Monthly Archives: March 2012

Gameplay: On-Screen Indicators

For the past week, the gameplay team moved forward with on-screen indicators. The purpose of an indicator is to do just what it implies: indicate something. Examples of objects or other things that need these indicators include players when they … Continue reading

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Character Pipeline 1: Affordance in the Visual Design of Game Characters

As the team’s character artist, it is my responsibility to see each player and enemy character through from the concept phase all the way up to the final animated mesh you see in the game. This quarter I am going … Continue reading

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Tool Time – GDC and New Editor Features

The Card Kingdom team was lucky enough to attend GDC, Game Developers Conference, in San Francisco a few weeks ago. We showed the game to a new audience that spanned the spectrum of students to industry veterans. The overall feedback … Continue reading

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Tutorial: UV Shell Padding in Maya

So I found something out that every pro or semi-pro texture artist worth his salt should know, and I thought I’d share it. First, a brief intro: I was on Polycount the other day and I stumbled across a really … Continue reading

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Designer Den: Control Scheme for a younger audience Part.1

Goal: Our goal is to create simple and natural control scheme for young teens using an Xbox360 controller. Research: To help us achieve this goal we took a look at ergonomics and popular controls across the genre. Before we get … Continue reading

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Data-driven Animation Machines

For this week, I explored making the animation machine design more user-friendly by making them data-driven! We already have a majority of our content being loaded via XML so I decided to extend the animation machines to do the same … Continue reading

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The Combat Corner – Design Process

Hello there, old friend. It’s been a while… So, today, I want to talk about our design process. I’ve been privileged enough to work on a lot of different types of teams over the years and I have to say, … Continue reading

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Ben’s Beta Postmortem

My Contributions My primary responsibility was gameplay programming. We hit that point in development where a great deal of focus into the gameplay was required. I worked intimately with the actual gameplay project of our solution to emphasize all of … Continue reading

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Johnny’s Winter (Beta) Post-Mortem

My Part For my own part, I worked on character asset-related tasks this quarter, which included death animations and related logistics, implementation of the new enemies and their variations, and heavy iteration on the existing Goon and Player textures and … Continue reading

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Justin’s Winter Post-Mortem

What I did For this version of Card Kingdom, I worked on updating core engine components with some optimizations and cleaner code, refactored the serialization pipeline to be more robust with prefabricated objects, or prefabs as we called them, added … Continue reading

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