Fun with Bézier!

Short video of a Bézier curve made in Unity as a college task for last semester.
In the video you can see four Bezier curves oriented by a different number of points each. They make an eletron travel to an atom (any scientific innacuracy, my sincere apologies).

Other than the curves there are also a few image effects (Motion Blur, Bloom) and a Rim Light Shader.

Insanitas at SBGames!

After a very busy weekend we finished yesterday the registration process for Insanitas to be on the XII Brazilian Symposium of Games and Digital Entertainment, known as SBGames. The symposium also hosts the brazilian version of Independent Games Festival, in which we submitted Insanitas.

The Gameplay video was posted yesterday (but since Blogger wasn't able to find it and attach it here, I'll leave a link for now):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOXyJ6zAC1E

SBGames is the biggest game related academic annual conference here in Brazil and a great opportunity to meet fellow developers and new researches & trends. :D

Insanity, sweat and a post mortem

Although the semester isn't officially over, it's a relief to say that in the end, everything worked out. It is a relief to be able to say we delivered the result of one (REALLY) sweaty year of work. It is a relief that the game did so well. And it is a relief it exceeded our expectations and apparently the ones of everybody who accompanied us during development.

Actually it is more than a relief. It is truly rewarding.

Screenshot from one of the rooms

For those of you who think post mortems suck have no intentio to read this Post Mortem and, luckily, learn one or two things about Insanitas and it's creative process, and just want a link to play, unfortunately I'll have to let you down postponing in a few days the download. Polishing and bug fixing never ends. :P

Optimizing Unity at CECON (and some other stuff)

I recently had the pleasure of being invited to speak to the students of the CECON game development course.

In the one hour I had to speak, we discussed the constant market growth to professionals who work with Unity, the main challenges of developing for mobile, optimization techniques and useful tools in the process of creating games for mobile devices.

It was a very good experience and I hope to have that opportunity again. A special thanks to Lucas Criscoullo, course coordinator, for inviting me.

As soon as I have some time I intend to improve and translate the material and maybe post it here.

Meanwhile, some preview images:

Global Game Jam 2013: A little bit about the experience

Some time after (a few hours to be more precise) my last post, I embarked on a three hour journey to the countryside of Minas Gerais to participate on an experience I can only describe as incredible.

To the ones uninformed and the ones who are not familiar with the game development field, last weekend took place the 5th Global Game Jam, an international game development event. In 270 localizations in 58 different countries, programmers, artists, designers, musicians and writers got together with a single objective: to create a game in 48 hours.

With my notebook on my back and sleeping bag on my hand, me and three friends drove down to Rio Pomba, one of the host towns of the event. We were extremely well received and the structure, although it wasn't perfect, proved itself to be more than enough for a stable Jam (which was a relief considering my last experience with such event). There were two days of a lot of work, dialogue, a few disappointments and a lot of new friendships - most of them extremely talented developers.

As usual the theme was announced by the beginning of the Jam and as usual the theme was surprising:

Facebook, iPad and the cookie's issue

The ones who follow me in the social networks were, sometime ago, witnesses of a short storm of "unusual" posts (I fear the less patient ones may have blocked me :P).

One of my most recent activities at Gaz Games was the study of plugin by Prime 31 (company specialized in developing plugins for Unity), the iOS Social Networking Plugin, responsible to connect Unity iOS apps with Facebook, preventing the developer of having to deal with Objective-C to do so. The plugin allows you to publish images, status, links, photo albums and retrieve user information such as email, name and age.

The so called storm of posts was part of a series of tests regarding the settings and functionalities of the plugin, resulting in the publication of many "Awesome iPad + Unity Integration test!" and prototype interfaces in my timeline (all of them deleted shortly after being posted).

Ironically, the plugin, which was acquired with the intention to avoid the direct use of Objective-C, was exactly the cause of a fast study about the language and its integration with Unity.

Graphs & Resurrection

Calm down ladies and gentlemen! The blog's hiatus (which was essential for me to close the semester with a golden key) is happily over!

According to the post I wrote here, my free time is a geometric progression of negative common ratio directly proportional to the moment of the semester, therefore, the closer to the end, less free time I have. As a consequence of that, some of my most beloved activities had to be left behind so I could ensure the stability of my academic life, resulting in the abadon of the blog (but still being responsable for the joy of being approved in all the subjects).

But, as I am finally free of my responsabilities with college, I can return to the writing and research. And I have a lot to post about the projects and studies I participated on during my time of absence here. Starting with graphs.

As a college task I developed along with the great Nosirrahh and other two colleagues the base for the creation of an artificial intelligence in a tactical RPG battle system (like the awesome Shining Force II :D).

To be clearer, our objective was to create the root of something like that: