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The client is Matt Johnson (mjohnson@frontier.co.uk).
The client is Matt Johnson (mjohnson@frontier.co.uk).


==Project proposals for 2016:==
==Project proposals for 2017:==
 
[[Equity Exchange]]
 
===Earlier suggestions===
 
Option 1:
 
Indy Community Framework
 
‘Independent’ or ‘Indy’ game development has become an exciting and
sometimes successful area. Many people are involved and some of the most
successful new properties in the games industry are forged in this area.
Projects are often developed by people meeting through forums and never
meeting face to face. Often designers will seek programmers and artists to
execute sections of their projects, and turn to sites such as Kickstarter
to find external funding to cover these costs, or need to invest their own
earnings and savings to do so.
 
The difficulty in this, is that when there are successes it can make it
difficult for projects to fairly represent all their contributors in it’s
success without complicated arrangements. Students are asked to consider
if they can build a framework to bring together a community of developers
and content creators to support their work together, and match the needs
and the providers and possibly also automate the tracking and ‘share’ of
work done by each party in a project, allowing finances to be split
representatively between the creators, allowing content providers a more
exciting participation and risk taking involvement, while knowing that
should the project succeed they have a clear entitlement to an amount of
returns relative to the success of the project, rather than a flat rate
for their hours.
 
Some careful consideration must go into how project assets are valued (How
many ‘points’ are agreed suitable for a certain job) and how can the
framework support the group in making and communicating these details.
 
 
------
 
Option 2:
 
Interior Environment Creation
 
A constant difficulty in a large number of types of video games is the
effort required in building suitable play environments, especially
interior spaces, whether it be buildings, space ships, or other player
explorable areas. Whilst for natural terrain many suitable automatic
generation solutions exist, interior spaces, particular with some kind of
functionality and utility services, such as power and water, are much
harder to generate usefully. To further complicate the problem most games
benefit from their terrains undergoing some design control to funnel play
in a particular direction. Your challenge is to produce a software tool
that allows the automatic creation of 3d interior spaces, giving some
level of design control to the results, to allow them to be reshaped by a
designer. Results should be viewable in 3d in a package or format of your
choice. While the output is not required to rival the current range of
latest games software, the system should be extensible to improve its
level of output quality.
 
--------
 
Option 3:
 
With this one I wanted to consider the potential in doing something with
the more modern aspects of game development which are arising as concerns
for developers at this point.
 
The two things I was considering were either looking at asking the
students to produce something utilising multi-context rendering, as
supported in Direct12. This would be a very focused technical project, and
there are an almost infinite number of directions and applications this
would take, but generally it would revolve around 'what bits of a render
pipeline can be run together and how do we shuffle things to make it
useful'.
 
The second was the potential of asking students to look at using OpenCL to
parallelise route finding, and character logic, ( or some other essential
game service which is quite heavily intertwined with the turn over of a
running product ).
 
With these options I've been mulling them over and umming and arring about
whether they would be appropriate, or just 'too dry' or involved as they
may well not produce an exiting 'resulting app' given the time restraint
for the project, and are mostly performance related projects.


Creature Dash
In some video games over the years, and most notably of recent in No Man's Sky, attempts have been made to make procedural alien life forms, to give a sense of diversity and variety, yet avoiding the production difficulties of manually creating and animating such a vast range of potential life forms. A common thread in these products solutions has been to come up with a malleable connected graph that can represent a creature out of a small and finite number of given parameterised nodes.
The challenge is to build a platform which provides a number of parameterised 'primitive parts' which may be connected together by users in building block fashion to create automotive creatures with some kind of walk, or propellant movement cycle. The users may also use other provided simple building blocks to construct 'obstacle' courses to commit their creatures to, to explore their success in navigating them, and to see which creature finishes first. Innovations involving sensors, planning, navigation and movement are welcome, but must extend the modular parameterised system, rather than being specific to an individual creature. The only rule is there must be no user interaction with individual creatures during its progress on the course.
VR DJ
Virtual Reality is becoming an increasingly popular medium for computing applications, particularly in entertainment. There is currently a lot of undiscovered potential in VR, especially related to it's use in creativity and manipulation, rather than just in terms of 'experience'. This project aims to explore the more tactile and immediate possible uses for VR, to use a headset and application to create live, responsive audio/visual entertainment, through the use of virtual controls presented to the user, to allow them to mix audio, video and potentially other media presented to an audience in real-time.
VR Minigame BuildSpace
VR has become a serious contender in the field of video games and entertainment in the last few years. There is still limited applications for it in the this area which allow users to build and share their own games in a common virtual environment. Your task in this project will be to build on the backs of some existing technologies to develop such a space, allowing users to build operational games out of primitives, assets and rules, and potentially even collaborating to do so.
.. and slightly more high level
Plan -> VR
This project is about interpreting 2d building plans given in a commonly accepted format, and using this to produce a decorated and lit 3d environment from the plan, allowing walls and faces to be set with various materials, and so rendered as such from a palette of textures and models. The environments should be navigable via a convincing VR interface, potentially with the ability to manipulate and decorate them, from within


==Projects in 2016:==
==Projects in 2016:==

Revision as of 13:56, 2 October 2016

The client is Matt Johnson (mjohnson@frontier.co.uk).

Project proposals for 2017:

Creature Dash

In some video games over the years, and most notably of recent in No Man's Sky, attempts have been made to make procedural alien life forms, to give a sense of diversity and variety, yet avoiding the production difficulties of manually creating and animating such a vast range of potential life forms. A common thread in these products solutions has been to come up with a malleable connected graph that can represent a creature out of a small and finite number of given parameterised nodes.

The challenge is to build a platform which provides a number of parameterised 'primitive parts' which may be connected together by users in building block fashion to create automotive creatures with some kind of walk, or propellant movement cycle. The users may also use other provided simple building blocks to construct 'obstacle' courses to commit their creatures to, to explore their success in navigating them, and to see which creature finishes first. Innovations involving sensors, planning, navigation and movement are welcome, but must extend the modular parameterised system, rather than being specific to an individual creature. The only rule is there must be no user interaction with individual creatures during its progress on the course.


VR DJ

Virtual Reality is becoming an increasingly popular medium for computing applications, particularly in entertainment. There is currently a lot of undiscovered potential in VR, especially related to it's use in creativity and manipulation, rather than just in terms of 'experience'. This project aims to explore the more tactile and immediate possible uses for VR, to use a headset and application to create live, responsive audio/visual entertainment, through the use of virtual controls presented to the user, to allow them to mix audio, video and potentially other media presented to an audience in real-time.


VR Minigame BuildSpace

VR has become a serious contender in the field of video games and entertainment in the last few years. There is still limited applications for it in the this area which allow users to build and share their own games in a common virtual environment. Your task in this project will be to build on the backs of some existing technologies to develop such a space, allowing users to build operational games out of primitives, assets and rules, and potentially even collaborating to do so.


.. and slightly more high level

Plan -> VR

This project is about interpreting 2d building plans given in a commonly accepted format, and using this to produce a decorated and lit 3d environment from the plan, allowing walls and faces to be set with various materials, and so rendered as such from a palette of textures and models. The environments should be navigable via a convincing VR interface, potentially with the ability to manipulate and decorate them, from within


Projects in 2016:

Equity Exchange

Projects in 2015:

Projects 2014:

Projects in 2013:

Contact: Ben Nicholson bnicholson@frontier.co.uk

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