Tag Archives: 3D

MEGA (Mundo Estrella Galicia) Sport Training (Kinect)

Disclaimer: This is a video preview of the published game. This video not shown the final state art.

3D Wire 2019

Details

Project: Estrella Galicia: MEGA Sport Training
Studio: Flying Beast Labs (Cateffects S.L.)
Genre: Sports, Casual
Platform: Windows, Kinect v2
Job description: Lead Programmer, Tool Programmer, Technical Artist
Technologies: Unity3D, .NET, C#, Git, Source Tree, Hercules Setup Utility
Website:
- https://mundoestrellagalicia.es/
- https://flyingbeastlabs.com/proyectos/mega-sport-training/
- https://flyingbeastlabs.com/3d-wire/

Credits

Lead Programmer, Tool Programmer & Technical Artist
José Miguel Sánchez Fernández

Gameplay Programmer
Diego Santiago Sanz

Producer & Game Designer
Carlos L. Hernando Lopéz

Project Manager, Music Composser & Sound Technician
Daniel Nuñez Martín

Art Director, 2D Art & UX Designer
Alberto de Torres Martínez

3D Art, Modeling, Rigging & Animation
Irene Arnaiz Lopéz

Producer
Cesar Piña Mudarra

Description

Lead Programmer and Tool Programmer for the development of MEGA Sport Training, an interactive experience for MEGA: Mundo Estrella Galicia museum, in A Coruña, Galicia, Spain.

My main task in this project was develop the entire game architecture, focused on modularize all critical parts of the project for ease maintenance, upgrade or deep-changes quickly, the creation of requested tools during the development, and supervising the work of a junior programmer, the person that was develop the 4 mini-games that compose the game (basket, football, hockey and rugby) and help me to integrate the Kinect v2 SDK in Unity and study how implement features like the advanced gesture recognition.

Other tasks that I colaborate was supporting the 2D and 3D artists as Technical Artist, optimizing all 3D assets and materials in-game (combining meshes, fixing materials setup in Unity, and advise the 3D artist, a junior profile, in some tasks involved with optimizing modeling and asset exporting), setup the lighting in all scenes and setup all post-processing effects to fit the limited requeriments of the target machine (an Intel NUC without dedicated graphics card) to achieve a good performance without lost quality visual look & feel.

3D Wire 2019

This same year, we make a variation for the 3DWire (https://3dwire.es/), an important spanish annual event of animation, games and new media that is celebrating in Segovia. Weird Games: Food Training is the new name of the game and have a little visual changes as replacing all sport things like the basket ball by a toaster or the hockey disks by spanish omelets, most of the work as rebranding and applied some gamification rewards for the event games.

The true challenge: Kinect 2.0, Windows 10 and beyond

Also of the difficulties recording custom gestures using the official Kinect SDK tools, implmenting a custom gesture system to avoid some issues with some gesture recognitions, and the many other related and technical issues, the true challenge to develop and maintain this project are the Kinect 2.0 + Windows 10 combo:

  • Kinect 2.0 has been discontinued by Microsoft in fall 2017 and removed support on Windows (drivers, tools, etc...) a few months after publising the tools for Kinect 2 for Windows (supported Windows 8.1 as last official version).
  • Never existed an official SDK for Unity, only a few outdated particular user implementations on the web for Unity 5.6 (we developed the game with Unity 2018.3.5). We using the only full implementation solution available and well documented by examples, that can be found in the Asset Store.
  • No all PC configurations supports Kinect 2 hardware. During the pre-production, we found that only 2 PCs in our studio are capable to run Kinect 2 without problems. Other PCs directly can't work, can't recognized the Kinect hardware. Seems the USB 3.0 in most of them has issues related with power supply or the drivers (in some cases, Kinect burned the AC Power unit on a couple of our PCs).
  • Kinect 2 hardware can't works on current versions of Windows 10. The last supported version is the build 1803 (April 2018 Update). The USB 3.0 drivers has many known issues and one of them affect to Kinect 2 USB connector. The solution initially seems very simple: using the build 1803, but...
  • In Windows 10 you can't full disable Windows Update services. And, later or soon, your Windows 10 will be forced to upgrade to latest version. In our case, disconnect the PC from the net is not a solution. The PC can not we unpluged from the net because need access to internet to send mails and send and read signals from an UDP server. Basically, the solution passed to reroute the all Windows Update known server address to localhost in the Windows hosts file, setup all Windows Update related services to manual and disabled it, and blocking the internal Windows folders related with Windows Update downloads and deployments.
  • The official Kinect 2 AC Power Unit not works on current PC configurations. One of the Kinects, supplied by the museum worked with the Surface 3 AC Power Unit instead of the Kinect official unit. For any reason the Kinect 2 official AC Power Unit not works properly on current PCs.

And the final boss...

But the true challenge was the final issue of the Kinect 2 + Windows 10 combo. At the final stages of the development and testing, we found the game sometimes was freeze without any reason! (very inappropiate for a museum experience).

After 2 weeks of deep debugging and testings in the source code of the Unity implementation of the Kinect SDK, I found that the reason of the game was freezing was the avatar recognition event in a driver level. It's seems that the outdated driver in Windows 10 has any internal memory leak or something related bug.

Because I'm not was capable to fix this, because is an internal driver bug and not a source code issue, I designed a little "trick" to able the game to catch the freeze state and reset himself. I developed a little program that works as a monitor instance of the game. A simple terminal program that run in fist place and launch a new instance of the game as child process. Basically the game instances comunicate with the monitor to tell that it's alive. When the game stop to send signals to the monitor, the monitor understand that the game is freezed, kill the freezed process and launch a new one.

For prevent the user noticed the game reseting process, as idea of Carlos L. Hernando, we empty the entire Windows desktop of icons and hide the task bar, and using the same game splash screen background as desktop background. With this, the user not see any stranger thing except that the game has return to the main menu screen.

P.D.: In a way to avoid several freezes and their resepective resets, I needed to reimplemented all avatar recognition logic system in the game to avoid conitnuous calls to native Kinect avatar recognition functions.

Pipe Push Paradise (Nintendo Switch, XBox One & PS4 Port)

Details

Project: Pipe Push Paradise
Author: Corey Martin (ported by Stage Clear Studios)
Genre: Puzzle
Platform: XBox One, PS4 & Nintendo Switch
Job description: Gameplay Programmer
Technologies: Unity3D, .NET, C#, SVN, Tortoise SVN
Store links: XBox One, PS4 (EU), PS4 (US), Nintendo Switch

Credits

Programmers
Juan Escudero Vizcaino
José Miguel Sánchez Fernández

Technical Artists
Sergio Bernardo Sánchez
Francisco Porcel

QA
Guillermo Regueiro Martín-Albo
Andrés Conde Herranz
Maria Ruiz Algar
Alberto Relucio Gallego
Ricardo Pascual Segovia

Producer
Raquel Sánchez Illescas

Credits (Nintendo Switch version) on MobyGames site: https://www.mobygames.com/game/switch/pipe-push-paradise/credits

Description

Gameplay programmer for the porting to Xbox One, PS4 and Nintendo Switch.

I worked on optimization tasks on code and graphics assets in scenes, mainly reducing polygons in major objects in scene, like the pipes, implementing a system to switch original pipe models for a low-poly version when the puzzles are solved (the original pipes, that the player see when play a puzzle, are a compound of several high-detailed meshes with detailed interiors, very unoptimal for realtime videogame rendering), and removing several duplicated/overlaped sprites on decorations (and improved the sprite materials with help of our in-house technical artist, Sergio Bernardo) to reduced the several overdraw and draw-calls when the game shows the entire island or large areas with solved puzzles.

Other task consisted in adapted the user session for working with the console systems, and save game implementation and other related game state code to avoid continuously read/write operations on disk (or the NAND memory in Switch) major bugfixes related with the original Steam version and last-hour game workflow changes requested by the game developer.

