Paipa
It is the year 1866.
The Queen has sent the interplanetary steamer HMS Victoria to claim Mars in the name of the British Empire.
You are an engineer responsible for the pressure release valves on deck 43.
To release water pressure you have to connect the valves on both sides of the console by rotating pipes and working with tools.
Paipa is a steampunk puzzle game I made for the XBox 360 Indie Games Channel during my free time.
Since I did not want to spend too much time prototyping I used mechanics found in popular puzzle games such as Pipemania. I already used the same mechanics on Elbehochwasser so I knew it would be fun to play.
I created everything myself including shaders and interface graphics but I had help with the models and texturing. The sound effects used in the game are from The Freesound Project (www.freesound.org).
•
Download the demo to your XBox 360.
Bonsai
With Bonsai I wanted to do something with trees and I have always been fascinated by the way bonsai trees have to be nurtured and trimmed. In pop culture they are loaded with meaning. In an episode of Andromeda, that purple chick controls fate by trimming a miniature tree and in a Star Wars novel that one crime lord receives a magnificent bonsai as a present from a former rival.
The growing and cutting was planned beforehand and implemented fairly straightforward, but the coloring of the leaves and the idea of using watering cans as an analogy came to me during development. Especially the coloring allows a lot of experimenting. With good timing the foliage gets beautiful gradients and the combination with trimming allows layers of different colors.
•
Try the game.
Elbehochwasser
Elbehochwasser is an online teaser for the downloadable game "Entdecke mit Welbi die Elbe".
The game is part of a cooperation project between the University of Magdeburg and the FGG Elbe to teach children about environmental protection. It was created using Flash and Actionscript.
•
Play the game at the FGG Elbe website.
Stick Fu
Stick Fu is a sidescrolling jump 'n' run game that was created by myself and fellow students for the game design lecture at the Faculty of Computer Science in Magdeburg. The students formed production teams to design and implement a game in the supplementary seminar using the multimedia development tool Squeak (Smalltalk). Each team consisted of five students who were responsible for areas such as art direction, gameplay and programming.
The Village of Zamé
The village of Zamé is a build & construct game for the XO laptop created for a OLPC game design competition. It is the game's goal to develop the village of Zamè into a self-sustaining, prospering community. In order to reach this goal the player has to distribute the workers of the village into different areas such as farming, reclaiming land or constructing facilities.
The intended audience for the game are children in third-world countries to teach them to help themselves and be independent of development aid.
•
Try out the flash preview.
Ornithological Shock
My concept for this side-scrolling game combines immersive gameplay with an emotionally engaging plot. The story begins at the end of Hitchcock's The Birds: The star-crossed lovers, which the game's story revolves around, escape with a run-down truck from a bird sanctuary, where birds have gone mad. From the truck's cargo area the hero fights off birds with two nailguns, which the player controls with the mouse. The heroine drives the truck, which is controlled by the cursor keys. The gameplay is inspired by scenes from the third Matrix movie.
•
Take a look at the other pages of the high concept.
City Runner
In this prototype a new city is procedurally created each time the game starts. In the final game the player can run and climb endlessly in one direction as the city wraps itself around a gigantic tower. Nobody knows the origin of the structure nor why and when it was settled. But while ascending through the different belts of the city the player uncovers the truth about the city's origin by accomplishing tasks and missions which he receives from the city's inhabitants.
•
Unzip and test the prototype.
• Requires the Microsoft XNA Framework Redistributable 2.0 to run.
•
Take a look at the source code (C#).
My Diploma Thesis
The bas-relief is an artistic medium which combines the haptic attributes of sculptures and the visual attributes of drawings. Existing relief generation methods use a range image of the depicted scene to reach high visual fidelity to the original scene. This thesis develops an approach to relief generation based on bump maps which focuses on the haptic perception of the generated bas-relief.
The main idea of the method consists in using the arccosine of the bump map's z-component for the approximation of a height map. Extraction of the shape information is performed by thresholding the height map's gradients. By integrating over the gradient field, the height map is recovered. The application of a smoothing operator removes details which inhibit the haptic perception of the final bas-relief.
The results, which were obtained by an evaluation study, show that the developed method is well-suited for applications that focus on the haptic perception of bas-reliefs.
Possible areas of application of the bump map-based relief generation are the development of haptic media for the visually impaired and the design of haptic interfaces.
•
Unzip and test the implemented application. Note: Haptic output is deactivated. Contact me if you are interested in the source code.
•
Take a look at the source code (C++).
•
Read the diploma thesis (German).
IGDA Scholarship GDC 2007
In March 2007 I was chosen as one of 25 recipients of a scholarship to attend the GDC 2007 in San Francisco. The IGDA scholarships are awarded annually to students all over the world.
The GDC is an annual conference on game development, sharing tools, tips and technologies for learning, networking and fun.
•
Take a look at the pictures from the conference in my gallery.
•
Read mine and other reports about the conference.
Tutor for Game Programming Lecture
The lecture realtime techniques for computer games is held regularly for students in higher semesters at the Faculty of Computer Science in Magdeburg. It covers methods and basics of computer graphics and animation, video, text and sound output as well as user interfaces und interaction in virtual spaces.
In the winter term of 2006 I tutored the supplementary seminar, for which I created practical exercises with the professional 3D engine Trinigy Vision and Visual C++
in the areas of AI, gameplay and interface programming.
•
Visit the lecture's website.
Flash Workshop
I organized an flash workshop for the student club Acagamics which covered the basics of creating graphics, animations and movie clips with Macromedia Flash and programming with the scripting language Actionscript. Over the course of both days each participant created a simple non-violent shoot'em up flash game.
•
Play the flash game we created during the two-day workshop.
Level Design for Desperados 2
For my industry internship I joined German game developer Spellbound and was part of the newly created level design department for the realtime strategy game Desperados 2. In the course of the internship I was given several responsibilities and credited as Senior Level Designer. The official Desperados 2 demo was designed and implemented by a colleague and myself.
Level design is an area which has not received a lot of attention in the past. More often than not, creating and designing levels is only a secondary task performed by artists or game designers. My internship paper, which is an important part of the Computer Science degree, describes the approaches developed and applied by myself for the creation of Desperados 2 levels:
•
Read my internship Paper about game and level design of Desperados 2.
•
Download and play the official Desperados 2 demo.
Laborpraktikum: Genetic Algorithms
The Laborpraktikum is a programming task in the computer science curriculum. With C++ and MFC I implemented an application for the area of genetic/evolutionary algorithms. The goal was to implement an ancestral repair operator which facilitates a kind of extragenomic transfer of genetic material. The application allows to determine if such an operator enhances the performance of genetic algorithms.
•
Unzip and test the application.
•
Take a look at the sourcecode.
•
Read the report (German).