Pose recognition tool!

I've been working on my Kinect-pose-recognition tool!
We are using Unity as our game engine and there are some built-in tools for Kinect, that has helped us a lot because it makes it really easy to start working with the Kinect and at least get something on the screen. As our engineering professor said "the hardest part is to get stuff to be drawn in the screen" (he was talking about DirectX and getting started with it).
I put some good hours of work on this tool and I was happy about the progress that I did over the weekend. I showed the tool to my fellow engineers and they were pretty happy with my progress too, the code works very well and the user-interface that I coded for the tool is also well developed, it has some very interesting features that hopefully will help a lot during our game development process. I can output and input information about different poses and skeletons and I've been working on some vector interpretation math in order to be able to recognize the player and different stuff that the game will need in order to determine success or failure (I will keep more details about my tool for later).

We are getting close to the end of the semester and stuff is getting tough, hopefully I can finish this tool as soon as possible, I want my game designer to have something to work with over the summer but definitely I will keep upgrading it over the summer too, it is going in a cool direction and hopefully it will give me good amount of information to study about for my final thesis!

Challenge accepted!

Beginning of the semester, 2012, we were ready to start working on our last prototypes for pitch games.
I got into this awesome team where the game was about KILLING DODOS! I liked the idea very much, it was goofy, creative and fun.
I took a look at the original idea and I was able to give some really good contributions that re-enforced the fun in the game. We managed to have a really strong concept with a good prototype showing how the game was going to be played, only in one month!

After having such a big success with that prototype, the game was picked for final production. Then, surprising decisions popped-up, the 'executive' producers decided to move me from this team and get me into another one...
Regroup started, my new game is called ZODIAC RACERS! A very creative idea but it is a raw diamond, not very well polished on concept or fun but the theme in it, hell I like it!
Another good part of it, is that it will be developed for Kinect!
I am still a little concerned because I haven't really done anything with the Kinect (other than play a couple of games with it haha). But I take the challenge, sounds like a great opportunity to learn something innovative and new but at the same time more complicated and mysterious.

As my first task I have to develop a tool that has to recognize different poses and then let us use those poses in the game in a faster and more agile way.
Let's see what we've got!

[Reset] Level 1 - Pitch a game!

What?.. Again?.. GREAT!
Yes, a new game, but this time the enemies got buffed!
I got "hired" by a new producer, my new team looks cool, we get free drinks (only water), we play SSBB, we have nicer lunch times and the ideas we come out have different perspectives (a little strange ones I may say).

As I said the enemies (clients) got buffed this time, we're now dealing with Mechanical Engineers!!!
They ask for more technical stuff, learning is also involved and looks like our "Fairy" (Corinne) decided not to let us use cannons!?!?!?! I dunno what are we supposed to do without cannons...
But we'll see, our new game pitch is set and we're polishing the idea [top secret].
Tomorrow we'll see what our client thinks!

Game of the week: BRAID
(I'll start weeks on Sundays haha)

Level 3 - Killing the first boss!

The presentation day arrived!

We were ready for that, powerful Rocket Launchers, laser beams and lots of ammo (I really hope it was like that haha). But "The Adventures of PLUMMET DIXON, Inept Pilot" was ready for it's first public presentation, the map was looking good, the character was moving properly and most important the prototype was good enough to demonstrate gameplay! 

We got into crunching time the days before but whole team was happy about the prototype we showed since it basically demonstrated what each of us added to the project as a whole. 

What I take from this first game is the importance of a good working pipeline (once again). It's important to have all your resources working well at all times in order to be on time with the whole process, falling back in any  area might delay the whole pipeline.

The importance of conceptualization and graphic development is of great importance in all multimedia projects, we had a big delay in the graphic development and that ended up delaying the whole process, but we figured out the way to catch up and be able to present a good prototype at the end. 

Game of the week: BRAID

Level 2 - The Level!

Me and my team have been working on the distribution of our first level. It has been a little more complicated than I thought at first, we went from one idea to another, adding, changing, making questions about complexity, gameplay, etc...

The team decided to put me on charge of this task. I created the layout for the first part of the game, also my teammate Jesse created the second part of it. My last duty was to put those two pieces together and then create the third and final part of it. The layout is now done! I created a prototype of the prototype of out game and played on it for a while, this way I could experience the gameplay and check for basic problems. As I said, after a while I finished the first final draft for our world. I think we succeeded on creating an interesting gameplay, not stupidly hard but not too easy either!
By having this I believe the art process will go smoothly, we didn't really wanted to get our artist to work too deep in the development of the graphics before we got some good and pre-tested layout of the level.

加油! 加油! 


Game of the week: WORLD RIDDLES SEVEN WONDERS
(some people might say it's inspired on Mineseeker)

Bonus World 1 - Football culture

Last Thursday (Sept. 1st), the University had the first football game of the season, the U of U against MSU!

The great University of Utah defeated MSU by more than 10 points... 

Why am I writing about this? 

Well, even though I've been to the US many times before, I had never experienced what football means to this culture, it was pretty impressive to me to see the whole city turn their heads to the U and come to the football game!

Now I know why EA's franchise "Madden" reaches high positions in the lists of bestsellers every year... it's denoted that sports is a very important part of the North American culture. Definitely EA has done a very good job at the development of all the sports games but more than that at supporting this important part of the country with the biggest sports culture!

Level 1 - Pitch a game!

How do you recognize a good Video Game?

The question I asked myself when working on my first assignment for the Projects I class. 

We had to design a game where we would teach something to out players, our first idea was to pitch a game about the Cartel Problem in the Border!!! quite a subject huh! specially since I'm Mexican and racism is always a good way to start! hahaha...

So we decided to teach people "how to survive in the jungle"!

Our idea was working smooth and nice, until we got told we had to work with such great Engine... Power Game Factory! Wuhuuu! So after clicking and clicking we figured out that the idea wouldn't work very nice in this engine so we had to modify it quite a bit, happens a lot (from what I've heard). 

My team is great, we have very creative people and we try to contribute as much as possible!

Since we already decided on the final idea, the characters and the basic structure of the gameplay we want, we are now working on specific assets for the game. At this point I'm working on the map and hopefully that will give us a bust so we can finish the basic prototype as soon as possible! (that way we'll have time to add fancy stuff!!!)

Game of the week: SUPER MEAT BOY!
(come on it's a great game, it deserves at least a full week)