Monthly Archives: September 2011

The secret of attack timing

I have made a discovery. For the past two weeks, I have been working on some attack animations for our Diamond character for testing and prototyping purposes. The motion is mostly based on my experience with boxing and on whatever … Continue reading

Posted in Animation, Art | 2 Comments

Who Needs Scaleform…

Another new feature for the engine this go-around is an enhanced UI. Our previous UI was built using objects and custom components for each type of widget. Buttons, text labels, sliders, and other such controls could be placed in the … Continue reading

Posted in Coding | Leave a comment

Card Kingdom: “Gods of the Arena”

This week we were not happy enough with the base assets to move on. So we reworked the main scene to reflect the concept image not perfect, but if we don’t get a chance to improve the assets by our … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

AI – Prototypes (With more pictures and hopefully less text!)

Before I could prototype the two AI architectures in any kind of complete way, I had to decide on a rudimentary system for controlling the enemies in my flash prototype. I went with a common character control system, where both … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Animation. Will it blend?

Getting the Havok girl to render, texture, and animate in place was extremely satisfying; it was a major milestone hit and it paved the way for some serious business in animation. But, the battle with Havok Animation was far from … Continue reading

Posted in Animation, Coding, DirectX 11, Graphics, Havok | Leave a comment

The Image

I come from an engineering background, so you can imagine the transition to a master of fine arts program for me is jarring. In undergrad I learned that form follows function, so anything that you create should serve its purpose … Continue reading

Posted in Art, Design | Leave a comment

AI – Architecture

This week I researched and prototyped a couple of options for the architecture of the enemies’ behavior AI. The two possible architectures I am considering are Behavior Trees (or more precisely, behavior directed acyclic graphs – each node can potentially … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Creating a Colosseum Environment

This week I worked on an overview of our design and work flow for building the arena in CardKingdom known as the colosseum. This post will briefly cover the points below Modular Level Design Gid and Consistent Scale Environment Concept … Continue reading

Posted in Art, Design | Leave a comment

Havok Physics, Tools, and the Visual Debugger

Integrating Havok into our engine has been a slow, arduous, yet rewarding experience. The main feature that makes Havok such an ideal solution are the tools. Exporters for common 3D modeling programs, preview tools and visual debuggers make the development process a much … Continue reading

Posted in Coding | Leave a comment

Havok Animation Integration

Our engine made one giant leap in the rendering world. We can now successfully render a character model, fully rigged, textured, and animated, using the Havok tools. The accompanying video shows the Havok Girl running in place. Let’s get started … Continue reading

Posted in Animation, Coding, DirectX 11, Engine, Graphics, Havok | Leave a comment