[Event] Johannesburg Community Evening - 12th August 2014

Bensonance

This event happens monthly, is free to attend and anyone may speak at the meetup - just comment in the thread below to let us know!

Test games! Talk games! Make games!

When: 18:30 until around 21:30, Tuesday 12th August

Where: Microsoft Campus Bryanston, 3012 William Nicol Drive, Bryanston, Johannesburg

Content
- Introductions
- Community News (5 min)
- Moosebox Screening ~ 2 mins
- Using randomness for effective procedurality - @hermantulleken ~20 mins
- Make Break Create Hackathon report back - @duncanbellsa ~15 mins
-How to get the most out of your job application/portfolio/internship/job shadow - @Elyaradine ~20 mins

- Your presentation/talk/game here

- 5 minute break.

- Focused Feedback (10 mins x 3 slots) [Games that will be shown on the big screen]
- zX: Hyperblast SCREENSHAKE EDITION
- Number Hacker

- Open Demo Floor (Show your games in an informal manner with set up PC's/laptops).

Bring your games and set them up inside the auditorium before and after the meetup!

Beers/Drinks/Pizza afterwards at Col'Cacchio's down the road! Other nearby suggestions are welcome!

If you intend to attend, please indicate so on both the Meetup page and FB event!

Board game prototypes can, will, and have been tested at the post-meetup beers and pizza, so bring along your prototypes!

Also, we need talks! Get on that!

If you get lost or don't know where in the Microsoft campus we are, call me on 083 397 8725

Karuji

Tentative demo slot for zX ;)

Also last time Col'Cacchios was closed when we got there. So wondering if there is going to be a schedule redress so we get there early enough or if we are going to use an alt venue that doesn't really close?

Bensonance

I have added a short 2 min slot for a screening of Moosebox - Mike Scott's pilot animation commissioned by Nickelodeon, that has yet to be made public elsewhere (not entirely game related, but it's short and indirectly related :) ).

@Karuji YAY, zX SCREENSHAKE <3.

Yeah I was going to mention that now: I don't think we can really force the meetup to be shorter as that isn't really fair to people who are only there for the meetup. I think I just need to be stricter on the time limits (let a lot of people go over time last meetup) and we should be okay :).

Also, I think @TasticLuc might be keen on giving a talk on 'An Intro to 2D art'. Having an art oriented talk might be a pretty great change of pace :).

Karuji

@Bensonance I could totally counter and say that some of us are only there to hang out with people ;)

I think being strict and forcing people to stick to a time limit is a rather fair thing. It forces people presenting to put more effort into their talks so that they make sure that they cover everything they want to show in the time they have been allotted.

Also don't talk to me about screenshake. Busy working on a new type and might have to rewrite the GM camera system to get it working just right >.>

Thelangfordian

We would like to demo our game Number Hacker (working title) :D I will be uploading it to the forum soon as well.

Kcoolthanksbye! :D

hermantulleken

I'd like to do a talk on randomness (or rather, non-randomness... ways to use randomness more cleverly for procedural techniques), in the spirit of this, this and this. Although it will be slightly technical, I'll keep it accessible for designers (I hope).

Bensonance

@Thelangfordian Cool!

@hermantulleken Woah that sounds really awesome! :D As a designer, I would love to hear about that :).

Related: This video on how No Man's Sky works as procedural rather than random might be of interest to those who are as excited for Herman's talk as I am :).

duncanbellsa

I've got some of the hackathon videos (finally) - so I'd be happy to show those :)

Bensonance

@duncanbellsa Cool! Do you maybe want to do a talk about it too? Talking about making games like you did at the hackathon? Just some advice on how to design them; what hardware to use; and what people to team up with etc. ? :)

duncanbellsa

@Bensonance Well I can give a brief breakdown of what I did, but the videos explain the process pretty well...?

Also, the introduction about the hackathons kinda explain the process and how it all works :)

Elyaradine

I haven't prepared anything, but if people are keen I can talk for a bit about how to get the most out of your job application/portfolio/internship/job shadow. I mean, I thought this stuff was obvious, but the number of people who've been doing it really badly is a lot more than I expected... :/

Stray_Train

@Elyaradine yes please!

Bensonance

@duncalbellsa Cool, cool - so 10 mins maybe?

@Elyaradine Cool! How long a slot you want? :)

Elyaradine

I really only have two main points I want to make, though I have a few anecdotes and examples that I believe will be both entertaining and informative. I'm sure I'll be under 20 minutes.

duncanbellsa

@Bensonance - Let's make it 15 :). Theres some rad videos!

Bensonance

@Eyaradine Great - 20 mins it shall be!

