September 2012 - December 2012. I modeled, textured and lit this environment using Autodesk Maya in my first semester. This was a challenge as I hadn't worked with modeling software before and there were a lot of new concepts to grasp. We weren't actually asked to do lighting but it interested me. Similarly, the transparency of the water-cooler and reflectivity of the screens and elevator were just things that interested me and weren't at all required. This took about 50 straight hours to render on my laptop at the time. I'm pretty happy with how it came out.
September 2012 - December 2012. In the first semester one of the modules focused on learning how to use media creation tools such as Adobe Photoshop. The coursework assignment was to design a Flash game which you would then be making in the second semester (though if you wanted to make something else you could, which I ended up doing), including a mock-up of what the game would look like. I ended up designing a real time strategy meets tower defense game called ASCII Assault.
The game takes place inside a computer, with the player taking the role of security software protecting the system from viruses and malicious programs. The aim is to destroy your opponent's terminal. You can place towers such as Lag Spikes and Nanobots onto the grid, and summon troops from your terminal such as Byters and Interrupts. Troops will make their way along the path and attempt to disable enemy towers and destroy the enemy terminal. If you put troops into a tower it will begin to fire on the enemy's troops such as Popups and Trojans, which will in turn be attacking your own towers and terminal. Level modifiers later on in the game included Encryption (creep types are disguised until damaged) and Automatic Updates (towers would randomly shut down for a period of time, but they would come back slightly buffed). September 2012 - December 2012. So in one of the modules in the first semester we worked on the old Game Boy Advance (or at least an emulator of it). Working with very limited hardware means you have to think about really low-level things such as how to plot a pixel to the screen, which was interesting. Good memory management was key as there wasn't exactly a lot to throw around, and we were also introduced to the idea of hardware-specific reserved memory. For example there is reserved memory on the GBA for the screen buffer. There's also the bitwise logic used for detecting button input, and a whole host of other interesting low-level stuff. It was great fun and very informative. For the first semester coursework we were told to recreate a feature from an influential game. I figured there's no more influential game than Tetris (and indeed my accompanying report argued that point), so I decided to work on that. Of course, Tetris is a relatively simple game so I ended up recreating the entire thing rather than a single feature. My lecturer didn't mind. In the screenshot you can see what I ended up with. The game tracked the current play time in seconds, the number of lines cleared and the current level. Every 10 lines cleared meant a level-up, causing the tetrominoes to fall more quickly. A preview of the next shape is shown at the top. The currently falling shape can be rotated in either direction using A and B, moved left and right using the d-pad and caused to drop quickly by pressing down. All in all I was pretty happy with how it turned out. You can download a rom of the game here. You'll need an emulator - I recommend Visual Boy Advance. |
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