It's Official!

We won the Ford Project, which means that myself and several other members of Spartasoft will be flown out to GDC by Ford Credit to attend the conference and present our game on the Expo floor. Which, needless to say, is really exciting. I've updated my portfolio to include a short description of the project and my contributions, as well as a link to the beta version that is hosted on Spartasoft's website.

Ford Project

Monday was an exciting for me and several of my fellow Spartasoft members, as we presented a game to Ford Credit that we've been developing for three months now. We were in direct competition with a team from University of Michigan's Wolverinesoft. All in all, I'm happy with the outcome of the project, even though Flash development does not tie strongly into my long term goals, because 3D is definitely where my hearts at. We find out next week if Ford Credit has decided to use our game or Wolverinesoft's game, and the suspense is killing me!

Bioshock Pinball Demo!

I decided to take the plunge and put up the current build of Bioshock Pinball in the portfolio. There will be some more work put into the game at the beginning of next semester (level design and audio hopefully!), but the bulk of my work has been completed, so I thought I'd show it off. Go check it out at my page!

AI

I'm currently 400 pages deeps in Millington & Funge's AI text. Part of me wonders if I'll actually be able to apply it in my classes next semester (I hope so, then again Unity can be a tricky beast to work with sometimes...). In other news I'm not sure what I'll be working on anymore after February 1st hits (the day that my Flash project gets presented). Marie still wants to make an adventure game, which would be awesome, but I also need some stuff to try out my mettle at both AI and graphics. An IGF submission would be nice too...

Additionally, the version of Power Master that was used by the student test group back in November is now available on my portfolio at jonmoore.squarespace.com for Mac and PC. Go check it out!

Website

By the way, I nearly forgot! I have a web portfolio now that hosts my work (as well as access to this blog), at www.jonmoore.squarespace.com! Go check it out! The pinball table will hopefully have a demo posted soon!

Fall Projects

Well, I just finished my finals so I actually have the time to blog a little. I've been working on a pinball machine for my portfolio this past semester. It started as a game-jam game and is coming along quite nicely, hopefully a playable build will be up soon. Power Master went into its beta test, and my work on it has largely come to a halt until a new batch of funding is acquired, but I might still put in some polish next semester while the GEL lab still has me as a free employee from the MSU Honors College.

Other hot news is the awesome competition that MSU's Spartasoft and University of Michigan's Wolverinesoft are competing in. Each team is making a game for Ford Credit, and the winning team gets an all expenses paid trip to GDC, which would be AWESOME. The only downside if that its in flash, but learning new things is still fun and insightful, even if my main interests are 3D graphics and AI.

Hopefully new games will be posted in the portfolio soon!

Passage

I don't hardly know what to say. Passage is in a whole different league of art game. It's 8 bit with a very narrow screen, and it's left me wondering if its going to leave me bummed out for the rest of the day.

Passage is essentially a depiction of life and the design has some very interesting implications. Early on you can meet the love of your life, but if you go exploring you can miss her and go through life without her. More amazingly you can go straight from beginning to end in a straight line if you never move down on the screen, just running through life as fast as you can. About halfway through the fact that you, and you lover if you found her, is obvious enough that you can't miss it anymore. It also becomes clear is that the characters position on the screen is moving steadily to the right, which gives a sense for the approaching end of life, even though you didn't notice it in the earlier part of the game. There's some very deep depictions of life in these design decisions.

The most shocking part of the game was when my lover died. It happens sudden and unexpectedly, and moving backwards won't bring her back, just as once you move to the right and age you stay that age even if you try to return to younger years. Furthermore, I had noticed that my lover had actually impeded my progress through the game because she increases the amount of space between the walls of the game that is required for both of you to slip through as you travel through life. Her presence also makes certain chests (which either sprout black dots that don't do anything for you or stars that add to your meaningless "score") unreachable. At first I was upset that the designer would depict love as such a hinderance, but a second thought made me consider if it was actually worse to have a lover to keep you from racing through life? Is a success that means nothing in the context of death worth more than love?

After my lover died I was more than a little bummed out by it, and I will admit I raced to the right as fast as I could to meet my own end, which wasn't as fast as previously because I could no longer walk as fast as I used to. Then I died, and it was over.