@duncanbellsa Cool :)

Thelangfordian

Thanks for a great meetup everyone! @Elyaradine, @duncanbellsa, and @hermantulleken your guys' talks were really enriching. Everyone else, thanks for the feedback on NumberHacker, I will have a thread up soon :)

This community ROCKS!!

hermantulleken

Cool meetup everyone :)

For anyone who wants the slides of my talk; here they are:

http://www.code-spot.co.za/downloads/Randomness.pdf

Tuism

Rad meetup everyone! Really fantastic stuff, thanks @hermantulleken for the methods of random that I *know* I should know but never really was able to put into words. Or code :P

Thanks @elyaradine for the really good tips for anyone really - not just interns! What Matt said (sorry I'm gonna stop forum handling everyone, I prefer names) is so very true - people should be aware that they're putting themselves in the public, so just... common courtesy is important :)

Jonno, are you putting your lovely hand-written prezzo online? :)

Duncan, Hackathon is awesome, I've heard about it and I knew most of the faces in the videos, hahah :P I should try join in the next one :)

dreampunchboy

Yeah great meetup. Thanks for taking the effort of preparing and presenting @hermantulleken & @elyaradine.

Thelangfordian

@hermantulleken thanks for the slides. Is it possible to put up implementation examples of stuff you guys did for generating some of the patterns? If not it is cool, I am just curious :)

Elyaradine

@Tuism: Um. I can, but I feel that my presentations are pretty useless without my commentary. I usually like to put pretty pictures (missing last night because very fast prep) and things on the slides, and have the bulk of the information in my talking, but it does limit the usefulness of sharing slides.

But to summarize:

• Each piece in your portfolio should be evidence that (1) you understand the fundamentals required for your discipline, (2) you understand the game-specific implementation of your discipline, or (3) you are a really good fit for the team. If a piece brings any of those into doubt, then best leave it out.
  
• Make it as easy as possible to get to the work you actually want to show. If you have a portfolio website, put your work on the home page to save visitors from having to dig around for the link to what they want to see. Don't use "welcome" pages.
  
• Be professional in all correspondence. Respect peoples' time.
  
• There is a lot to be learnt simply by observing. People have work to do, so unless they're offering to sit with you, best not to disturb them, and save your questions for when they're taking a break.
  
• Sit with people during lunch breaks and learn from their informal conversation. You can learn a lot about peoples' standards of living, income, general job satisfaction, and other things related to their career just by hanging around.
  
• Come prepared with questions.
  
• I don't even look at your CV until I've seen that your portfolio is good. (Note: Much larger studios, where they have HR departments and thousands of applicants, do however look at CVs as an initial filter before passing the portfolios onto the art directors and whatnot.)

hermantulleken

@Thelangfordian A lot is the stuff is already on my blog or Dev.Mag (so it may not be new to you):

Arbitrary distributions

• http://code-spot.co.za/2008/09/21/generating-random-numbers-with-arbitrary-distributions/ (1D)
  
• http://code-spot.co.za/2009/04/15/generating-random-points-from-arbitrary-distributions-for-2d-and-up/ (2D and higher)
  
• http://code-spot.co.za/2009/04/28/generating-random-integers-with-arbitrary-probabilities/ (Integers)
  

Correlation

• http://devmag.org.za/2009/04/25/perlin-noise/ (Fractal noise)
  
• http://devmag.org.za/2009/05/03/poisson-disk-sampling/ (Poisson disk sampling)
  
• http://code-spot.co.za/2009/04/09/cellular-automata-for-simulation-in-games/ (cellular automata)
  

Then some examples with colors and steering and texture generation.

----

That leaves some examples from our 30 Games in 30 Days games that make heavy use of our Grids library, so I won't post the full code. But the stuff below should give you the basics.

The basic idea for making a symmetric point set is to do the following:

var pointSet = points.SampleRandom(n); //Choose n points randomly
var reflectedSet  = pointSet.Select(p => p.ReflectX()); //make a new set where each point is reflected about the X axis
var symmetricSet = pointSet.Append(reflectedSet);  //Add the sets together.

Something similar can be done with rotation and so on (you will need more sets if you want to have more rotations than 2). In practice we select which thing to do on another random number.

----

Making wavy curves is a little bit complicated. In 2D, the basic idea is this:

var signal = amplitude1 * sin(frequency_1 * t + timeOffset_1) + ... + amplitude_n * sin(frquency_n * t + timeOffset_n);
var x = t * speed;
var y = signal;

Where all values are chosen randomly within a range.

When you go to 3D, the idea becomes a little tricky - the basic idea is to calculate a z based on time using a formula something like this:

float x = signal * cos(t * another_frequency_1);
float y = signal * sin(t * another_frequency_1);
float z = t*speed;

(This revolves your signal in 3D around a circle)

To make it more interesting, you can split signals into separate frequencies, and revolve them at different "other" frequencies.

(Once you have the basics implemented and you can be around with the formulas, you will get a good understanding of how these work).

It's useful to know as many parametric equations as you can, this gives you an intuitive understanding of how they are constructed, and you can combine them for your own effects: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parametric_equation

Here is another cool curve book.

Thelangfordian

Thanks @hermantulleken that is awesome. I feel a little dumb because I did statistics and advanced maths for 3 years, but never got to do any sort of implementation, so just want to see examples to refresh the memory banks. That is plenty of content! Wow! I think we need to add your info above to a sticky or some such :P

hermantulleken

@Thelangfordian

@Elyaradine and I was actually talking about stats afterwards too. I think it's great background for game development (and indeed, life). You are lucky!