I recently created a new website design for a Mario Kart fan-site called Mario Stadium and integrated a new Content Management System; Wordpress.

Whilst there are many YouTube Wordpress plugins available, when I needed a YouTube plugin on another site I needed to add extra code surrounding the standard embedding iframe code, in order to have the YouTube video resize with the browser. I didn’t know how to do shortcodes at the time, so when I learnt how to use it, I thought this guide may be handy to a few people.

In the final months of my work placement at We Are Colin (last August), I began to work on Googly Eyed Splitters. Throughout the duration I was there I built a level editor and integrated Farseer Physics into the game and built a few levels. The new We Are Colin team continued to work on the game and the final outcome can be seen in the following video.

Try it out on the Xbox Live Indies Channel on Xbox 360. You can also try it out on your PC by downloading the trial here: http://www.wearecolin.co.uk/.

I developed Snapshot for a module at University but have done some more work on it. Heres a video showcasing Snapshot’s features:

University has officially nearly finished (minus an exam). For one of my modules in the last semester I used Gamebryo to create an adventure game (which imitates Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time).

In this project we had to collect various middleware and slam them into our game. The outcome of my game can be seen in the following video.

The city has made some progression. I spent far too much time trying to create some building textures, but didn’t really create any decent textures so I have decided to leave the buildings how they are for now. The city now has a road and a gradient skybox. The floor texture is just generated using the 2D array that contains the world data.

I have read a lot on different implementations on city generation from using grid plans, l-systems to voronoi diagrams. The task at the moment is to try and improve the current version as much as possible and then document the effect those improvements have had in optimisation or realism.

For the Networking module, a multiplayer networked game is required (obviously). I decided to make a variation of Pac-Man in Java. Each player starts as a Pac-Man and the aim is to reach 500 points before anyone else. Points are awarded for eating pills and eating opponents, by getting a power pill. If you do eat an opponent they will change into a ghost. Ghosts are able to gain points by touching normal Pac-mans (Pac-mans without a power pill). In doing so, the ghost will turn that Pac-Man into a ghost (sort of like Zombies). Ghosts can return to a Pac-Man state by eating a power pill!

The next step was to create a texture for the buildings. I haven’t had much experience in DirectX generating textures in code, so to begin with I have decided to create a 512 × 512 texture with some windows (a load of squares).

Now that I have some experience of creating textures in code, I should be able to create more realistic building textures and hopefully add more variety. I then marked the roads in the scene’s 2D array I created, marking them with the directions the car would go in (North, East, South or West). I then spammed the roads with a load of red or yellow cars (quads) on these roads and moved them around in the scene. At the moment when they go out of the scene, they simply loop back to the other side.

You can see the result at the moment in the above screenshot. Obviously I need to make the scene more realistic by adding lights, improving the building textures, adding variety, fog, a skybox and there more improvements/additions I can make. These hopefully will be done in upcoming weeks, but of course are dependant on time.

For one of my assignments at university I will be creating a procedural city. At the moment it is very basic in its early stages. It contains 20,000 buildings within the scene at the moment running at 53 fps (on my very average/slow home computer), where as at University it runs at 800 fps, so hopefully you can see how crap my graphics card is.