Articles

My most recent project took me into a new, unknown and unexpected territory. There was no motion design, no vfx, no gaming, interactivity involved. Just some machining and a whole lot of power tools.

I was invited to participate in the collaboration with Kiki's Cocoa and ChiChiLand, to create a set of 27 exclusive chocolate sets accompanied by a block-printed bandana. Using official "agency terms" I guess I served as a technical director and craftsman. To put it simply - I used a combination of vector illustration, laser etching and wood shop tools to produce linoleum stamps based on the original designs by my Chi Michalski.

It's been a while since I updated the progress, and I totally skipped any mention of alpha 0.0.7. Now we are at 0.0.8 and although I will be rolling back on some features, I think it's time to show the progress.

I have been working on two main areas of the game: NPC VI and Level Generation.

The Incredible Adventures of Oli the Olivari Olive and Friends A.K.A. "Oli the Olive" is a series of 12 short animations created for the Olivari Olive Oil as a part of their "Year of the Little" campaign. The episodes were released once every month, throughout the entire 2013.

I'd like to take a break from our scheduled programming, to bring your attention to the issue of the battle for net neutrality that is currently taking place. The video below explains the basic concept, while the links underneath will provide you with more information.
Take action now - write your congressman, email FCC. Inaction, passivity and apathy make the world a worse place. Thank you.

Topographix is a cool new tech I have been developing for the past few days. It will most likely eventually make its way to the QubaHQ tutorials, but not before we make something new using it with my team. The tool is still in early alpha, but already kicks some major ass and se should start doing some testing early next week.

ChiChiLand Adventure will use procedural generation for many of its elements, including zones within the levels. Within these zones, the entities (zone citizens) will be simulated based on simple sets of rules. In the garden, for example, I am planning to have some animals and some trees. Every x amount of time, each tree will have a chance to bear fruit. The fruit will fall down and roll in a random direction until stopping. Each animal in the zone will have a hunger meter - as they get hungry, they will seek out fruit and eat it. There will definitely be more behaviors, but that's the basic logic.

Color grading using Curves, Levels and other RGB tools always felt quite counter-intuitive to me. That's why I decided to create QHQ Channel Splitter - an After Effects script and Photoshop action for automatic splitting of the image/footage into discrete RGB or CMY channels. Channel Splitter can change the way you experiment with color correction as well as open a brand new way of color grading through changing the "inks" rather than the channel values.

Some days you just have to take a break from work and do something silly. As my next tutorial (coming Tuesday) was rendering, I grabbed some Perler beads and made myself a water glass coaster featuring the main character from the ChiChiLand Adventure game I am developing. Stupid little thing, but made me happy :)

I would not go as far as calling it Concept ART, but as I was working to develop a number of idle animations for the player sprite, I realized how little I understood about what I am drawing.
I use pixel art is an abstraction, a simplification of an actual form - but I never really stopped to think about what this actual form may be. Needles to say, abstracting something that does not exist was quite tough.

Making the character walk around the screen was fairly easy. Keep in mind that at this point there is no interaction with any environment elements or vertical movement, so the whole thing will have to become more complex over time.
At the moment however, the whole system works on few basic principles.

With the look of the character worked out, I begun the basic animation for the sprite. The ChiChiLand Adventure will use a mostly top-down perspective (slightly off vertical), popularized by many Nintendo titles such as Pokemon or Zelda (especially the handheld versions).
I wanted the character to have a cute, bold, slightly stumpy way of walking. Here's a first pass.

I have decided to learn how to create games. It's really a no-brainer. I've been playing and following game development for most of my life now, I already use code in my animation work - why not give it a shot?
At the moment I have a more-less fleshed out idea of what my first game will be (more on that in another post) and I will document my journey through the posts in this brand new Game Development category on QubaHQ.

Lead by Johnny Chung Lee, Project Tango took a fairly unorthodox approach to the development of this new technology. Rather than complete secrecy, Google engineers collaborated with research labs and academia, developing both the software as well as the current incarnation of the project - the Tango Tablet.
This film is a tribute to all the amazing minds involved in making Tango a reality. It documents the amazing journey of computer vision and 3D sensing that led to today's ability to contain all these amazing technologies in a user-oriented mobile device.