Imphenzia

So far this week I have spent most of my hours awake either in traffic on my way to or back from work, or in work. The few hours I've had to spare at home I've put on composing exclusive music for the three game developers that have contacted me. I've also uploaded some more stuff to  the Unity Asset Store and played some Modern Warfare 2. Today I reactivated my Eve Online account (free for 5 days) and the game is truly looking awesome but I simply won't have time to play it unfortunately.

First week of "normal" work following my paternity leave is now in the past and I am enjoying a very welcome weekend. Motocross practice at Uringe Today I spent a few hours at Uringe, a great sand track south of Stockholm, where I tried to improve my motocross skills. It went fairly well with only one minor crash but plenty of fun. Bike collected some sand as you can see in the picture below - quite easy to clean with the pressure washer though.... Making Exlusive Music for Three Games I've also recently had requests to create exclusive music for three different games. Two games for the mobile platform (Android + iPhone) and one game is aimed at computers and consoles. Quite exciting because the music needed is of very different genres and it's a lot of fun to let the creativity take over and see where it leads. Astrofighter.Net As for Astrofighter.Net I've managed to make slight progress here as well. I've imported the low poly ship versions into Unity and I...

Today was my first day back in my "normal" job as an IT Security Consultant and I'm coming back from a 7 month long paternity leave. It is with mixed emotions that I return because I've really enjoyed spending the time with my family and it has also enabled me to focus a lot on Imphenzia Music/Soundtrack/Games. But then again, you have to earn a living... Anyway, I've finished creating the 8 types of spaceships to be featured in the game ranging from a light scout to a heavily armored and well equiped beast. The 7 weapon types I'm considering for the game is Blaster, Cannon (Gatling Gun), Plasma Gun, Rail Gun, Laser, Missile Launcher, and Mortar. Here is a preview video:

Today I modeled the 8th spaceship and all the weapons. I created a low poly and a high poly version of each weapon so I can render "Normal" maps (bump maps) making the weapons appear to have a lot more polygons than they really do. I'll be doing the same for the spaceships as well. Of course, the ships won't look like this in the game. These are just colored wireframe renders of all the prototype ships in low detail. Top down view as they will be seen in the game (click for high res picture) Here is a perspective view of the spaceships as well: Finally, here is a detailed look at the weapons I created today: Texturemapping these objects will take a lot longer than it took to model them. Each ship only took about 15-20 minutes each and the weapons took about the same amount of time. I can imagine it will take me a few hours to make the texture maps for each object though, ugh. 2:31am - I'm off.

Low Polygon Spaceships for Astrofighter.Net Today I took a break from programming and decided to make some low polygon spaceships for the game. I don't have a lot of modelling experience but it's a lot of fun to let the imagination take over.  Here are the 7 ship models I've come up with so far: When I create these models, I just start with a normal box, about 4x2x1 meters. Then I just extrude, extrude, extrude the faces in different directions to create the wings, the engines, the cockpit, and so forth. In addition to extruding I also move the vertices to create angles, but that's pretty much it. I use the "Symmetry" modifier in 3DS Max so I only have to model one side of the ship. These models are very primitive, as you see, but for my top down view I think they will be quite sufficient. They will need texture mapping, normal mapping, and specular mapping as well which should make them quite decent. I did 5 of these models tonight, the other 2 I created prev...

I'm tired now. It's 1:53AM and I only sleep about 4 hours per night. Too excited to go a sleep =) It's now been roughly five weeks since I started with Astrofighter.Net and I estimate that I may have put in 150-200 hours during the five weeks. I've been off on paternity leave but that still requires a lot of work with a 1.5-year-old and a 2 month old, so it's mainly been when the kids have gone a sleep that I can work on the project, between 8pm and 2-3am. I realize that I haven't made it easy for myself since I am, with this project, learning Unity, learning C#, learning network game development, and learning object oriented development all at once. The only object oriented development I have played around with before is BlitzMax, but I never really created anything with it. Since my last update I've got a lot of development done. It's not so much game-play wise because I decided to ensure that I got a menu system and game state machine running so I don...

Today I've spent a lot of time trying to get a nice resizable menu for Astrofighter.Net and it's been a bit of a struggle so far. My first approach was to use Matrix4x4.TRS  to create a scalable 4:3 ratio menu GUI based on a coordinate system of 1600 x 1200. For wide screen resolutions I would simply add an offset to make sure the 4:3 menu system is always centered. It worked quite good in higher resolutions but as soon as a fairly mid-range to low resolution was used smaller fonts became pixelated and unreadable. How unfortunate because the matrix scaling was a one line solution. I'm now working on my own approach. It basically still uses the 4:3 ratio menu with padding being added to the sides for widescreen resolutions. The difference is now that I recalculate the Rect positioning and width/height using my own function basically doing the same as the Matrix4x4.TRS scaling. The difference is that I now also manually set the font size using the same scale, but with an inte...

Yesterday I participated in an enduro race called "Ränneslättsloppet". It's a competition with thousands of participants in different classes. I raced the recreational class for men aged between 30-39. The weather was great and the trail was dry but not dusty. I got a decent start but my lack of experience in competitions such as these lead me to ride defensively in the beginning so I more or less just joined the flow. During the first lap we saw some traffic jams and no less than two bikes catching fire =) Note: The thumbnail is linked, not copied, and it leads to the  photographer's site (www.bildeffekt.se)  which contains many great photos from the event.   One lap was 20 km in length and the goal is to do as many laps as possible during 155 minutes. The winner of my class did 5 laps and I am very satisfied with the 3 laps I completed being so novice at this. My only other previous experience was when I participated in Stångebroslaget earlier this year and that was...