Emerging Technology at SIGGRAPH 2012

Combiform showcased at SIGGRAPH 2012 last week, in the Emerging Technologies exhibit!  Ed set up my computer to work with the controllers!  We had originally planned to launch a kickstarter in time with SIGGRAPH, but a lot of stuff didn't come together to meet the deadline.  With a rewritten script, and newly shot footage (armed with amazing lenses!), we're ready to launch soon!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/shuandang/sets/72157631012473100/

This exhibit next to us demonstrated a surrogate robot that could provide tactile and heat sensitivity.  Only half a century away from manufacturing full working shells!

A handful of my favourite pictures.  More on my flickr. 

Space Cowboy, Space Cowgirl

SIGCHI 2012, Innovative Interface

This last week I traveled to Austin, Texas with the Combiform team, to attend SIGCHI.  This was my first time with a demo booth at such a large convention.  We had a ton of people stop by, and the space was crowded during the main event.  I spent the time trying to photograph everyone that stopped by, occasionally taking breaks to work on an essay.  

We placed first in the Student Games Competition for Innovative Interface!

More photos on Flickr.

The Grand Escalator, Austin Convention Center

Student games Competition

We've got a crowd

Heading out every morning

Demo'ing Combiform to the student volunteers

More photos on Flickr.

Mariya

I'm working on a fighting game now.  The only ones I play myself are Street Fighter (Juri and Sakura), Super Smash Brothers, and a bit of Melty Blood.  We're going to have a couple of characters, and I'm having a lot of fun repurposing a sketchbook drawing into a game character.

These are the two puppets, rigged in Flash's skeleton system.

Check out Mariya!

trying out different color schemes.  I started with the one on the right and in the end we stuck with that one.  The final puppet is missing that round face =/

i based Mariya's fighting pose on this doodle.

this is a poor attempt to change the proportions of the characters.

And Yet Again Those Four Colors

I've been yearning for a course on color recently.  My school does not seem to offer one, and the closest I would be able to get to color theory would likely be the Painting class and/or certain Animation courses.  I remember watching the Gurren Lagann production documentary, and noting that a key role in the entire process were the people in the coloring department.

Another instance was a Toy Story 3 presentation by Lee Unkrich in which he showed how the entire film was color keyed to set the mood in each sequence.  

Agent Purple?

In this last game I worked on, Agent Purple, (again for CombiForm), I made sure not to recycle any previous colors, instead opting to practice using the Photoshop color picker.  I ended up referencing the original cover for A Study in Scarlet, and, at my producer's suggestion, Patrick Owsley's rendition of Secret Squirrel.

Color Coded Characters

Last year in Game Design Workshop, for the first Paper Game, my team created a spy themed laser gun board game.  Each spy was given a color, and as such things usually go, we settled on Blue, Red, Green, Yellow, finding success in Google's logo design.  What makes it such that these four colors represent basicality?  The inclusion of Green instead of Orange or Purple a consequence of being complementary to red and a combination of the Opponent colors Blue and Yellow?

That's not to say that Green does not fit into the team.  Look, he's just as good a spy as any other:

I recently worked on another set of color coded characters, and as usual opted to assign them as hair colors.  These one's for Pop Quiz, a CombiForm math game: