Democamp 13

I went to my first Democamp this evening. I thought I'd share the experience while it's still fresh in my mind.

First off, I wasn't too sure what to expect, but it was fairly close to what I thought. The community is pretty tight, and there is a good energy. There was only 5 demos, and a couple were somewhat underwhelming, but I'll start with the good:

pluggin.it presented their new app for selling stuff on fb/twitter and sharing the profits with the friends who helped you get the word out. Seems like a great idea, and it seems like they've thought it through quite well.

A guy (I forget his name!) from 3Di who works with their pureLIGHT lighting engine presented his concept game that was pretty cool. It was based on the idea of mapping the 3D engine onto curved space... Kind of hard to describe, and unfortunately his demo only covered the basic "training" level, which wasn't very curved at all, but I could definitely see the potential of a game that ran with that idea. The graphics and lighting were very top-notch for indie developer.

There was guys from deckle there. Solid looking application, but I had this creepy feeling when they demoed the feature of printing bank quality cheques. I suppose I'm just not all that starstruck with the wonders of print media.

And the rest don't really deserve links, in my humble opinion.

Afterwards, we headed to the pub and I got a chance to meet some cool people in the Edmonton developer community. Good stuff!

Rapid Game Prototyping in Quartz Composer

I am a Quartz Composer junky. I love tinkering with ideas and hacking together logic gates within this kind of visual programming environment.

I think this it's the best way to teach core CS techniques that are often obscured in text-based code. Things like logic gates, the value of modularity, and application structure start to really make sense when you lay them out visually. It's like a UML diagram that functions and evaluates in real-time.

As an example, I will use a game-idea I had, and how I quickly mocked it up in Quartz Composer. It's called "Stellar Debris", and the point of the prototype is to demonstrate vertical parallax motion in a 2D game (like the background scrolling in Canabalt).

The storyline is that your character is a flying robot(spaceship?) that takes off from the surface and must make it through the layer of orbiting debris in a post-apocalyptic earth. The controls are very basic, click to takeoff, mouse back and forth to move and click to shoot.

Here's the start screen. The graphics are very rudimentary (prototype remember!).

Once you click, the character takes off and you can control his motion and fire bullets.

You'll notice the foreground has scrolled off screen already and there are blocks to shoot. The background scrolls much slower, and the sky doesn't scroll at all. It also gets darker as you ascend into the atmosphere.

Game Logic

I don't think I would want to build an entire game in Quartz Composer. But having a mockup like this is great for prototyping because most of the game logic is there in a clear modular structure, which makes it a great starting point for porting it to your programming language of choice. Here's a look at the patches involved in making this "game" happen.

Rather than coding blindly, many of the logic bits required for gameplay are already in place. Things like "the bullet needs to know the character's position at the time of firing" or "each 2D layer needs to know the absolute position and multiply it by some factor" or even "the clouds look good enough as a blurred semi-opaque sprite".