Technical Art for Games » touch KO

Biped Editor for Unity 3.0

Adam — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 02:27:33 +0000

I’ve been really head-down for awhile with work, the latest of which has involved some pretty substantial refactoring of Touch KO for a big update this summer (finally!). Since I’ve been working in Unity 3.0, I thought I’d share a short clip of a tool I developed during the refactoring process. It’s a biped component along with an editor for interactively adjusting collision shapes and sizes as well as joint limits. The component also has functionality to perform an automatic mass distribution based on human values, as well as interfaces for entering and exiting ragdoll. If I manage to get caught up on things after the update I’ll probably share the code on here eventually, but as anyone who follows the site may have guessed it’s been really busy lately O_o.

Note: for best viewing, I recommend turning the resolution on the video up to 1080p and watching full-screen, since that’s my native resolution and it will be easier to read some of the buttons.

Touch KO is out!

Adam — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 16:54:43 +0000

I’m out of town right now, so have to be pretty brief, but I wanted to say that Touch KO is finally out now! You can pick it up in the App Store for a special launch sale price of $2.99! Perfect for blowing off some steam if you’re waiting around somewhere.

Maya Python – The Book

Adam — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 21:57:47 +0000

Well we have finally wrapped up development on Touch KO! The last few weeks have been hectic as we had some last-minute requirements sort of indirectly imposed on us by Apple, but everything is wrapped up and sent off to Chillingo.

One of my next projects is a book on the Maya Python API for Morgan Kaufmann (publisher of David Gould’s Complete Maya Programming texts). Ryan Trowbridge and I will be working on this together over the next year, so it is sure to be fun and exciting. We have a pretty comprehensive plan for what the book will cover, but please do feel free to contact either of us if there are specific things you would like to see!

In other news, Crane Wars, the newest Blurst game, was released a couple weeks ago. Among other things, I focused primarily on the characters in it. I did a post awhile ago that showed the facial rigs I created for them. Go play it now!

More TKO Work

Adam — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 00:18:51 +0000

This last week the game has really made some pretty dramatic changes! In addition to getting more of Michael’s graphic design work in place, we have lighting working on the characters now! This is actually a really taxing process for a platform like the iPhone (not the rendering so much as skinning something with normals). That’s why you see so many games with unlighted characters. However, thanks to the genius of Renaldas Zioma and the rest of the iPhone team over at Unity Technologies, we’ve gotten some massive engine performance increases. One of these is assembly-level skinning using the ARM’s VFP coprocessor. Anyway, I’ll stop ranting and just let you take a look at the screenshots!

It may be bold to say it, but I think in the near future if you are making iPhone games and you aren’t using Unity, then chances are you’re doing it wrong

Touch KO Gets a Facelift

Adam — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 14:16:55 +0000

We’re coming down the home stretch right now with Touch KO as well as with Crane Wars. Have you ever crunched on games? Not fun. Now try crunching on two games simultaneously. OK well me crunching on my two games at once is probably still not as bad as crunching on one game for E3 at a company like Sony or Activision (you guys know who you are and have my deepest sympathies).

Anyhow, we hooked up with Michael Heald, the awesome graphic designer who did the Blurst website, to have him take a pass at the graphic design elements in Touch KO. He has done a marvelous job and we have started getting some of his work into the game. Just a couple more weeks now and we should be ready to submit! Here are a couple of new shots to share!