Of Light & Shadow is a 2.5D platformer game. There are two characters which the player controls, Mr. Light and Dr. Shadow. The first can only survive in the Light, the second only in the Shadow. The player can switch between those two characters and has to to pass some tricky passages and puzzles to complete levels. If you like competition there’s a online highscore so you can see how good you really are.
As you might have read somewhere on this blog already, I’ve worked on a nice little runner game for android phones. It’s called RunnersHigh and started off as a side project at the university. But we kept polishing it as a private “just for fun” project. We improved a few of the gameplay features, the sprites, and the stability. We had thought about publishing the game to the Google Play (formerly known as android market), but quite couldn’t get the energy to do the last bit. What finally made us do it was that there was a competition for mobile applications in Austria. We wanted to submit RunnerHigh there, but that required it being published on Google Play.
As part of my studies I was required to write two bachelor thesis’s. The first purely theoretical and the second with a practical component. I was certain I wanted to write something about games. But I found the game related topics you can write a scientific paper about rather limited. You can write about computer graphics stuff and AI for the most part. I would have like to write about some gameplay related topic but wasn’t able to find something which I could write about on a scientific level. So I decided to write about something related to AI. But I had no idea what sub categories exist in the AI field. So I searched for a bit to find something which interested me and was small enough so I could write one or two thesis’s about. And I found the field of player prediction.
Let me start with the most important part first: It was awesome!
Holiday cottage I lived in
Skövde is a quite small city (~35k inhabitants) in Sweden. Most of the city life focuses on the university there and a Volvo engine factory. It’s a charming city but accommodations are pretty hard to come by. My girlfriend accompanied me during the whole time from end of August until mid December. We were able to rent a nice little holiday cottage only 15 minutes by car from Skövde.
After we, that is Andreas Stallinger and me, experimented a little bit with the Arduino Duo during our class “Interface Technologies” we found the Arduino Lilypad among some hardware supplied to us. First we didn’t know what it was but after a little research we found out it’s designed to be used on clothing. The Lilypad is a tool to create wearable technologies. That cought our attention and we were excited to have this tool at our disposal. So we thought about what we could create with the Lilypad. We wanted to make something useful which wasn’t complicated the handle and could be used in everyday life. So we came up with the idea to create a watch which was sewed into a shirt. Due to the lack of a display which is comfortable to watch we used LEDs to create a binary watch.
If you are a fellow game developer you probably heard or even implemented and used the RK4 integrator.
For those of you who haven’t here’s a quick info about it.
The Runge Kutta order 4 integrator is like the name says a integrator. You need integrators in games so you can solve differential equations which occur basicly as soon as you implement some physics.
For Example:
You want to calculate the position or velocity of a object in the next frame. The newton mechanics teach us you would do that like this: