by Jeff | Sep 27, 2013 | Axon, DataVis, Design/Development, Featured, Games, Our Games, Quench |
We’ve been working on the Quench editor and pipeline for about a month now, and before anything else, I want to know what I can and can’t get away with doing on an Android tablet. Over this past week I’ve performed a semi-scientific study to identify how best to use the A* algorithm in Quench. AI can be incredibly demanding on CPU resources. Having spent time studying robotics, I know the kind of computational power that often goes into academic robot designs with goals no more noble than ensuring even coverage of a surface by a Roomba. It can be surprising how much computation it can take to do something that seems trivial in the human experience. Quench is going to require that groups of animals have herd-level group-think AI and individual-animal-level AI that result in flocking/swarming behaviour to move as a group and also avoid enemies while finding their way through a map of hazards to reach a goal location. Our plan is to implement the group-level AI as an A* algorithm that runs at intervals to identify a clear path to follow. Flocking requires some further study before we can say how exactly that will work. With these goals in mind, I dove into the first assignment for my AI class at Humber to answer some important questions for myself. I wanted to know what factors cause the computation complexity of A* to grow most quickly, so that I could plan to mitigate or sidestep them. And so I wrote myself a simple A* testbed as a C# Console Application that utilized interfaces to specify the necessary...
by Jeff | Sep 7, 2013 | Axon, Design/Development, Featured, Games, Our Games, Quench |
As school starts up again for the year (my final year!) my attention has been focused upon the project of grand scale that lays before me: my capstone. The project that no teacher at Humber will let you forget from the first moment you sit down in a classroom. It is intended to be your greatest achievement before graduating, and to mark your transition into professional video game development. I’ve been dying to get started. And so much thought and care has gone into my plan — and Axon’s plan — to bring my capstone project to life as a commercial game called Quench. Quench is a top-down hex-based puzzle game in which the player controls the weather to assist herds of animals though desolate landscapes and the dark spirits of the past. The player uses earthquakes, lightning, wind, rain and simple psychology to guide their flock to safety, and eventually restore the world. Since Axon is working on this project as a whole, I find myself in the enviable position of having a team of some of the most talented people I know from a wide range of fields to bring to bear in creating Quench. Furthermore, Axon will be bringing another another Humber Game Programming student named James Zinger onto the team, and so Quench will be shared as our student work masterpiece. All told, the Axon team for Quench is comprised of 6 people: Myself (Jeff Rose) – Programmer and Technical Direction James Zinger – Programmer Tabby Rose – UI Design and Creative Direction William (Bill) Nyman – Game Design, Level Design and QA Albert Fung...
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