As if the world was not a bad enough place - I put up a new blog about Random Stuff. It’s in Lithuanian and is mostly about that “life” stuff; no triangles there.

Here it is: aras-p.info/blogas

Seriously, what are they up to? Intel acquires Offset Software, a game development studio that is doing a game and an engine. Wait, I was thinking the game and tech are for PC and Xbox360? What would Intel do with that?

Not so long ago, some well known graphics guys went to work for Intel. A while ago Intel acquired Neoptica…

Signs of Larrabee coming? Intel starting to take GPUs seriously? Something else?

I decided to make a very small game with Unity. Coincidentally, Danc of Lost Garden fame just announced a small game design challenge called “Play With Your Peas”. It comes with a set of cute graphics and a ready-to-be-implemented game design. What more could I want?

So it’s a small very small 2D game without any next-gen bells and whistles. It can probably be done casually on the side, by allocating an hour here and there. We’ll see how it goes. Hey, I never actually done any game in Unity, I only make or break some underlying parts…

Of course, first I start with no game, just imported graphics. Hey look, I can do sprites!

Then cook up some base things: define the game grid, throw in some basic user interface on the right hand side, and make it actually do something. This wasn’t so hard; that already gets me an almost working level building functionality. It does not have fancy block building delay or block deletion yet; that will come later.

Next come basic physics. Danc’s design calls for simple arcade-like physics (things moving at constant speeds, bouncing off at equal angles, and so on), but in Unity I have a fully fledged physics engine just waiting to be used. Let’s use that.

The design has sloped ramp pieces, which are hard to approximate using any primitive colliders, so instead I’ll use convex mesh colliders for them. Now, on this machine I only have Blender, which I totally don’t know how to use; and I was too lazy to go to PC and use 3ds Max there. What a coder does? Of course, just type in the mesh file in ASCII FBX format. Excerpt:

; scaled 2x in Z, by 0.85 in Y
Vertices: -0.5,-0.425,-1.0, 0.5,-0.425,-1.0, -0.5,-0.425,1.0, 0.5,-0.425,1.0,  -0.5,0.425,-1.0, -0.5,0.425,1.0        
PolygonVertexIndex: 0,1,-3,2,1,-4,1,0,-5,2,3,-6,0,2,-5,2,5,-5,3,1,-5,5,3,-5

It’s a left ramp mesh! So much for fancy asset auto-importing functionality, when you don’t know how to use those 3D apps :)

After a while I’ve got peas being controlled by physics, colliding with level and so on. Physics is very bad for productivity, as I ended up just playing around with pea-stacks!

So far there’s no game yet… Next up: implement some AI for the peas, so they can wander around, climb the walls, fall down and bounce around. I guess that will be more work and less playing around… We’ll see.

So I decided to check out Crysis myself. A demo for a non-gamer like me would be perfect, I thought.

It’s probably three frames per second. In the menu!

I did not see the game itself yet, got bored while waiting for the after-menu-but-before-game intro movie to end (it’s not skippable, and it also ran at about three FPS). This is after watching half a dozen obligatory before-menu intro movies at 3 FPS with stuttering sound (“nvidia,vidia,vidia,vidia… the way it’s meant,meant,meant,meant…” - TWIMTBP).

All of this on a half-decent PC, I think - Intel Core 2 Quad, 4GB RAM, Radeon 3850, Windows XP, latest drivers, none of extra stuff running; the PC is able to run other 3D stuff just fine. I’m sure the developers and EA’s testing labs have tested everything extensively, but sometimes something completely random apparently can make things be oh so slow. Oh well. Get back to work.

This is just too cool: Off-Road Velociraptor Safari game. Read that again. Who says game industry is all about sequels and safe licenses?

You drive a jeep with a spiky ball, and your goal is to chase down raptors and send them to the future, presumably to end world hunger. Or you can do stunts. And you the driver are a raptor, only you wear a hat and a monocle.

Just go and play it already: raptorsafari.com. It’s free.

Or watch a trailer if you want to miss all the real fun, or read a press release. Of course it’s made in Unity, in two months from start to finish.

To me, this is a perfect example of focus. Basically there are three things - 1) vehicle, 2) raptors, 3) physics mayhem - and that almost describes a game. Yes, there are crates and stunts and achievements and online leaderboards, but that’s just additional stuff on top of the core game.

Sounds like a good plan for making game prototypes:

1. Think up a game idea and describe it in one concise sentence. The idea may be totally crazy, like in this case. I guess an idea like Velociraptor Safari would not fly in a pitch at any publisher, but that does not matter at this point.

2. Get a small team of smart people. In Flashbang’s case, it seems they were 4 to 7 person team.

3. Choose a game engine/toolset that will allow you to make your game fast. cough cough

4. Do it!

All the above requires is a small smart team and groceries/rent for a couple of months.

Your original idea may be totally crazy, but with the actual working prototype at hand it might just work. Looks like Velociraptor Safari really clicked something on the internets (see Kotaku, JayIsGames, Destructoid, TIGSource, AtomicGamer, …).