Pierce the Dark

Pierce the Dark is the newest (and only) game from the Beautiful Elevator Kids, a team of six student game developers at Champlain College.  We're comprised of Ben Thomson (Lead Designer), Alex Beauchesne (Lead Programmer, me), Zach Collins (Lead Artist), Charles Stone (Designer), Vasily McCausland (Programmer), and Chas Elterman (Artist).

A fifteen-week project for our Game Production 2 course, we took great advantage of our time and created more than just the vertical slice we were required.  Our game is polished, challenging, fun, and promising.  The game's only in Beta, and there are a few tweaks here and there we want to make, especially regarding the game's conclusion, but this represents the most complete game I've worked on in my time at Champlain so far.

We plan on finishing up the last bits of the game over the summer, and a spiritual sequel is being considered in order to further explore the gameplay avenues we've opened up.

You can download the beta as it stands for PC and Mac (size: ~30MB).
Watch some gameplay footage here.

I'll make a blog post later on detailing the technical design of the game.  It was my first experience with Unity, and while learning Unity I found myself learning a lot about game engine architecture.

A few more screenshots for good measure:

Patisserie Montreal (Twine Story)

I wrote another interactive story, this time as a final project for my Food Writing course.  It deals with my experiences in Montreal this semester.

Play Patisserie Montreal

This one was a little easier to write, since I wrote about my own experiences rather than some fictional world.  The expandable details are a bit lengthier than those from my previous stories and cover a broader range of topics.  A few are a bit heavy in terms of the amount of text presented, so I'm going to focus on writing tighter in my next stories.

As always, any kind of feedback is appreciated.

The Frozen Mountain (Twine Story)

I wanted to do another short Twine jam today, so I asked a friend for a theme to help me write the story.  I took her suggestion of "Climbing Everest" and wrote The Frozen Mountain in about four hours.

Play The Frozen Mountain

This one was a little harder to write than Space Cruiser Panic.  That story had a futuristic setting with a lot of room to fill in details, while the landscape in this story is sparse, unforgiving, and realistic.  Much more of my writing had to be dedicated to imagery rather than the absurd.  Still, I think this story is worth reading.

As always, any feedback is appreciated.

Space Cruiser Panic (Twine Story)

Today, I challenged myself to create a game in two hours.  It ended up taking more along the lines of four hours, counting some polish at the end, but the effort, I believe, was worth it.  I'm really starting to like Twine.  It combines my love for games with my love for stories in a quick, accessible format.

Play Space Cruiser Panic

The story is a narration of an absurd day aboard an interstellar star cruiser.  The ending's really why the story took so long.  I wanted something beautiful, something that ends on a hopeful note rather than what the ending initially appears to be.  Hopefully my efforts have paid off.  I may attempt another 2-4 hour game jam next Saturday.

As always, I appreciate any feedback I can get on my works.  Feel free to criticize, praise, etc.

Dijkstra Maps and Simulating Goal-Based AI

(Note: this post served as an explanation of a final project for a Game AI course.  It describes a pathfinding technique in detail.)

A Dijkstra map is a pathfinding tool that, in its most basic sense, marks a 2D grid of cells with distance values according to the number of cells a particular cell is away from a target cell, navigating around wall cells.  When used properly, however, it is a powerful data structure that, when combined with other Dijkstra maps, allows multiple A.I. agents to intelligently navigate towards targets, biasing one set of targets over another based on specified weights.

Dijkstra maps operate on very basic principles.  The implementation I chose (and the one described by Brian Walker) is relatively naive but simple to implement and does the job well enough.

Well, it's Halloween (Interactive Short Story)

I said I was going to finish a story for today, so I did.  I successfully completed a very short story in Twine.

I present to you all: Well, it's Halloween, a short interactive story about a man with some free time on Halloween.  I haven't found a good spot to host it yet, considering I finished it within the past hour, so you'll have to download and open the html file.  As soon as I can find a good spot to host it, though, I'll update this post with the new link. 

I'm pretty happy with how this turned out.  I managed to balance an introspective narrative with a decently lighthearted tone, which is a drastic change from my first attempt back in January.  I'll give it it's own page within a few days.

You can check out Twine here.  It really is a great tool for this sort of thing.

Edit: I updated the story a bit after messing around with Twine a bit more.  The visual presentation's improved, so there should be less confusion.