Projects

Sounds from Heaven

by Daniel Roperto

A serious rhythmic adventure game that challenges the player to learn real drumming techniques. The player must conquer drum parts (instruments) and level up his avatar, while the real player (not the avatar) must learn about drums and the techniques to defeat enemies and progress through the game.

It uses a drumkit controller (two XBox Rock Band Drumkits at the moment) and is being developed in XNA, which can be easily converted for an XBox game in the future.

Please, feel free to visit/join the Facebook group where any other information, screenshots or meetings will be announced.

http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/group.php?gid=97545857899

BallFight

by Daniel Roperto and Greg Louden

Ball Fight is a game made for the research and development of touch screen technology and applications for games at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) Games Studio. The objective of Ball Fight was to enable multiple players using one touch table to compete against each other to achieve the highest score through putting their own colour distinct balls into a centre pocket using touch. The key focus during development was to create an accessible, simple and most importantly fun game that would appeal to all ages due to its simplicity and intuitiveness.

Links:
Ball Fight Game Design Document
YouTube Video

Unreal Ed Machinima / Short Movie Creation

by Greg Louden

Associate Professor Yusuf Pisan, director of the UTS Games Studio and co-director of CCS asked Leena Kowser Ganguli to learn CryEngine 2 and Greg Louden to learn Unreal Engine 3.0 to explore the use of game engines to pioneer future tools of animation production back in November 2008. After 4 months, it was decided that CryEngine 2 was too difficult to learn and create machinima and as such Unreal Engine 3.0 was the choice to explore machinima creation on.
The following document is the result of 4 months of research and prototyping of Unreal Engine 3.0. By no means is this an exhaustive document on all aspects of machinima design; but rather it is a simple list of instructions on how to create a simple animated short in Unreal Engine 3.0.

Download: Unreal Engine 3.0 Editor Handout

assimilate: collaborative storytelling

by Damian Hills

The assimilate project is an online collaborative environment that allows participants to visually construct narratives in a 3D virtual space. Using an expressive and physical touch table interface, up to four participants can collaboratively narrate an ongoing story using online media obtained through an internet keyword search. The system is a visual search engine that aligns the participant’s search criteria with template stories drawn from a database of mythology and folklore. The search results are styled into generative behaviors that visually self-organise while participants make choices about the narrative outcomes and their associated behaviors. The playful interface promotes conversation and role-playing as meaning and connotation are cycled through a continuous process of search result feedback and narrative template selection.

Garry vs. Hitchcock: Machinima Using the Source Engine

by Aram Dulyan

This project intends to illustrate and document two distinct approaches to creating machinima using the Source engine from Valve, used in games such as Half-Life 2 and Portal. The first approach is the one offered by the Source SDK tools provided by Valve, which is highly evocative of Alfred Hitchcock’s ethos of treating actors like “talking props”. The tools allow hitherto unsurpassed ease of control over character facial expressions, including a powerful tool for automatically synchronising lip movement with a given audio track. Scenes are then built using the Hammer editor, and the character and camera movements are defined using a scripting language.

The second approach is the one offered by Garry’s Mod, a community-built modification of the Source engine that offers a sandbox-style multiplayer gameplay environment. In a game session, players are free to import objects and characters from other Source engine games, and manipulate them with a set of tools such as a “physics gun”, ropes, or triggers. Creation of machinima in the environment thus becomes a group effort, with player taking on roles such as actors, operators, directors, and even key grips, mimicking the real-life approach to moviemaking.