Dobbs Challenge winners!

Posted under Contests

The judges of the Dobbs Challenge have finally selected the winners of the contest.

We won the Best Total Conversion category!
That wasn’t that easy though. We planned to work on our entry something like three weeks ago.
Unfortunately all sorts of problems popped up, Rosario (me!) had to go to live in another house and couldn’t connect to the Internet for two weeks.
After we solved those problems, we crunched for three days working day and night and we came up with this little 3D demo using NVIDIA PhysX.

Here’s a quote from the Dobbs Challenge website:

“Wow! Like all of the categories Best Total Conversion was hotly contested, but in the end our judges had to select Giuseppe Navarria’s Ninja Run because it simply astounded them with the extent it was different from the original Dr. Dobbs Challenge.

Turning a 2D single screen platformer into a cel-shaded 3D platform game (with working physics!) even with the help of NVIDIA PhysX was just so unexpected that it was the winner even in the face of more complete entrants. If there was criticism to be made it would be that while the technology is there the “game” isn’t complete.

As a result, many of our judges requested that we only give them the $1,000 prize on the condition that they continue to develop the title — as they want to play it!”

[Download Now]
We also did some art not included in the game, like those two enemy models:


Maybe you’ll see those enemies in action in some future release of Ninja Run.
Congrats to all the winners of the Dobbs Challenge!

Tutorials!

Posted under Uncategorized

I just finished my first programming tutorial written in English!

It’s about an underrated argument in the sea of game programming tutorials: using shaders for 2d or 3d postfiltering.

You can read all the stuff here. And don’t forget to leave me a comment about it!

More on Circle

Posted under Projects

I’ve quit my job and I hope soon to start Circle development full-time, but this will happen if I manage to find a way to substain myself for the development period of course…

….and I got also a job offer as coder for a Nintendo DS game!

I’ll do an interview soon so this can change the cards on the playfield too.

Little updates for Circle, I used some of the code I wrote for Zombiedog in Crazyland and also added postfiltering to the rendering pipeline to achieve some fancy effect such bloom, distortions ect. I also did procedural trees (still WIP) and I think they will have a primal role gameplay wise.

You will discover soon why

Also this time I will introduce you the Roboplanet! So hordes of tiny robots will be one of the “cultures” the player will be able to choose.

I’m also learning 3D modeling, I’ll never be a great artist but I want to do some assets for a next-gen techdemo I want to work on to show around my own 3d engine, so maybe I’ll post something tomorrow.

Stay tuned for another episode of The Amazing Adventures of an Amateur Indie Game Developer!

Zombiedog in Crazyland

Posted under Projects

In these days I built a small demo for the TIGsource VGNG Compo, (where VGNG means Videogame Name Generator, so you had to use this generator, choose a name and make a game from it).

Sadly I simply had a bunch of spare hours in total because of my job, so I’ve quit the contest with nothing more than a small demo with almost no gameplay

Anyway I had fun doing that and I’ve meet a lot of interesting indie developers around!

Here you will find the only screens of Zombiedog in Crazyland, my VGNG compo project:

A new indie project: CIRCLE

Posted under Projects

I’m here to post something about a little indie project I’m going to start.

The game name will be, don’t know if only during development or not, CIRCLE. It stays for Circle Is a Random Colorful Little Emotion (or better I hope it will be)!

That’s a pretty recursive acronym, isn’t it?

I’m currently searching a nice looking style and after a few tests I think I’ll try a one-to-four colours scale for each object in the game.

It also features a sort of vector graphics style, here there are some screens

Yes, these are planets!

Almost empty at the moment but they will be the place were the players will build a living 2D ecosystem.

So Circle will be something like a “God-game” such Populous or the long waited Spore, but with a pretty unique gameplay and, as you can see, style

Hello World!

Posted under Uncategorized

I’m Giuseppe Navarria and I work as Lead Programmer in a small videogames software house in Italy.

This is a DevLog, were I’ll post and discuss about my work, the game biz, and my own projects.

I’m currently working on a 3d action\platform game for job and on the Akom 3D engine in my spare time.

More on all this stuff and more soon!