Archive for February, 2010

digital monologue

Thursday, February 25th, 2010

While we’re on the topic…

At SouthEnd we use a versioning tool called Subversion. It is just one of many tools doing the same thing – managing versions of files.
I could go on and on about version control and configuration management. But I won’t. At least not this time. Let’s just say it’s a wonderful thing that makes it possible for us to work as a team.

deleted dogz

This time I will bring up the social part of it. Commit comments.
Commit comments are messages that you write when you have made a change to a file in the project. The comment is supposed to briefly explain what you changed (committed). (As we speak, 2642 commits have been made to ilomilo)
These comments, along with a list of the files that were changed, are stored in a log than can be viewed by all members of the project. This log can be compared to a giant chat log of people talking to themselves.

Your average comment might look like this:
“Fixed: Scaled objects not culled properly”

This log, consisting of hundreds of little comments, will of course contain a certain amount of literary gold!
And that’s what this post is really about. I’ve hand picked a few of my favourites, and will present them to you in a series of posts.
(I bet you didn’t expect _this_ to be published, fellow SouthEnders…)

Here we go. Today’s selection is from the early stages of the project:

--------------------------------------------
Revision: 4
Author: eber
Message:
Initial commit
--------------------------------------------
Revision: 32
Author: eber
Message:
wtf etc
--------------------------------------------
Revision: 76
Author: sfle
Message:
animations for milo! :D
--------------------------------------------
Revision: 107
Author: eber
Message:
Added first pass at collision grid IT'S SCREWY I KNOW! the directional mapping is not correct.
--------------------------------------------
Revision: 118
Author: mdah
Message:
Added: Shadows in Ilomilo (Iteration #1, NOT final!)
--------------------------------------------
Revision: 237
Author: eber
Message:
Removed: crap code
--------------------------------------------
Revision: 238
Author: eber
Message:
Added: crap code
--------------------------------------------
Revision: 318
Author: mgar
Message:
- Tears in my eyes...
--------------------------------------------
Revision: 400
Author: eber
Message:
Fixed: materials 'ballon' and 'ballonskirt' didn't exist
--------------------------------------------
Revision: 403
Author: eber
Message:
Added: super secret stuff...SHHHhh..don't tell anyone!
O_o
o_O
O_O
it's the custom bounce cube animation, to allow for unique/totally awesome jumps :D
--------------------------------------------
Revision: 444
Author: eber
Message:
Added: stuff before we get kicked out of the office
--------------------------------------------
Revision: 695
Author: mdah
Message:
Fixed: Children are now put in quarantine when picked up
--------------------------------------------
Revision: 700
Author: mgar
Message:
- GDC Candidate 1 (stand-alone version)
--------------------------------------------

That’s all for now. Stay tuned for the next episode!

best practice cat

Posted in Fun, People | 3 Comments »

code swarm

Thursday, February 25th, 2010

filesyumyum

Game development is a very collaborative process. The contributions to a game project like ilomilo come from people with widely varying skills.

Artists build 3D models that are brought to life by animations and textures.
Level designers, well, they design the quirky levels…
Programmers (like me) mess around with the code to make all parts work together.

What if you could visualize this complex process?
Well, we made an attempt, using the sweet tool “code swarm”.

The video clip below shows the history of ilomilo so far, as interpreted by code swarm. The dots represent changes made to the files in the project and the colors show different types of work. Green and yellow dots represent code changes, blue dots are graphics, red are sounds etc… The floating texts represent the people working on the project.

So, here you go!
One year of ilomilo development, compressed to a one minute incomprehensible video.
I don’t expect any of you to make any sense out of it, but it certainly is fun to watch.

To view the movie in all it’s full size glory, click this link (and set it to 480p):
ilomilo swarm

The big explosion at the end shows very accurately how Gordon (mgar) removed all files and then added them again.

Tags:
Posted in Fun, People | No Comments »

Ambient occlusion

Wednesday, February 17th, 2010

ao
click pic!

A nice little render effect, called ambient occlusion, recently made it into ilomilo. As mentioned in an earlier post, all textures have occlusion baked into them, but now characters cast nice occlusion shadows on all objects in the level.

Some of you may not know what Ambient occlusion means. Well neither do I, but this is what wikipedia told me:
“Ambient occlusion is a shading method used in 3D computer graphics which helps add realism to local reflection models by taking into account attenuation of light due to occlusion. Ambient occlusion attempts to approximate the way light radiates in real life, especially off what are normally considered non-reflective surfaces.”

So basically it just makes things look nice.

Posted in Art, Code | No Comments »

ilomilo begins

Thursday, February 11th, 2010

Alright, so today I’m going to talk a little about the early design phrase of ilomilo and how the game developed from an abstract idea to what we have today.

The concept for ilomilo started back in 2008 when it was time for us to start developing a new game project. The main game element was to let the player cooperate with itself in a 3D-labyrinth by altering between two characters and make them meet up anywhere on the stage, rather than getting to a pre-defined target. We decided that the primary puzzle element would be cubes the player could pick up and place down anywhere to overcome obstacles.

To get a picture of how the puzzles would work we started to create lots of illustrations depicting individual puzzle sections.

earlypuzzledesign01
One of the earliest puzzle designs using cubes and carpets.

earlypuzzledesign02
Another early concept illustrating the need to cooperate with oneself.

earlypuzzledesign03
Later concept with describing text

earlypuzzledesign04
Early concept for special cube

After having nailed the basic game design and visual style we started to ponder on a name for the game. We sent out a mail to everyone at the office requesting name suggestions. “Åril & äril”, “Knak och brak”, “panpan & dandan” were some early propositions, but ultimately we settled for “ilomilo”.

Posted in Design, Pictures | 3 Comments »

ilomilo cameo in the dream machine

Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010

dm_logo

Point and click heroes Cockroach Inc. are busy making their clay and cardboard adventure The Dream Machine. If you haven’t tried out Gateway and Gateway II, head over to the cockroach homepage to play them. Dream Machine looks equally awesome and best of all: it has a funky clay cameo apparence by milo.

dm_cameo.

Try out The Dream Machine demo!

Hmmm, who knows, the dream machine protagonists Victor might just make a cameo in ilomilo?

Posted in Fun | No Comments »