This weekend (my last holidays weekend) was the Ludumdare 27, the compo where you have to make a game based on a given theme, alone, in 48 hours, without reusing existing code or assets.
I made “A DEUS”, an asynchronous multiplayer web game in Javascript/WebGL. You can try it clicking on the image.
I wanted to write a post-mortem with some of my thoughts about the game and the development process.
Some time ago I had the idea of porting the concept of a great old game called Mindrover to the web, as an excuse to do something with my LiteGraph.js library (a javascript to create modular graphs similar to PD).
Mindrover is a game where you design your vehicle to fulfill some challenges. You cannot directly control the vehicle during the challenge, instead you must add sensors and thrusters around the chasis of the vehicle and wire them to react according to your strategy. A very interesting and fun game. Sadly it seems that the mechanics of the game havent caught up with more developers.
As I was commenting in a previous post, I enjoy playing with the parameters in C4D to get a nice realistic and soft illumination.
Today I wanted to get a nice text that felt warm. This is the result:
There are lots of subtle changes made to get a nice final image, you can see step by step the process in the full post.
I have improved Simplecanvas so now it has some basic 3D rendering functions, check the latest entries in the gallery to see the syntax.
It is a pity that I can’t use WebGL (I want to keep it as compatible as possible, specially for iOS), otherwise I could make something more like processing.
I finally created a web with a list of all my webapps created during the last three years.
Not all of them are finished, and there are some that I don’t think are interesting enough to put them there, but at least the cool ones are well listed.
Feel free to check them following this link.
Today I have presented in front of an audience for the very fist time the work I’ve been doing for that last year and a half. It is a 3D editor entirely made for the web, using my own 3D rendering engine. It is called WebGLStudio.
Because it is still a prototype full of bugs I didnt want to promote it but now I feel more confortable sharing it. You can try it by clicking the screenshot.
I will make a better post about it with a tutorial video in the next weeks.
This micro-talk made me rethink some of my conceptions about if I should shown more about the work I’m doing.
I’m against showing anything before it is almost finished to avoid people criticising aspect that I already know they are bad. But after this talk I think I’m going to make a video of the project I’ve been working over the last year.
Meanwhile, I leave this 8 minutes talk about if it is a good idea to show your work when it is not finished.
I hate when coding a neat web application I stumble uppon a problem where due to a poor standard there is no clean solution.
This weekend I was coding a planet shader for an idea I’ve been having lately, the problem when dealing with planet rendering is that you need very high resolution textures if you want to let the user get a close view. So I searched and found some 4K textures perfect for my scene.
One month ago Graham offered me to collaborate with him in one of his live coding performances. He does amazing music by coding live in front of an audience (no samples, no synths) using Supercollider.
He thought I could do the visuals using one of my tools, he would send me OSC messages and I can try to visualize them. So I took my old Simplecanvas web-experiment and tune it a lot so it can work in a real environment.
I wanted to talk about it before but I was waiting to have a video to show (we recorded the session), sadly the videos will have to wait a little bit, meanwhile just a heads up about the new features in Simple Canvas 2.0.
Today I stumbled uppon one of my old blogs, it has been stored in my host since the day I swapped servers but It didnt work due to some problems in the old version of WordPress. I decided to fix it after realizing that there are lots of post there (none that has special interes for anybody besides me). Check it out if you are extremly bored (the content is in spanish).
Which reminds me I have another blog online, the one where I explained my “adventures” as an Erasmus Student, soon it will be 10 years since I wrote it…
I live to keep them alive, maybe in 20 years I will like to read them again.