Since my last post, way back when, there have been quite a few developments.

First off, my Ludum Dare results came back.
Sadly, while I was happier with the resulting game, the results were lower this time than my last submission:

Coolness 79% (up 11% from #23)

#466 Humor 2.40 (down 0.89 from #23)
#847 Theme 2.83 (down 0.47 from #23)
#890 Fun 2.50 (down 0.03 from #23)
#923 Audio 1.50 (There was 0 audio in the games so…)
#951 Mood 2.16 (down 0.52 from #23)
#994 Innovation 2.30 (down 0.51 from #23)
#1016 Graphics 2.10 (down 0.12 from #23)
#1068 Overall 2.43 (down 0.18 from #23)

So I never carried on the dare game…
Which I’m a little disappointed in myself for. However I was working on average 10am-8pm Monday-Friday for 7 weeks. It was originally just a game to try to work on through to completion so that I have a game in my portfolio.

I never expected, going into it, to receive as much experience as I did. Not only did I get a good hands on with working in a team, but I was able to see (albeit perhaps on a smaller scale) the typical ups and downs of games development. I also never expected to get a chance to show off what I’d make nor how the experience would have an effect on me.

This is going to be a biggie. I'll be containing my full flow of work in this post.


Over the summer, certainly off the back of my last project detailed in this blog, I’ve been turning around in my mind the concept of expanding from a single planet. Typical of my imagination, the task I envisioned wasn’t particularly on a small scale.

I want to make the universe.

This post combines my initial post as well as the later results page


The 48 hour competition.

I was at a slight disadvantage in that the comp began from 2am Saturday morning and would run through until 2am Monday morning.
I was working both Friday night and Saturday night.

I had a plan for how to get the most time. But it didn’t sound appealing.

I managed to pull off the plan. It wasn’t appealing.

These following posts span my later half of my 3rd Year at the University of Abertay Dundee when we were studying procedural generation and post processing effects.

I was initially tasked with creating a flat mesh to represent a terrain. It was advised to create an algorithm which created a diamond pattern. After sketching out a plan and trying to work it out in my head, I went on to code out what I thought would make the correct mesh. To my amazement; it was spot on. The only issue was that I was only using a vertex buffer, which not only meant there was up to 8 vertices at any one point, but also, randomly offset vertices would result in a broken surface.
So I went about editing my code to include an index buffer, which to my despair meant recalculating my algorithm, however with the basic principles in mind, this wasn’t too hard and I soon managed to recreated the same grid:

Since part way through my third year at the University of Abertay Dundee, I have made blog posts on my progress as a computer games programmer on Tumblr. Recently I have heard of other blogs being wrongfully closed down without due warning and the authors being unable to retrieve their blogs. As such, I'll be moving across my posts to my site. Unfortunately, there's no straight forward way to port the posts and as such they'll be grouped together into quite large posts.