P.D.: Before the last Nintendo Switch SDK version on november, Unity games on Nintendo Switch they couldn't reach the full potential on the GPU. Because this, initialy, in an effort to reach almost 30 fps, we created an alternate version of the island scene for the Nintendo Switch version and applied several cuts on effects and decorators, like the water waves effects and some sprite layers in most of the wall decorators like the hedges.

Slayaway Camp: Butcher’s Cut (Nintendo Switch & PSVita Port)

Nintendo Switch Trailer

PSVita Trailer

Details

Project: Slayaway Camp: Butcher's Cut
Studio: Blue Wizard Digital (ported by Stage Clear Studios)
Genre: "killer" puzzle
Platform: Nintendo Switch, PSVita
Job description: Gameplay Programmer
Technologies: Unity3D, .NET, C#, SVN, Tortoise SVN
WebSite: http://slayawaycamp.com/
Store links: Nintendo Switch, PSVita (US), PSVita (EU)

Credits

Programmers
Alejandro Machuca Díaz
Sergio Alonso Martínez
José Miguel Sánchez Fernández

QA
Guillermo Regueiro Martín-Albo
Andrés Conde Herranz
Maria Ruiz Algar
Alberto Relucio Gallego

Producer
Raquel Sánchez Illescas

Description

A killer puzzle game where you control Skullface, a psychotic slasher bent on slaughtering camp counselors at the title campground. Slide this adorable voxel murderer around hundreds of isometric puzzle levels to squash, flay, and decapitate the hapless victims in this darkly comic homage to 80s trash horror.

Gameplay Programmer for the porting to Nintendo Switch and PSVita console versions. I worked on optimization tasks on code and graphics assets in scenes. Other task consisted in adapted and improved some UI elements to use in touch screen and major bugfixes on this platforms.

PSVita version was required most of the enfort, was the most difficult platform to port. Mainly I needed to reimplemented most of the original game core to ensured to fit in the low hardware requeriments, I implemented new resource management systems to cached reusable assets (sounds, textures, etc...) and background load processes (this is the only version that requires of loading screens between scenes and other game states). Also I applied extreme optimization in all graphics assets to avoid continous VRAM overflows adjusting size and compresion parameters in a right way to preserved the original visual feel in the PSVita screen resolution.

Ginger: Beyond the Crystal for Nintendo Switch (Porting)

Details

Project: Ginger: Beyond the Crystal
Studio: Drakhar Studio
Genre: Adventure, 3D Platformer
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Job description: Gameplay Programmer, Tool Programmer, Tester
Technologies: Unity3D, .NET, C#, SVN, Tortoise SVN
WebSite: https://www.drakharstudio.com/ginger
Store links: Nintendo Switch

Description

Ginger: Beyond the Crystal is an adventure platformer in which you have to rebuild and restore balance to a world devastated by the explosion of a mystical crystal. Face quests and challenges set over 3 worlds and gain powerful new skills, costumes and powers that will help you to defeat the fiercest.

Gameplay Programmer and Tool Programmer for the porting to Nintendo Switch version. I worked on optimization tasks on code and helped to optimize asset graphic implementations in scenes (mostly consisted in grouping and baking meshes for reducing draw calls). Other task consist in develop small intergrated tools (to help to search large amount of objects in scene by component type and other filter options, mainly to help in light mapping tasks), studied and tested the game against the Nintendo Switch TRC guidelines and testing the game with the last changes on the Nintendo Switch hardware.

The Esc4pe, a “primitive shooter” made with Unity3D

Featured tweet from GameJolt

Video reviews from itch.io & GameJolt

Today (August 4, 2018), the game reached +120.000 visits and +50.000 downloads, with a 4/5 avg. rate and featured on cover pages, on itch.io and Game Jolt marketplaces, in 60 days (near of 60.000 visits and 30.000 downloads between March and early May of 2017).

