Blog

The Game Developers Conference 2009 is near and I am proud to announce that my session proposal has been approved! I will be doing a 60-minute lecture in the Programming track on the subject of:

Dynamic Walking with Semi-Procedural Animation
(Follow the link to see the session description on the GDC website.)

I am honored to be presenting my work in the company of the great minds of the game industry at such an early point in my career. This is the second time I am going to GDC and I am truly looking forward to it.

Updated Interactive Demo
Now, since I'm updating the blog anyway, I have thrown in the latest version of the uneven terrain demo that I have used as a testing bed for the Locomotion System. New in this version is a coyote, as well as lots of visualization options that you can play around with to get an idea of the inner workings of the system. This is the same version that was used for the Video Demo 2 of the Locomotion System in the previous post.

Instructions for the demo:

Command	Keyboard	Gamepad
Walking-direction	arrow keys	analog stick 1
Walking-speed	shift	-
Facing-direction	W, A, S, D	analog stick 2
Jump	space	button A
Time slow down / speed up	numpad - / +	-

You can control the characters with either the keyboard or with a game pad. With a game pad, such as an XBox 360 controller, the direction and speed can be controlled precisely with ease, while independently controlling facing direction with the secondary stick.


In this demo the terrain can be dynamically controlled with the sliders at the top. You can create stairs, slopes, and various combinations. The terrain will reflect the changes once the character has walked a little distance to the left or right. Enable manual mode to control the character yourself, as described above. This demo uses four animations for walking (forward, backwards, and sideways) and also four for running.

In other news
Besides having my session at GDC accepted, a few other notable things have happened recently:

• I have moved from Aarhus to Copenhagen (both are cities in Denmark; Copenhagen is the capital) together with my girlfriend.
  
• I have started working at Unity Technologies, a company making an extremely cool game engine and authoring tool called Unity.
  
• I am still working on finishing my Master thesis about the locomotion system ... it will hopefully be done soon!
  

That's it for now. I hope to see you at GDC!

Labels: carreer, demo, gdc, locomotion

Posted by Rune Skovbo Johansen at 10:06 PM   1 Comments

And now for something completely different. Well, slightly different anyway.

In May last year I was Lead Game Programmer on the one-month student game production Flipside. The game has just one level, but it has a unique premise accompanied with a fantastic and crazy artistic style. Read more about it on playflipside.com or get my own angle on it on my website.

It ended up winning of the 12 Independent Games Festival 2008 Student Showcase Awards and we went to GDC in San Francisco to show it off at the IGF booths. (Note that we live across the Atlantic Ocean in Denmark.) We didn't win the Best Student Game Award though.

However, we got a lot of attention. Since a video interview with us have just been put online by Noesis Interactive, I'll use this opportunity to just mention some of the places where Flipside has been in the media.

ModDB.com / Noesis ModTV Interview June 2008 The popular games and modding site ModDB.com features a video interview with Thomas Pilgaard and Rune Skovbo Johansen about the making of FLIPSIDE. Click the image to view the full video interview

Politiken (DK) Section 2, May 15 2008 The daily newspaper Politiken has an almost full page article about the essense of nordic games, and Flipside is used as a prime example, with two big screenshots from the game. Click the image to view the full article

ModCenter.com Interview February 29, 2007 ModCenter, "your one-stop resource for all your game development needs", features an interview with me about the making of Flipside. Open ModCenter interview in a new window

Games for Windows (US & CA) Issue 15, February 2008 US and Canada magazine "Games for Windows - The Official Magazine" has a half page review of FLIPSIDE in their February issue. Sorry for the poor quality scan. Click the image to view the full article

PC ZONE (UK) Issue 184, September 2007 UK magazine PC ZONE has a full page review of FLIPSIDE in their september issue. PC ZONE is sold in about 40.000 copies monthly. "Flipside is such a highly stylized and impressive mod, with such a simple and original premise, that it almost feels wrong to be playing it for free" Click the image to view the full article

PC ACTION (German) September 2007 German magazine PC ACTION has a half page review of FLIPSIDE in their september issue. PC ACTION is sold in about 80.000 copies monthly. "WERTUNG: SEHR GUT" Click the image to view the full article

PC GAMES (German) September 2007 The magazine PC GAMES has a half page review of FLIPSIDE in their september issue and they have FLIPSIDE included on their cover DVD. PC GAMES is sold in about 175.000 copies monthly. Click the image to view the full article

ModDB.com June 2007 The popular games and modding site ModDB.com features an article on FLIPSIDE in their REVIEWS section. "The game, quite simply, looks amazing. Everything about it, from the textures that look pasted onto cardboard cut-outs to the manic, false grin on the main character's face, makes FLIPSIDE infinitely more interesting to look at than the standard mods we see these days. When I first flipped the world over to see the darker perception of reality, I literally gasped out loud. It's a magic moment and one that everyone should experience." Click to view the full article: Open ModDB.com review in a new window

Ok, nuff' ego-tripping for now...

Labels: carreer, flipside, press, video

Posted by Rune Skovbo Johansen at 11:13 PM   0 Comments

My website runevision.com has been online since 1998. Now, ten years later, runevision blog is started to make it simpler for me to communicate developments in ongoing projects and other things in my life.

For a start, the blog will mainly be centered around my master thesis project on Adaptive Animation for Character Locomotion, which I have just begun working on. For the next half a year, this blog will be a place for myself and others to track the progress of the project, see the ongoing results, read about the thoughts behind the technical details, and roll eyes at the occasional silly remarks.

The master thesis marks the end of my education in Multimedia with specialization in Games Programming at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. After my graduation, I am looking forward to a carreer in the game industry as a games programmer. Well, enough background - you can always go to runevision.com for more. The blog is now officially open.

Labels: carreer, locomotion, meta

Posted by Rune Skovbo Johansen at 10:37 PM   1 Comments