Blog

It's time for a new update on the development of Eye of the Temple.

Events

GDC in March is well behind us and I had a great time there. Among other things, I got to show off Eye of the Temple at the European Game Showcase (and saw a lot of other cool games too). This was a private event for specially invited people from the network of the organizers.

Now, Eye of the Temple has been selected for Yonderplay, an event that's part of the Nordic Game Conference in Malmö in Sweden and open to everyone at the conference. This will go down on May 25, the last day of the conference. This is the most public showing of the game yet, and I'm very excited about it! If you'll be at Nordic Game Conference yourself, come by and say hi and give the game a try.

Last week I took a dive into the world of PR with Eye of the Temple.

There is a new trailer you can see on the website eyeofthetemple.com or right here below.

And Eye of the Temple now has a Steam page: Eye of the Temple on Steam

If you have a Vive or Oculus Rift, and think Eye of the Temple looks interesting, you can totally add it to your wishlist on Steam now! ;)

After that I took my first stab at contacting the press with a press release. The story got picked up by UploadVR and a handful of smaller outlets (see list on the Sanctum Dreams website). Considering I'm an unknown small indie developer with no experience with the press, I'm pretty happy with the results.

This week I'm at Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. I'm mostly here with Unity, but I'll also be showing Eye of the Temple at the European Game Showcase.

Exciting times!

I've been spending the last week in San Francisco attending the Game Developers Conference and showing off Unity at our awesome (and very busy) booth.

Booth Experiences

The people I've met have been very excited about Unity; both our product in general and about the new features we'll be releasing in upcoming Unity 3 this summer and which we previewed at the booth. Unlike last year, there were practically no people this year who hadn't heard about Unity some way or another.

IGF Impressions

The Independent Games Festival awards show was great. I was especially excited about Danish guys Playdead winning no less than two awards for their game Limbo and other Danish guys Press Play winning an award for their Unity game Max & the Magic Marker for Wii, PC, and Mac. I've had a chance to play both, and they're both excellent games. Coincidentally they're both side-scrolling platform games with a strong puzzle focus, but besides that they're completely different.

Animation Insights

I only got to see one session this year - Player Movement and Animation in Drake's Fortune 1 and 2. It was very well presented. Everything was sensible and easy to understand; there was nothing ground-breaking but a lot of useful tips and tricks. With the exception of one thing that was purely done to save memory (flipping animations on the left-right axis), everything they did could be done in Unity without problems. They basically rely on lots of animation blending, some of the animations applying to only part of the skeleton, and some animations being additive; all things that are supported in Unity. They also do some IK fixes, which of course can be done in Unity with scripting.

Their method for making characters standing and moving correctly on uneven surfaces is a little similar to how my Locomotion System does it, just a bit simpler: They too use raycasts to find the ground height for the feet, then adjust the hip/root height, and then use IK to adjust the legs.

The most interesting thing they did was having a few long animations with random wiggling of the character. By applying this on top of a 1-frame idle animation they get a nice long, varied idle animation, but it means they can have lots of different idle animations that are all just 1 frame long which turn into nice animations when the wiggly-animation is applied on top. They do similar things with walking and running to add variation that can span over a long time but doesn't require much space because it can be reused for many different animations. Perhaps we can add something like that for our new Unity 3 launch demo that we're working on.

Going Home

It's been a long and hard, awesome week, and I've met lots of great people, but now I also look forward to going home again. I'll be arriving back in Copenhagen on Monday, and once I've recharged a little I'll be continuing working on getting Unity 3 out.

My lecture at GDC about my Locomotion System went really well I think. I've had some requests for the slides, and they're available here:

Dynamic Walking with Semi-Procedural Animation (PDF, 16 MB)

Note that the presentation included quite a few videos which are not in the above slides, so a few points may not come properly across if you did not see the presentation at GDC.

GDC may at some point make a recording of the slides available, complete with audio. I don't know if that would also include the videos I presented. I'm not so sure of the details. If anybody finds out, please let me know!

The Game Developers Conference 2009 is very close now and I will be doing a 60-minute lecture in the Programming track on the subject of:

Dynamic Walking with Semi-Procedural Animation

(Follow the link to see the session description on the GDC website.)

Time: Friday (March 27, 2009), 4:00pm - 5:00pm
Location: Room 2018, West Hall

Version 2.5 of the Unity game engine and authoring tool has finally been released and is now for the first time available on Microsoft Windows too.

Unity is the engine I've used to develop the Locomotion System with. Unity is gaining popularity like mad these days and has been used for so many cool games for Mac, Windows, web browsers, iPhone, and Wii.

Besides Windows authoring support, Unity 2.5 primarily bring improvements to the authoring tool, including a fully customizable tabbed interface and improved support for creating custom editor windows.

I also work for Unity Technologies now, and we'll be proud to show off Unity at GDC 2009. We'll be in booth #5110 in the North Hall.

The Game Developers Conference 2009 is near and I am proud to announce that my session proposal has been approved! I will be doing a 60-minute lecture in the Programming track on the subject of:

Dynamic Walking with Semi-Procedural Animation
(Follow the link to see the session description on the GDC website.)

I am honored to be presenting my work in the company of the great minds of the game industry at such an early point in my career. This is the second time I am going to GDC and I am truly looking forward to it.

Updated Interactive Demo

Now, since I'm updating the blog anyway, I have thrown in the latest version of the uneven terrain demo that I have used as a testing bed for the Locomotion System. New in this version is a coyote, as well as lots of visualization options that you can play around with to get an idea of the inner workings of the system. This is the same version that was used for the Video Demo 2 of the Locomotion System in the previous post.

Instructions for the demo

You can control the characters with either the keyboard or with a game pad. With a game pad, such as an XBox 360 controller, the direction and speed can be controlled precisely with ease, while independently controlling facing direction with the secondary stick.

In this demo the terrain can be dynamically controlled with the sliders at the top. You can create stairs, slopes, and various combinations. The terrain will reflect the changes once the character has walked a little distance to the left or right. Enable manual mode to control the character yourself, as described above. This demo uses four animations for walking (forward, backwards, and sideways) and also four for running.

In other news

Besides having my session at GDC accepted, a few other notable things have happened recently:

• I have moved from Aarhus to Copenhagen (both are cities in Denmark; Copenhagen is the capital) together with my girlfriend.
• I have started working at Unity Technologies, a company making an extremely cool game engine and authoring tool called Unity.
• I am still working on finishing my Master thesis about the locomotion system ... it will hopefully be done soon!

That's it for now. I hope to see you at GDC!

Our Team 3 game production FLIPSIDE is a 2008 Independent Games Festival Student Showcase Winner! It's a huge honor, and I and two other guys from Team 3 are going to San Francisco by February to show off our game at the Game Developers Conference, attend the IGF Awards Ceremony, and talk with people in the business. :D