A Symphony of Light and Sound: Project Genesis

Well, first things first. I've ditched the entire zombie killing game. I've shifted my interest into something more interesting - towards interpreting sound through fine demonstration of computer graphics. It'll be like those media player visualizations - only that mine will be sequential. The concept that the CG will portray will be about the creation of earth - from the Archean to Phanerozoic eon (that is, from bacterias to end of Ice Age). Hence, it is absolutely essential for me to grasp some of the advanced rendering techniques OpenGL has to offer in order to produce breath-taking but non-photo realistic scene.. and as a preparation for this, I've enrolled myself in a CG class in BCIT and have dumped my two Java courses. This was a huge risk that I have to take in order to accelerate the development of my portfolio.

Getting back to the project, I'll probably have to mix a number of techno / rave sounds in order to produce an impression of the earth in the process of being created. And in line with this, I've already laid down the tracks for the portal scene (1st scene). I've selected the Shumacher track by DJ Visage. The 1st scene will last for 1.21 minutes and will portray our hero entering the portal and travelling back through time. This scene's gonna be good! I've gotta lot of good stuffs running in my head right now but the question is.. can I implement it? Well, only time will tell.

Anyway, here's some of the practice work that I've been doing lately. Here's a Gouraud-shaded scene, with dynamic lighting, environment mapping, and multitexturing applied to it.

14 x 7

That game programming summer class was a tough one.. I only had 6 weeks to do a whole lot of of things and boy, it sure kept me sitting in front of the computer 14 hours a day, 7 days a week. If I think about it again, it's really up to the learner to make the subject as tough as hell. If you want to gain more, then you'll have to work even harder. I'm kinda sad that its over but hey, I really enjoyed that summer class. Here are some of my creations within the class. I worked really hard on these reels so I hope that you'll enjoy it:

The tools used for these are the following:

Graphics Engine: OpenGL
Programming Platform: VC7 ++, Win32
2D Visuals (Textures, Splash Screens, etc.): Adobe Photoshop 7.0, Terragen
3D Model: 3DS Max Model and Quake 2 Model (via MilkShape)
3D Audio: OpenAL

Cybershrine

Easter Egg Hunt

Stream Valley

Underground Volcano

Spider Infestation

Going under water in Easter Egg Hunt

This fall, i'm gonna start making my portfolio. If everything goes well, then I'll be able to submit my demo reel in one of 'em big gaming companies and hopefully, they'll be generous enough to offer me a job ;) This will be a 3-month effort so it'll really be a tough one. I was initially planning to do a game on Naruto but I realized that my 3D modeling skills just plainly sucked so I decided to just go to a 1st or 3rd person shooting game whose plot isn't really that grand. It's like this: You're in charge of manning a gun tower and your task is to prevent the horde of zombies from getting inside the fallout camp and have a picnic out of the flesh of the town's last survivors during a virus outbreak. You'll have various weapons at your disposal but be wary that as the level increases, the zombies exponentially increases in number.. oh, and did I mention that they also become tougher? So, what do you think?

Anyway, just this afternoon, I borrowed Physics, Trigonometry and Geometry books from the library. I'll be using them as a reference as I go one with the project. I also bought this game by Microsoft called Dungeon Siege 2. I planned on gaining some more insights as to how I can apply real-game concepts into my portfolio but it turned out that I'm enjoying playing it more than just doing an observation on the game. Well, whatever happens, I'll see through this until the end and make sure that the job gets done even if it takes me 24x7.. uh.. well maybe not that far ;)