After almost 10 weeks of development we can proudly say that Yo is finally finished. On May 12th we gave our presentation explaining all the details of the game during Spring 2009 DemoDay at USC.
So, how do I play Yo ?
Log in using your Facebook account.
Personalize your avatar and your thoughts.
Your thoughts will become a platform level that any other player can beat worldwide.
Play against your Facebook friends or against any other Yo player.
Beat the platform level created from the other person’s thoughts and you can change his/her thoughts!
Improve your ranking.
Video here:
For more information about the game, please visit the website that we have created for Yo. http://motorola.usc.edu/yo.
The semester is finally over and as usual, USC hosted the event called Demo Day. Demo Day for the USC GamePipe Laboratory is when the students show off their games to the industry.
In my case, I was part of the team behind “Us Versus Them”, an online game experience straight out of the 1950. As a lead network engineer my work was to manage a team of network engineers in order to deliver the game on time. The experience was great, the whole team learnt a lot, and we can not wait to see the public beta of “Us Versus Them” soon.
All told, I want to thanks the whole team for their huge effort, congratulations and, once again, thanks!
New material developed at USC! These are some screenshots from our finale project for the Game Engine Development class.
The idea for this project was simple, build an editor (GGE Live Editor) for an existing engine written in C++. As it is well known, the user interface written for this language is not the best one. After testing some open source frameworks such as wxWidgets or QT we quickly decided that C# and the windows framework was the perfect choice. This decision brought us a new challenge, how do we communicate both applications. One option was to write a wrapper around the engine in C++ so that we could fully access the engine’s features from C#. The second approach was to embed the C++ application into a C# control and communicate both applications using sockets. Since we just had around 12 weeks to develop, test and publish the editor, we decided that the second technique was more suitable for our requirements.
The approach worked really well and we had the first prototype working in just one week, it is quite straightforward to implement and the results are impressive. Of course, we had some problems, basically related with the synchronization but nothing important.
This is the list of basic features implemented in the editor:
Create, edit, and delete entities, scene nodes, lights…
Viewer: static meshes, animated meshes, particle systems
Edit and save scenes with different screens
Different cameras (top, side, front, perspective)
Grids, picking, maya controls…
Scene manager and properties editor.
Edit and execute the game inside the editor with different controls (edit or game controls)
And much more!
The following gallery shows the final aspect of the editor:
