Archive for January, 2012

Winter Volleyball: Behind the scenes

In this post I’ll discuss the creation of the Winter Volleyball prototype.

As I mentioned earlier the base mechanic was inspired by the old DOS game Arcade Volleyball. Back in the mid 90′s I played it a lot with my brother and friends so I wanted to make it a two player game. I had also just added a few features to the Razer Hydra integration which needed testing therefore I chose to base the controls on that input device.

The season lent itself as a visual theme and I started using snowmen as main characters. At first they were just sliding back and forth but hitting the ball with the narrow top of the hat was somewhat difficult. Before going with a different avatar I linked up tilting to see if it’s fun. While it needed some tweaking, at the end this additional degree of freedom turned out to be both intuitive and useful.

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Written on January 28th, 2012
Categories: Gavit, My projects, UDK
Tags: prototype

Winter Volleyball

Here is my latest prototype, a homage to Arcade Volleyball:

(Watch it in HD on Vimeo)

The players use the Razer Hydra controllers: aiming at the screen moves the snowmen, twisting the wrist makes them headbutt.

This project was finished in about 15 days: the core game mechanics and controls took 5 days, asset authoring was done in 6 and I spent the rest on the special effects.

That’s all for now, I’ll discuss the technical details in an upcoming ‘behind the scenes’ article. EDIT: It’s up.

Written on January 23rd, 2012
Categories: Gavit, My projects, UDK
Tags: prototype, udk

The Razer Hydra 3D model

I wanted to have a 3d model of the Hydra controller for visualization purposes and as a template to create 3D printable accessories for it. Since a professional 3D scanning is quite expensive I decided to use the excellent 123D Catch (Project Photofly) service which reconstructs objects from several photos.

The featureless black plastic material of the Hydra offers little for tracking so as a first step I needed to add some texture to it. I sealed the openings the best I could and then peppered the surface with baby powder.

With these high contrast reference points in place I took 82 pictures and let 123D Catch do it’s magic. The result was reasonably good, although far from being ideal:

The shiny plastic buttons on the top reflected the lights which confused the system so that area is a mess. The also reflective bumper and trigger got through in a much better shape.

I used this raw model as a 3D reference to manually build a subdivision surface model in modo:

It’s too imprecise for accessory design but should be fine for visualization tasks.

Razer Hydra 3D model pack.
Contains the PixarSDS model (.lxo) and polygonal meshes (.obj).

Hydra_Model.zip

Written on January 15th, 2012
Categories: My projects
Tags: razer hydra

A new PC for my parents.

One of the side projects I had during the holidays was buying and setting up a PC for my parents.

They had a crappy old notebook, a usability wreck so I felt that it’s time to get a proper machine for them. I checked out several All-In-One machines and ended up buying an MSI Wind Top AE2240. It’s 2GB RAM, P6200 CPU and integrated video card is just enough for the stuff my parents want to do: browsing the web, watching HD videos, flying around in Google Earth.

Of course the hardware doesn’t really matter if accessibility suffers so I tried to make sure that the PC is simple and fun to use, with special attention to the needs of the senior, technically less inclined audience:

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Written on January 8th, 2012
Categories: My projects