The game received a lot of feedback in the comments, and some users made video reviews with gameplays. This is a Youtube list with videos collected from user comments and Twitter searches:

Details

Project: The Esc4pe
Genre: First Person Shooter
Platform: PC (Windows, Linux, Mac)
Job description: Game Programmer, Game Designer, Level Designer
Technologies: Unity3D, .NET, C#
Links: Post on my blog, Visual Studio EX3, with more details (ES)

Downloads

Featured on itch.io marketplace with +25.000 downloads with a rate of 4/5 stars!

Featured on GameJolt marketplace with +40.000 downloads with a rate of 4/5! (Click on the thumbnail to view on gamejolt page)

Credits

José Miguel Sánchez Fernández - [EX3]
Game Programmer, Game Designer, Level Designer, "Voice" actor

Third party assets

Standard Assets & Cinematics Effects - Unity Technologies
 
 
Sci Fi Characters Mega Pack - PROTOFACTOR, INC: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/19831
 
 
Scifi LowPoly Ammo Pickups - Pixelgraffiti: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/12005
 
Yughues Free Palm Trees - Nobiax / Yughues: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/13540
 

Amplify Color and FXAA Fast Approximation Antialiasing - Amplify Creations: http://amplify.pt/

Light Shafts effect - Robert Cupisz: https://github.com/robertcupisz/LightShafts

Camera Filter Pack (CRT Effect) - Vetasoft: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/18433

Sound weapons & items effects are downloaded from Freesound.org site (http://www.freesound.org). All samples are under Creative Commons licence (Attribution 3.0 License)

Music themes "Hitman", "The Complex" & "Killers" are creations of Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) and released under Creative Commons licence (Attribution 3.0 License)

Description

This project is made as practical exercise for the "Master Degree in Video Game Development with Unity3D & 3DS Max Official Autodesk (MPV)" of CICE Madrid (http://cice.es/curso/master-en-desarrollo-de-videojuegos-con-unity-y-3dsmax/).

A "primitive shooter" developed in one month with technical restrictions based on the topics seen in class until the project start date. The game is not optimized (its performance is not stable).

Support XBox360 Controller in all PC platforms (implementing the input map for Linux and OSX following the information found on this wiki).

The game is initially designed to be played in 5~10 minutes (It can take 20~30 minutes to complete).

Developed and full tested under:
- Intel Core i5-2500 @ 3.30GHz
- 8GB RAM
- AMD Radeon HD 6800 Series (with Crimson drivers)
- Windows 10 Pro x64

P.D.: This game will not receive new updates, bug fixes (for now) or new version with more levels.

Counter Strike Map Design

Info: In these years I used [B-84] Nightmare as nickname instead of [EX3] on cibercafes where playing Counter Strike with friends. In the video not is appreciable my full name at bottom of the easter egg wall. You can see it better in the last screenshot in the gallery.

Details

Project: CS_Parcela
Genre: Multiplayer level for Counter Strike
Platform: Windows
Job description: Level designer
Technologies: Valve Hammer Editor 1.1
Download: cs_parcela.zip (1.89 MB)

Description

A small map for the classic Counter Strike (currently Counter Strike 1.6) composed with multiple usable spaces and differents routes to connect the two main areas.

This map was designed in 2001 and it's builded using an old version of Valve Hammer Editor, then known as WorldCraft Editor, included with any copy of Half-Life or expansions like Opposing Force and Blue Shift. This editor version doesn't has any advantage functionality like realtime rendering or precalculated lights, common functionalities in modern level editors or the current version of Valve Hammer Editor.

The map included waypoints for the old version 1.4 of POD-Bots, one of the various choices of the moment to get bots to play versus the CPU in Counter Strike. The video show the bots in action. In order to make the bot able to navigate the map, is necessary to set behaviour points to configure actions or define paths (the bot system includes an user friendly editor in game time for this task).

The map is available for download and it's fully compatible with Counter Strike 1.6 (the waypoint file is not included because of being incompatible with current versions of POD-Bots).

Extra

Also experimented other ideas for bigger maps than CS_Parcela, inclusive a map for the Half-Life: Oppossing Force expansion (and had the intention of creating campaing levels, for a single player mode). This gallery below show sections of these prototype maps.

Unfinished map of custom campaing: Star Ranger