The personal blog of game designer, programmer and Cand. Scient. Informatics, Jimmy Marcus Larsen. Currently working as a game designer at Cego ApS.
February 13, 2007 at 21:51
Yes, I know it is the name of a crappy Hollywood movie, but it is also the name of the game we are creating this semester. A really simple game about a scarecrow having nightmares about crows stealing his straws, and using them for nest building. The goal is to shoot down the crows to prevent them from doing so. The interesting part for us, is that we will be coding flocking behavior for the crows. Hopefully we will have time to apply some reinforcement learning to them as well, to make them unbeatable over time.
We began modeling the game in UPPAAL, which is a really nice program for doing model checking and pre-implementation testing. I would recommend game designers to have a look at that. Here is an early UPPAAL-model of our game to play with. I suggest trying out the build-in random simulator to see how our variables behave over time.
February 7, 2007 at 21:15
I somehow managed to pass both the project exam and the Math for Game Programmers exam with excellent grades. During my reading up for the math exam I quickly got a good grasp on the subjects I beforehand had thought on as being hard. Curves and the Frenet Frame for instance.
This semester our focus should be on agent behavior, or AI as it is often called. We are going to create a simple game, with advanced AI in it. Sounds like fun, and as we are going to build our game engine with Ogre the coding will be great too. No more Source-engine for now - yay!
The most interesting course this semester is probably in 3D Computer Graphics, where topics like ray tracing, shadow generation and shading will be present. Test and Verification might sound like something I have done before, but the more mathematical approach to testing that this course takes is still interesting.
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