Projects

Programming games with DirectX

This project was the first programming project of the master program. The requirements were to make a scene in C++ using DirectX 9.0c that exhibits the following features:

Textures
Materials
Lighting
Stencil and Depth buffering
World, view and projection transformations
Meshes (loading and rendering)

The report of the application can be found here

Tudomino.com

www.tudomino.com

TuDomino.com is an on line game of dominoes aimed for players in Venezuela but with public from Mexico, Dominican Republic, Spain , USA, among other countries. I am the administrator of the server since 2004 and the duties in this matter are maintenance of the server, release security fixes, developing interfaces to the payment systems and developing new features in the server side of the game.

Programming Games on the PC

soccer

This mini game was the final project for the second course of Programming Games. The game consists in a soccer game of only 1 player that has to score against an unique goalkeeper. The project had to accomplish the following requirements:

Keyboard and mouse interaction
Audio
Simple physics (collision detection)
Use of an effects file (HLSL)

The final report of the course can be found here

Game Design and Development – Happmann

Game Design and Development

Happmann is a third person shooter with some key features such as a reasonable rich set of power-ups and an humouristic environment which made the game really enjoyable especially on LAN parties of 4 or more people playing together. In this project a team of 6 programmers, 2 producers and 4 artists worked together for about three months from two different locations (Canada and Scotland). Since the MSc CGT is taught from Scotland the producers and artists team where located in Dundee and the programmers team was located in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. The game was developed using Torque Game Engine Advanced with C++ and TorqueScript as scripting language.

The role of each member in the programmers team was not strictly defined. Several times the role was changed depending of the preference of each member. In my particular case, the role was changed several times from being in charge of networking to being designing some UI screens. At some point in the project it was necessary or convenient to develop some features between groups of two. This strategy was working very well in cases such as developing complex tasks, when some research was needed, or for bug fixing.

The most important asset obtained in this project is the ability to work in a team environment in addition with learning to handle a code base of several of thousands lines of code.

Dare to be digital – Rock Rebellion

Rock Rebellion - Dare to be digital

Rock Rebellion was our game submitted for the competition Dare to be Digital which was a fantastic experience where 14 teams of 5 members each worked hard for 9 weeks to make a prototype that was shown at Protoplay at the international festival of Edinburgh, Scotland.

The game is about Izzy – a die hard rock fan, who has to rescue the world that has been taken over by the evil forces of the pop music. It is an old fashioned beat’em up fighting game where the main character is controlled using the RockBand guitar peripherals. Our main goal was to use the guitar controllers to achieve the empathy between the character and the player taking the experience of using a guitar peripheral in a new different way. The game explores the use of remarkable moments with a strong dose of humour and the reception of the kids in the Protoplay event was amazing.

Rock Rebellion was developed in C++ using Gamebryo Lightspeed as game engine and Lua as scripting language. The experience gained in Happmann was very helpful to learn how to use a high-end middleware in a tight schedule of 10 weeks. The art pipeline of Gamebryo Lightspeed is really powerful as well as the integration with other middlewares like WWise SDK and PhysX. Those features made us the life easier and allows us to focus more in key aspects of the game, like how to map the guitars controllers in a easy and fun way, rather than be spending time solving technical issues.

If you have a Rock Band guitar controller you can give a try of the game which is available here.