Explorer: The game I worked on when I was a teenager
I’ve been a professional game developer since 1997. I’ve shipped at least 10 games at around 10 different studios over the past 21 years, and now I’m living the dream as a Senior Technical Artist at Blizzard Entertainment. However, my first industry job wasn’t the first game I worked on. History Way back in 1987, when I was 14 years old, I downloaded a shareware game called “Explorer”, which was a pretty simple PC clone of the old Apple game “Wizardry” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizardry). The game consisted of 6 UI panes, one pane was a faux-3D view of the dungeon corridor ahead of you, one was an inventory list, and a few of the panes had player statistics. The content was generic D&D fare, and the gameplay was what we would call rogue-like today, you wander through a dungeon and you either escape or die. Dying erased your character. After playing my…
Creating an angle-driven node network in Maya using native nodes
We’re going to make a cone and some spheres. As the cone’s Y-axis points toward each sphere, the sphere will scale. Make a poly cone (driver). Rotate it 90 in X so it’s “pointing” along the xz (“ground”) plane. Create a vectorProduct node with the “Vector Matrix Product” operation, to isolate the driver node’s matrix . We can set the input1 vector to [1,0,0] to return the first row (x axis) of the matrix in the output attribute, [0,1,0] to return the second row (y axis), and [0,0,1] to return the third row (z axis). To get the fourth row of the driver’s worldMatrix, I recently found out that one can use a VectorProduct node with input1 set to [0,0,0] to isolate the translation row. (thanks @yantor) Make some targets: poly spheres in a circle around the origin on the XZ plane, between 0 and 10 units away from the…
Welcome
Rebuilding my website.