Pixelated Martini Roller - Game Jam Video

I've posted about Pixelated Martini Roller before, including a cell phone video recording of an IGDA presentation and a description of the collision. But dear blog readers you've never been able to see a high quality video. Here it is:

Best watched in High Definition / full screen, with vimeo or youtube.

If you don't recall, it's one of the Triangle Game Jam games I've worked on, this one from 2008.

Three.5 of us made the game in 2 days, based on the madlibs jam theme that randomly made the title "Pixelated Martini Roller".

You're an olive. You like martinis. You roll around and get to umbrellas for checkpoints. Sitting in a martini glass gets you a bit tipsy. You've got more energy and can jump higher. But watch out, stay too long and you get sloppy. You'll stagger around, and your jumps won't land you where you want to go.

As you get tipsy the screen gets pixelated, and the music sounds like it's had too much to drink too.

The world was created with an in-game level editor. The objects are just a few images that represent the visual and collision texels.

We've noted how fun it is to implement hacky collision over and over again in a weekend, but I liked coming up with and working on the pixel based collision we did for this one. I also enjoyed writing the post FX pixels and rushing out the level design in the last hour. ;)

Thanks for Michael Noland and Adrienne Walker for working together on this game with me, and Brad for the title screen.

Gamma Correct Lighting, On The Moon!

When I explain gamma correct lighting to people, sometimes they look at images and aren't certain which is supposed to be better.

E.g. in GPU Gems 3, The Importance of Being Linear two spheres are shown, similar to these:

Two spheres lit by a directional light. Which has gamma correct math?

A small thought occurred to me: there's an object people are familiar with that will help them to understand, the moon:

Two spheres lit by a directional light, compared with an image of the moon.
Which has gamma correct math?

Still don't see it.. yes, it's subtle... shall we make it obvious with a gradient?

Yes, it is but one example, there are many more. But it's a good basic visual example.

If you'd like to read more on gamma correct rendering:

• Chris Tchou, HDR The Bungie Way
• Larry Gritz & Eugene d'Eon, The Importance of Being Linear in GPU Gems 3
• Steve Smith Picture Perfect: Gamma through the Rendering Pipeline presentation
  (A better article version is available in the Xbox 360 documentation)
• Alex Vlachos, Post Processing in The Orange Box, GDC 2008 presentation

[EDIT: See the comments for some nice thoughts from people who've spent more time on this.

Naty points out another good example in Real Time Rendering.]

Thanks to "ComputerHotline" on openphoto.net for the image of the moon.