Connectedness

Over the years I have surmised that I must have some sort of pathological condition wherein my ability to maintain and effectively update a blog is severely comprimised.

Short of a costly and risky medical procedure, it seems the only way to get better is to make some bizarre resolution to make more frequent posts. In the spirit of this, I will once again begin posting coding tricks and industry anecdotes to this blog. I will also be constantly updating my brand-new Twitter account (www.twitter.com/julianspillane) with many inane and semi-relevant details of my life!

Our Wii game, which is still unannounced so I can’t divulge too much, has been eating up a considerable amount of my time as of late, but I’m happy to say that we are on schedule for a retail launch in September. It’s been a hard, gruelling 11 months so far, but hopefully you will all be amazed with what we’ve managed to put together.

Here’s to a successful and informative 2009.

Up & Dn Info

So I’ve decided to start blogging all of the information related to the development of Up & Dn to the company blog which can be found here. I apologize for the infrequency of updates, I promise to get more content up here soon.

In the meantime, check out the developer blog every so often. There should be exciting updates coming in the next few weeks.

Happy Holidays from all of us at Frozen North Productions!

Here’s a little awesomeness our lead designer whipped up just in time for the holidays. Yours truly and co., Team Fortress 2 style! I hope you enjoy and look forward to more content in the New Year!

Special thanks to our friends at Valve.

Overhaul!

For those of you interested, we have recently overhauled our website to be more visually appealing and to accurately reflect our current team and development efforts. Check us out at www.frozennorth.net .

(P.S. I’ll be having the slide deck from the FuturePlay event as well as the shadow demo up soon. )

Publicity!

So the other day a good friend of mine from Microsoft approached me and asked if I could give a talk at the FuturePlay conference the following day. Always eager to help, I dragged our lead designer Doug along and whipped up a presentation on the importance of prototyping in design.

You can see a writeup at the event here: http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=16269

And I’ll be putting up the slide deck soon.

Screenshots…

As promised yesterday, here are a few screenshots taken from when we solidified our lighting system. These images by no means reflect final production shots. Just a demonstration of the lighting system with shadowing:

All images are copyright 2007 Frozen North Productions, Inc.

Shading the Apprentice

We’d been deliberating for awhile on what style of lighting and shading we wanted for Up & Dn. We’d tested everything from cel-based toon through to detailed phong shading, and nothing really felt quite right. Having given up on tuning the lighting in favour of completing the world editor and collision systems, I suddenly realized exactly what we needed stylistically while watching a presentation on the lighting systems in Valve’s Team Fortress 2.

 We had previously been using a toon shader based on lambertian lighting as an index into a 16 element 1D cel texture broken up into distinct tones. It looked okay, but didn’t really have the feel that we wanted. What Valve did was take the same approach of using the lambertian diffuse term as a lookup but into a graded “warp” texture that faded to warm colours before falling off to black. The warm colours were used to get that unique feel of 1970s American illustration that really defines the game’s visul presence.

 So taking a page from Valve’s book we went and modified our own warp texture using a falloff gradient that gave us just the right feel. It combined with an improvised ambient occlusion term has given our visuals just the right feel.

I’ll post some shots tomorrow along with the shadow demo that I promised. For now, here’s a link to the TF2 paper: Illustrative Rendering in Team Fortress 2

adventures in xna pt. 2: Shadows, Collisions, and More…

So a few weeks back I gave two presentations at a Microsoft-sponsored event at the University of Waterloo. One of them was a rather impromptu session where I answered various questions on XNA and entrepreneurship, and the second was an indepth look at shadowing techniques including tradeoffs, optimization considerations, and implementation.

It’s really amazing how few resources there are out there for fledgling XNA developers who want to delve into the world of real-time shadowing but don’t really know where to begin. To that end, I present to you my slides from the “Okdevberfest” event. Source code will follow once I’ve had time to clean it up and separate it from our engine code. The demo implements vanilla shadow mapping and percentage-closer filtering combined with a screen-space blur for improving visual quality.

You can find the presentation here: Shadowing in XNA: The “Dark” Side of Game Development

A screenshot from the demo

Now to change gears. Lately I’ve been studying collision detection very formally and have come up with some neat and optimized implementations of various algorithms including OBB tests, the GJK algorithm for convex polyhedra, robust tri-tri collisions and even a foray into GPU-based collision. I’ll be posting some demos and code of my various collision experiments in the next few weeks in hopes that I can help some of you who have gotten fed up with the effective uselessness of XNA’s built-in collision support.

Who knows, I might even get around to compiling it all into a managed library for people to use.

In other news, it looks like I might be keynoting a Purpose Gaming conference being held by Microsoft in Dallas next April, on behalf of Frozen North. I’ll post more details as I get them.

Once again, here’s the link to the presentation: Shadowing in XNA: The “Dark” Side of Game Development

adventures in xna pt. 1

Those of you who know me well know that my language of choice is C++. I just love its multi-paradigm nature and the direct control I have over memory. So when Microsoft approached us about making a demo using XNA I was at first a little reluctant. I’d used C# before, dabbling around with WPF and ASP.Net, but never really got into it. I suppose my lack of interest in .NET languages outside of tools development was in part snobbery and in part ignorance. Either way, I really didn’t like the idea of game development using managed code.

Imagine my surprise when I found development in XNA to not only be acceptable, but fun and productive as well! I think what hit home the most was the gamut of utilities and helpful classes packaged right in to the .NET framework. That in unto itself was a blissful change from either using a myriad of 3rd party libraries or rolling my own code for the simplest things like XML parsing.

So long story short, Microsoft approached us about making them a game for the X07 conference in two weeks. Using XNA (an API in a language that the coders on the team had barely touched before). The amazing part? We did it. We did it solidly and competently, and I really don’t think we could have done it in that short a time with native DirectX. XNA handled all of the things that we really didn’t need to worry about: device initialization, device loss, hardware input polling, etc.

So where are we now? Well we’ve taken the brief two-week concept and are now developing it into an Xbox Live Arcade title entirely using XNA. In the coming weeks expect posts relating to random graphics tips and tricks, the XBLA approval process, time management, and random waxing on entrepreneurship.

Happy coding.

std::cout << “Hello World\n”;

Welcome to my blog. It’s nothing fancy or shiny, but it exists to house Pearls of Wisdom ™ that I come across in my daily job as developer, manager, and entrepreneur.

My hope is that people can learn from what I post and avoid making the same mistakes that I did. Failing that, I’m sure I’ll at least provide an entertaining way to kill some time.

Stay tuned for good stuff.