEED 2013) track, inside CEDI 2013.

Abstract:

This paper presents a deep description of the design of an autonomous agent (bot) for playing 1 vs. 1 dead match mode in the first person shooter Unreal Tournament 2004 (UT2K4).
The bot models most of the behaviour (actions and tricks) of an expert human player in this mode, who has participated in international UT2K4 championships.
The Artificial Intelligence engine is based on two levels of states, and it relies on an auxiliary database for learning about the fighting arena. Thus, it will store weapons and items locations once the player has discovered them, as a human player could do.
This so-called expert bot yields excellent results, beating the game default bots in the hardest…

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What makes the AI from “Call of Duty” Insufficient for Military Training