Tag: Competitions

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Competitions News

Best Game Developer Award for us at the Cornwall Edge Awards!

Best Game Developer Award for Triangular Pixels at the Cornwall Edge Awards!

 

1st December 2017, Bude, Cornwall

 

Thanks to hosts Cornwall Live, last night we were absolutely delighted to be awarded with ‘Best Game Developer’ at the Cornwall Edge Awards. We’re based in Bude in Cornwall, are proud to be fully independent, and are therefore very grateful to have been recognised for our recent successes.DP57v2rX0AAWMnU

We’ve been deeply involved in the Cornwall technological scene, including showing at events, hosting work experience students, and working with Cornwall College to produce a trailer for our forthcoming game Smash Hit Plunder. We used this trailer as part of Sony’s Paris Games Week launch announcement and are now looking forward to releasing the game in 2018.

 

We’d like especially to thank Cultivator Cornwall for their business and financial support, and Sony, Valve and HTC for providing the means necessary to create cutting-edge virtual reality games. Special thanks are also due to Transform Cornwall for vital business mentoring, keeping us fully independent and able to continue to working on transformative, fun and engaging new games.

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Competitions News

Cornish VR Studio, Triangular Pixels, Wins Develop Games Industry Award

Punching well above their weight, two-person startup studio Triangular Pixels has taken home an industry coveted Develop Award for ‘New Studio’, winning over some very tough competition.

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Events

London Vive VR Jam – The Hatton Garden Heist

Sneak into the facility to steal the jewels, climbing through ventilation shafts and dodging lasers, in The Hatton Garden Heist.

 

Using the high accuracy room tracking of the Vive, and a smart room loading system, physically maneuver yourself through while having to use your tools to get you through safely.

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Competitions Development

Double Destruction Dev Blog 1: Coming up with the Concept – Influence & Approachable Design

As we’re developing Double Destruction, we will be uploading blog posts as frequently as we can so you can keep track of what it’s like to VR Jam! Today’s development post is about how we came up with the concept and what our influences are.

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Competitions Java4k

Java4k 2009 Results

The results are up for the 2009 4k competition, with my NiGHTS 4k entry coming a rather satisfying 11th! W00t!

Unsurprisingly (and deservingly) Left 4k Dead takes the top spot, and the worryingly addictive Bridge4k second. In fact pretty much all of the top games are worth playing, there’s a surprising amount of content shoe horned into some of the games.

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Competitions Java4k

NiGHTS 4k on Kotaku!

Kotaku put up an entry about the 2009 4k competition closing and mentioned NiGHTS 4k as one of the ones to check out. Woot!

The judging should be finished anytime soon, and while I don’t expect NiGHTS 4k to be in the top games (the quality bar has been very high this year) I’m interested in hearing the comments and seeing the final standings. Plus I’ve only played a handful of the entries properly so I’ll find out which good ones I’ve missed.

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Competitions Development Games Java4k

New year, new theme, new game!

Since it’s the new year (yes, I’m a little slow catching up with things) I’ve been giving the site a bit of an overhaul. I was never really happy with the old theme, due to it being very dark narrow, making it a bit awkward to read on certain monitors and. It was also pretty restrictive in terms of what I could put on the individual pages due to the side navigation bar always being required.

So I’ve spent the last week working on this new theme and it’s pretty much done now. It’s much lighter and less bunched up which makes it much easier to read (particularly for large chunks of text) and because the primary navigation is the strip of tabs across the top I can have pages which ditch the side navigation if I want to have a really wide page.

There’s new content up too, a game called NiGHTS 4k, so check that out when you’ve got a moment. Applets are much more solid these days so I may try a few more applet games as tests, particularly as the new theme means I can embed decent sized applets without breaking the layout.

One minor note about the new theme – it’s been tested on the latest versions of Opera, Firefox and Chrome, as well as IE7. Safari hasn’t been tested (because I don’t have that handy) but since Chrome is based on the same renderer it should be identical. IE6 manages to make a complete pig’s ear of it, despite claiming to render it in “standards” mode. Frankly I don’t fancy spending a week fighting with IE6’s bugs because I shouldn’t have to.

Those twelve people reading this site who are still on IE6 will just have to bite the bullet and get a proper browser – or upgrade to IE7 :-).

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Competitions Development

LD12 Preparation

So the theme voting for LD48 is up, and as usual there’s a whole bunch of interesting ones but nothing that really jumps out and grabs me. And a whole bunch of others which could be quite horrible to do (like “Film Noir”, which is a nice idea but would be very content heavy and hard to do well in the short time allowed). I try not to think too hard about the themes at this point because I can never guess which theme will actually be chosen, and it’s more fun to leave it until the contest starts anyway.

Goals
Like most LD48h competitions in the past, I’m going to set myself a few personal goals for this time around:

  • Something playable.
  • Something fun. Always tricky.
  • Something accessible. Gameplay and controls need to be explained simply so people “get it”.
  • Cross-platform. Windows, Mac and Linux.
  • Proper menu flow (main menu, in game, game over, repeat). Probably too ambitious for 48hours, so might get cut.
  • A more complete series of progress screenshots, rather than just a couple near the begining as usual.

Things I won’t be caring about:

  • Sound. A massive time sink for me, it takes hours to get a single sound effect right.
  • Fancy graphics. I’ll be on a laptop with just a basic graphics card, so no fancy pixel shader magic.
  • Code elegence. Hack hack hack!
  • My general state of health.

Things I’ll be trying to avoid:

  • Spending too long creating sprites.
  • Leaving something vital to the last couple of hours like last time (level creation).
  • Burning the midnight oil on the first day and ending up wasting a good chunk of the second day because I got up at midday.

I’ll be keeping a journal over at the official site along with the other contestants, and probably posting a potted summary here after the competition is over.

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AI Competitions Development Games

Ludum Dare 48h & Locomotion

It looks like there’s another Ludum Dare 48 hour game programming competition starting soon, so I’ll hopefully be taking part in that. Spread the word and join in – the more the merrier!

Meanwhile, back on my main project, I’m having much trouble with just trying to get a simple “chase player” behaviour. Pathfinding (with A*) wasn’t too hard but there’s lots of icky low-level details for moving a character around the environment which are creaping into my behaviour and generally cluttering it up. And due to the highly temporary nature of behaviours stopping and restarting a behaviour (such as repathing when the player moves far enough to invalidate the current behaviour) tends to lead to unpleasant animation jittering as it rapidly switches between idle and running animations.

So I’m trying to pull out some of the low-level movement and animation into a “locomotion” layer. The idea being that it will take high level orders like “run left to this point” or “jump to this waypoint” and it’ll automatically handle transitioning from the current animation to the next as well as the low-level ground following and animation ticking.

The idea is that if a behaviour aborts or switches the locomotion layer will still retain the current action and state, so it’ll continue with it’s current animation until issued a new order by the behaviour. So hopefully switching to or restarting the “chase” behaviour means that instead of snapping to a halt and then starting to run again (often in the same direction) the enemy should continue to run as it was until the “chase” behaviour decides where it actually wants to go. The locomotion layer should probably have a default anim to revert too should the current action finish, so if a behaviour is taking a particularly large time to respond it’ll start playing an idle animation rather than doing nothing.

That’s the theory at least. In practice drawing the line between locomotion and AI logic is proving tricky, so we’ll see how it evolves as things progress…