GDC 2010 - What to attend?

Time for Game Developers Conference! I'm attending sessions, which I haven't done for years when working the show. If you have any session suggestions, please comment! Here are the GDC sessions that look interesting to me so far.

I'll probably post notes from GDC to Scattered Pixels, we'll see if I have time for a post conference report here... ;)

Working on Chrome OS at Google

Many have been curious what I'll be working on at Google, including myself for a while. Google is interesting in that you are not allocated to a team until just before your first day. You accept the job because you're a good fit for Google in general, not just one team.

I'm going to work on Chrome OS. There's a lot to do for the initial launch, but long term my goal is to help make it a great platform for rich graphical apps and games too.

Whoa, you say, I thought you worked on high performance games? Yes, high performance 3D games will be running inside browsers, with security and performance delivered via Native Client.

Radial 10 bit Gray code - Tutorial

How I made the Radial 10 bit Gray code image procedurally in Photoshop:

1. Create a 10 bit gray code image (width 10, height 1024). I did this by hand, it's a little tedious. But there is a method: you duplicate the image vertically and then draw a line from the mid points of each tree.
   Then, expand it to a square image:
   
2. Transform it radially (Filter, Distort, Polar Coordinates (need to first rotate the image 90 degrees)):
3. 
4. Create some Gaussian blurs of the image, with a few similar large blurs:
   
5. Set the blend mode to Difference between 2 of the blur layers:
   
6. Add adjustment layers to remap the range, add a gradient, shift the hue, etc:
   
   
7. Add another blur with difference blend mode, and we're done!
   
   
   

I worked in 16 bit mode since there was banding when differencing the similar Gaussian blurs.

New Blog: Scattered Pixels

I put effort into posts to Beautiful Pixels. I hope you've liked what you've seen the last few years.

I've started a shadow blog called Scattered Pixels, for random thoughts, images, links. If you'd like more frequent updates from me that are less filtered, subscribe to both.

Subscribe in a reader to:
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And, maybe to comments:
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Scattered Comments

Vincent goes to Google

Taking a short break, then starting at Google in February.

Anamorphosis Gamebryo LightSpeed Logo

We all love Anamorphosis, and have seen it done wonderfully before ([edit] even spectacularly). Well, I've done a few simple things around the office, here's one I just did:

Vimeo and YouTube videos.




That was done with painter's masking tape, with the help of Cat, in about 2.5 hours.

Here's an earlier project, the old Gamebryo logo done with post-it notes:



Post-it notes were handy after a late night in the office and no prep. The masking tape is obviously much better. Both were done by setting up an image on my laptop and using a projector to cast it into the room. The perspective for both is just in a doorway, to help guide viewers to the right position. Both also are cast in a way that the image is heavily distorted as soon as you move slightly away from the right point.

Share links if you've done similar projects, or know of good ones. ;)

[Edit:]
Falice Varini is the link you want to follow! See e.g. this.

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.