Imirt 2019 Irish Game Awards Page

We took two first prizes: Best Technical Achievement and Best Game Art.
We also took two runner up prizes: Best Game Design and Best Game Audio.

Imirt is the Irish Gamemaker’s Association.

Orbs.it is a multiplayer game I wrote last year with some effective multi-server configuration and latency mitigation design decisions.. hence the award

Last week we presented a paper at an academic conference – IEEE Games, Entertainment & Media. This included a demo of some of the interactive multiplayer minigames which make up our learning system. It went really well, and the 20 or so participants found it very engaging. My heavily-cached Ajax-and-Websockets NodeJs server performed exactly as I had hoped.

For more details and discussion you can download our full IEEE GEM conference paper here.
You can try a demo of Newby Chinese here.
The main Newby Chinese website is here.

Last week I co-presented a paper in which we discussed two related research projects: Lie2Me and Fool Me Once. In these, I’ve been working with Denis O’Hora, a colleague in NUIG who works in the Psychology Dept. We’re investigating the dynamic body-language features which are apparent when users are lying, and as part of this we had an installation for 3 months in the Science Gallery in Trinity College Dublin.

Our continuing work will, among other things, perhaps lead to useful applications in games artificial intelligence (AI), whereby AI agents can act more human-like, perhaps through mimicry or perhaps through deeper analytical “understanding” of human actions. My related work from 2011 was in the field of pathfinding in my car combat MMO “Darkwind“.

You can download our research paper here.
You can participate in the Lie2Me experiment here.

The game runs using HTML5/Canvas, with a node.js websockets server. The ‘render client’ ran on my laptop and players ran the ‘controller client’ on their phones.. this seems like a really nice way to do casual LAN-style multiplayer games, and it’s a configuration I have been thinking about for a few weeks. I just need to figure out a killer party game idea to use it with!

In “Hittin’ Worlds” Each player plays as a planet, in orbit around a sun. Asteroids are flying about, and players have to use their forcefield to deflect them. By using a virtual joystick-style controller on their phone, they orient the forcefield in specific directions.. incoming asteroids get deflected in that direction. The idea is that players fling the rocks at each other while defending themselves.

We also had a really nice piece of custom music written by a guy called Ian, from Athlone/Reading.

I hadn’t really been sure of the value of a Game Jam prior to this – it just seemed a bit insane to try to produce something in a single extended session. But the value is now clear to me – by creating very tight deadlines, you immediately make every team member useful.. so those with less experience are in a position where their work is relevant and important, which it would not be if the project had a month or two to complete. Apart from that the GJ is an excellent and fun networking opportunity. It gives a focus and theme to a networking session, which is something that we had already been struggling to manage in our earlier GGG meetings.

The first event, in June, ran for 12 hours. I took on the role of photographer and on-the-day organiser (making runs to the shop and Pizzeria etc.).. I didn’t really want to take part in the competition since I knew I’d only get too engrossed in coding, to the detriment of the other stuff that needed doing.

“We had fun! There were games made! .. mostly with only a tenuous link to the under-the-moon alternative-reality wonderland I envisioned. Apologies for my smart-ass comments and constantly sniffing nose. Also my camera battery died a couple of mins from the end so we didn’t get the wrap-up presentation from all teams.”

The second event, in October, ran for 24 hours (I, like the other more ahem.. mature.. attendees disappeared in the middle for some sleep!).

“Footage of our 24 hour game jam, 12th-13th October 2013, attended by about 25 coders, designers, artists and musicians. The quality of work going on was very impressive, and it was great to see visitors from Dublin and Tipperary this time, in addition to the locals! Thanks once again to the organising team Liam Krewer, Alanna Kelly, and me! I kept my cheeky comments to a minimum this time.. and the music being produced was so good that I didn’t want to muck it up by overlaying any backing track.”

WEEK 1 – intro, IDE, API overview
Lecture 1 – Introduction
Lab 1 – Setup Shiva + Mars Rotator
Mars model (Collada .dae and .jpg) (for use in lab session 1)

WEEK 2 – key game entities, automatic flow of control, AIs, keyboard, accelerometer
Lectures 2&3 – Concepts, the Shiva SDK etc.
Lab 2 – Mars and its moons!
Phobos/Deimos models (Collada .dae and .jpg) and skyboxes (.jpg) (for use in lab session 2)

WEEK 3 – programmed flow of control, messages, key game entities, data handling
Lectures 2&3 – Added to since last week!
Lab 3 – Mars with collidable asteroids
Asteroid model (Collada .dae and .jpg) (for use in lab session 3)

WEEK 4 – physics, direct movement, the camera
Lecture 4 – physics, movement, camera
Labwork: start on your game projects; complete lab 3 if you haven’t done so yet.

WEEK 5 – HUDs, runtime object management, coordinate systems, vectors and angles, ray casting, the math object
Sample solution to lab 3 (Mars with Moons and Asteroids)
Lecture 5 – HUDs, raycasting, runtime object management

WEEK 6 – sensors & colliders, tables, hash tables, xml, game deployment
Lecture 6 notes

WEEK 7/8 – particle emitters, multiplayer, multitouch, efficiency, Shiva script and OpenGLES, materials & lighting, pathfinding
Lecture 7/8 notes

Demo Games that we will be discussing in class:
The Shiva webplayer plugin will automatically install..
[Afterburn 2150]
[Mars Defender]
[Block Rockin]

Anyway, here’s my presentation slides (pdf, 1MB).. I hope they’re useful to someone

The talk is only 45 mins long, so there’s no way I’ll get everything covered that I want to, but I figured I might as well make a more complete presentation so it can be useful to people after the event too. I’ll likely have to skim over bits of it.

[Presentation Slides here] (~1MB)