Super HYPERCUBE

Note : SUPERHYPERCUBE has been released by Kokoromi for PSVR, I did not work on this version at all, but this article shows its development history.

Super HYPERCUBE (capitalization may vary) is a game I made with the fine folks at Kokoromi for this year’s (2008) Gamma art/game show in Montréal. Gamma is a themed game party that’s been happening for three years now, each year with a design constraint for all the games that apply; this year’s Gamma 3D was about red/cyan stereoscopy aka color anaglyphs.

SHC Logo/Splash Screen : It’s actually all 3D and animated.

The idea is that you have to fit a cluster of cubes inside a wall that represents a projection of that cube on one of its faces, with a series of rotations applied. So it’s a bit like the Japanese “Human Tetris” game shows, which is the comparison that our recent blog coverage have been using, and it’s exactly right. Except you’re handling a random cluster of cubes.

Development Timeline : From concept art, to Sketchup mockup, to early prototype, to final product!

The game, like all other Gamma games, was made to be easy to learn and fun within 5 minutes, because it was to be played by the public and we want to get as many people to play as possible. So the concept is fairly simple, but I was surprised about how competitive the gameplay was on the showfloor! Until the last minute, I had a fight with a fellow party-goer for the #1 high score, which I won by an unfair margin, which I assume was due to luck and… well… hours of testing the game while making it. ;)

Good Luck With That : The shapes get pretty crazy in the last moments.

But our game’s most awesome feature is not just stereoscopy, it’s wiimote headtracking! Which is a bummer, because even if the game is now available for download, I assume noone will have the setup to play it as it was meant to be played. (The most important part being IR-LED-mounted glasses!)

You can still use an Xbox 360 gamepad or just the keyboard to play it, and that’s how I’ve been testing it most of the time. It’s just nowhere as immersive without the headtracking… the combination of that and stereoscopy worked really well for us. There will probably be videos of people playing at Gamma 3D sometime soon, I’ll update this post with links.

Updates :

Downloads

Binaries (this one isn’t open-source, sorry…) : sHC_final.zip (1.6 Mb)
Update 21/11 02h57 GMT-5 : Put the required font in a texture instead of looking up the TTF. I didn’t realize that Century Gothic wasn’t shipped with Windows anymore…

You will need the .NET 3.5 SP1 framework installed, and TV3D requires some oft-missing DirectX DLLs which you can get with the End-User Runtimes.

Acknowledgments

I have to say that the Wiimote headtracking technology is all thanks to Johnny Chung Lee‘s inspiring work on the subject (and free code!), as well as Brian Peek’s C# Wiimote library without which this would have never happened.

The game itself was programmed using C# 3.5, the Truevision3D 6.5 engine and part of the XNA framework (I’ve bundled the DLL) for full Xbox controller support. There is no sound, this is voluntary… there was a DJ at the actual event. :)

And last but not least,…

Credits (I’m not alone in this one!) :

  • Renaud Bédard – Polytron (Concept, Programming, Hardware)
  • Phil Fish – Kokoromi/Polytron (Concept, Design)
  • Jason DeGroot – Polytron (Concept, Hardware)
  • Cindy Poremba – Kokoromi (Design)
  • Heather Kelley – Kokoromi (Design)
  • Damien Di Fede – Kokoromi (Play-Testing)

Trouble In Euclidea, a mini-game

Chances are that if you’re reading this blog, you’ve already heard of this, but I’ll put it here for archiving. :)

Trouble In Euclidea is a game I made for the TIGSource Bootleg Demake Competition as an obvious demake of Geometry Wars. My intent was to demake the graphics (by using ASCII art for everything) more than the gameplay, but it turns out most people did both, which makes much more sense as the gameplay ends up being more original and it plays less like a cheap clone. Mine kinda does. :P

I ended up with five votes in the competition, which places my game 26th out of 30 positions. It may not sound like much, but I’m really happy that I got votes at all! There are really amazing entries that scored around mine, SHADE: Ghost Academy and DamN for instance…

It was also a nice experiment in fast prototyping. I did the game in a single month, but only on weekends except for the last week. Which means I spent at most 15 days on the game, from start to finish, from graphics to game code.

I used C# 3.5, IrrKlang.NET, TV3D and my spiffy new XNA-inspired Component Framework to build it. It worked really well for me, so I decided to release the source of the whole project. As with most of my code recently, it has an almost complete absence of comments, but should be fairly self-explanatory.

Downloads

Source with libraries and content : TroubleInEuclidea_src_r4.zip (2.7 Mb)

Binaries only : TroubleInEuclidea_r4.zip (1.6 Mb)

(for those wondering, the fourth update “r4” only contains bugfixes in the component framework, a new version of IrrKlang and very little code cleanup)

Of course you’ll need .NET 3.5 installed, and TV3D requires some oft-missing DirectX DLLs which you can get with the End-User Runtimes.

Closing Notes

There are three known bugs :

  • Sometimes fuschia octogonal enemies make their spawning sound, but don’t actually spawn.
  • Sometimes enemies appear too close together and “bounce” very quickly, sometimes traversing the whole screen in less than a second.
  • If you close the game with Alt+F4, it won’t actually close. Use the ESC key!!

There are also two achievements, read the ReadMe file for more info! :)

Displayable Profiler

Download

TV3DProfiler.rar [49kb] – Visual Basic.NET 2005

Description

You like the profiler in TV3D 6.5, but you’d like to do the same with your own application code? Hate the fact that what it reports is not tweakable or modifyable in any way? Here’s my own implementation of a profiler, which imitates the built-in one but has definable profiles and now categories, and is braindead-simple to use.

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Soft Stencil Shadows

Downloads

SoftStencils.rar [776Kb] – C# 2.0 (VS.NET 2005)

Description

This demo demonstrates a technique that fellow forum user kTech proposed in the Beta Discussion forum to smooth otherwise hard stencil shadows. It uses screen-space blur of the shadow pass to smoothen things out.

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Double-Sided Bumped Refraction

Downloads

Both downloads are Visual Basic.NET 2005 projects.

Refraction.rar [408Kb] – Simpler first version
Refraction_v2.rar [665Kb] – Second version, now with backface rendering (double-sided refraction) and more test models

Description

A specular-capable, normal-mapped, double-sided refraction shader that can be applied to pretty much any TVMesh, originally asked by forum user WEst.

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Non-Reflective Water

Downloads

NonReflectiveWater.rar [7.9Mb] – C# 2.0 (VS.NET 2005)

Description

I had a request from a MMORPG developer to make a lightweight water shader that doesn’t need a reflection rendersurface, yet looks acceptable.
It looks nowhere as shiny as the reflective water shader or even TV’s built-in water, but it runs a zillion times faster because it doesn’t do any parallaxing, nor specular bumpmapping, nor perspective projection… Its implementation is alot simpler as well.

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AGT’s Third Person Demo – C# 2.0 Port

Downloads

AGT3rdPersonDemo.rar [10Mb]

Description

This demo is a port of AGT’s Third Person Demo that was posted on the TV3D Beta Discussion forum. The original version was VB6, I just took the same media and code structure and adapted it to C# 2.0 (Visual Studio.NET 2005).

Continue reading AGT’s Third Person Demo – C# 2.0 Port