Febret's Hub

A new section has been added to the website: 24Hour Games The 24H Games project is an experiment in gameplay design and developement. Its main objective is the creation of simple web-based games in   a single day . Each of the games presented here has been built by a single developer (that is, me ^-^) in just 24 hours. Each game is presented along with its   developement log , describing the various steps in the creation of the games, things that worked and things that didn't. The first published game is called Atomz . In this puzzle game the player links moving symbols (thr atomz) by matching shape or color, before they go out of the screen. Linked atomz switch their state, linking them in a smart way to create bigger molecules increases the score. Enter the 24Hour Games project page to play the game and read the developement log!

New section added. Its about a CodeProject article I wrote several years ago, titled Fast late-bound invocation through Dynamic Method delegates : Reflection is a feature that allows a program to find out type (and metadata) information about objects at run-time. The use of Reflection, however, comes with a price. While some of its functions are pretty fast, some others, like late-bound invocation routines, are costly and if not used wisely could result in a major bottleneck inside your application. This article discusses a way to obtain fast late-bound invocation inside the .Net framework, by obtaining a method handle through the common Reflection services, and then emiting MSIL code to patch up a static call site for the method.

The port of Doom on the Nintendo DS was an amazing project. I used to play the original game quite a lot, and being able to run it again on my DS is like going back in time :) Even if the game is pretty much running as it is, the project does not seem to be under active developement anymore. Since I wanted to learn a little bit more about NDS programming I decided to try and compile DSDoom from source. The devkitPro toolchain contains everything needed to start homebrew developement on the DS. Since the DSDoom code was last revised in 2007, the source won’t compile anymore with the latest devKitPro release (r23). I managed to have the code compile and run again even though sound and wireless are not working right now. I planned to do some fancy stuff with this game but I soon realized I won’t have time for it, so I decided I was satisfied enough in having it compiling right :) Donwload DSDoom sources for devKitPro r23 here.

New project added on the website: Usability in Games. We are investigating how interface usability influences user engagement in long-term computer games, and working to assess the relevance of usability versus playability factors on the overall experience engagement. A preliminary paper on this topic has been accepted at the Engagement By Design workshop, which is part of the CHI09 conference on Human-Computer Interaction. The conference and workshops will be held in Boston, April 4-9 2009.

Added lecture material for the last game design & game industry lecture (Interaction Design students). By the way.... I should really revise the site layout, the current one is a buggy mess.

The wiki page for Edanarion can be accessed at http://febretpository.freesitespace.net/wiki/index.php/Edanarion . It will contain both technical and design information for the game.

The QbViz and Hydroviz Software Package 0.3 is now available for download! Take a look HERE! Installation instructions can be found inside appendix C of my Thesis, look at my last post for that.

Added to the site a new section about my thesis, titled Evaluating the Flash Platform for Web-Based Collaborative Data Visualization . It has been discussed 8 May 08 at University of Illinois at Chicago, and will be presented at Politecnico di Milano (Italy) by the end of July. It is mainly a discussion of the work I did developing Qbviz and Hydroviz .

Game videos and downloads of running version of the game and Lua sources are available HERE !

Yamo (Yet another music organizer), manages a music library, moving and renaming song files based on a set of options specified by the user. Yamo is composed of a dynamic library that implements the library manager engine, and a wizard application that allows easy access to the Yamo engine services. Both the library and the wizard are written in C#. Being a library, the Yamo engine can be used even inside third party applications. YAMO is a small app I developed some time ago... I tried it on my Vista machine and the binary version doesn't seem to work, I really need to build it again and see what the problem is, since my music collection is really messed up right now :) Original CodeProject article and binary / source code downloads

I added to my site a new page about QbViz, in which I describe how the library works with some more detail. I also added an introductory tutorial to the Hydroviz Preview application to give the user a better idea on how it works. Main QbViz Page Main Hydroviz Page

Screenshots of the new Hydroviz Sample application are available HERE

I added an entry for QbViz on my site. I plan to keep my blog updated with news about project progress from now on. I still have to publish stuff about an ond game on mine and some other folks, called Inner battlefields As for now you can find some more information (and downloads, yey!) about it HERE .

Added Videogame Design Seminar material (Italian).

Posted some new screenshot of Milestone 9 (Prometheus). You can find them here .