I’m as giddy as a schoolgirl. Not only to I finish a zombie rig on time for the meeting today but I was able to play the current build of our prototype. I had only played it in the lab and today I was able to play it at a reasonable distance away from the Kinect while standing up. What followed when it started running made me excited about the future oh and by the way my name is Brian Gabor Jr.

Kevin created a prototype which can be found at http://teamwereok.com/showCase.html under the videos section. The most interesting part about interacting with the prototype was the accuracy that it seemed to represent at our early stage of development. I was able to hover my hands over an object moving at a consistent speed without the data being thrown off. This is exciting because it in theory proves that our Pick - Up mechanic will most likely be able to work and in a accurate fashion. 

I was then able to throw that said object in the air (mentally because there are no interactions between objects) and move my hand back down to another object. Most of the time the movements would feel good and responsive. Overall, the protoype seems to be a very good indication that our Kinect functionality will work with the depth maps inside of Kevin and Dave’s engine. At the same time the prototype seems responsive enough that the game will be able follow  our dreams for the design of the game.

Beside that, Justin is currently creating an art bible to brainstorm a art style for the game. We have collected a good portion of pictures to help the team hone in what kind of art style we are looking for. He is also underway in creating our first enemy type : The Neanderthal. I am currently delving deeper into our game mechanic that we think will be the easiest to first implement : the swipe. Joe is currently underway brainstorming more interactions that could come from the Pick - Up mechanic. More on that later and we will soon have a GDD underway.

~Brian J Gabor Jr.

Rough Beginnings: The Video

Hey Guys,

This is Kevin, nice to meet you! (Virtually)  I’m the lead programmer for Ages of Eden.  Actually, I’m the ONLY programmer for Ages of Eden, which by default makes me the lead.  But if you are reading this, you probably already know that.

This post is about the beginning of Ages of Eden, by Team I’m Okay Where I Am, for DePaul’s Capstone class where we, as a batch of students, make a game from start-to-finish in 20 weeks.  But again, you probably already know that.

The technology that Ages of Eden is using is a WIP 2D “engine” that sits atop XNA called Princess2D that is in the midst of development by myself and my talented friend David Laskey, a fellow DePaul student.  Oh yeah, and the Kinect.  That’s a pretty big hunk of tech right there.

So far using Princess2D has been a peice of cake.  It helps that I programmed perhaps half the darn thing, but it’s also easy and intuitive to use if you are a programmer.

The Kinect is a different beast in itself.  I’ve wrangled the Kinect to function approximately how I want it to.  Through a long, complicated and not necessarily efficient process, I take the depth image that the Kinect spits out, and divide the image into different “depth objects” basically chunks of pixels at different depths from the Kinect that know where they are in 2D space but are all separate entities that I can access at whim, and don’t have to rely on running through an entire depth image to find.  From there, I take only depth objects past a certain layer (whatever layer the body of the person is at) and then slap together a conglomerate of these in order to more or less isolate the different parts of the body put forward (Hands, feet, head, elbows, etc.)

The premise of the game is that using these body parts, you get to tear things up.  You will be able to pick up guys and throw them around, smash them, chop them and punch them.

This is all working, the current problem that I was dealing with is the magically disappearing list.  Kinect works by using event handling, which means that when the Kinect is good and ready it sends information.  And when the Kinect is sending information to me, I have a list of objects that I want to update that is nice and full.  But then when I go to send these objects out into the world, the list, that was full, is now empty.  So I deleted it, right?  No, during the very next event that the Kinect triggers the list is back to normal.

Everything I’ve ever learned in computers doesn’t help me with any of this.  I’m stumped, which is not good if you are the lead programmer of a project… or the only one…

-Kevin

We are officially in progress of creating a Kinect game named Age of Eden. Check back here regularly for information regarding the project!