Project Description:
Kamarihn Rally is a racing game project I began in November of 2006. My purpose for this project was to create a racing game that was rooted in the world of physics, but didn't punish the player for not knowing every detail about how to "drift" a car like the pros. I built the GUI, and scripted the input scanning, and controls for the player. I used 3D Game Studio, a middleware engine as my rendering base, and a freeware physics engine called "Newton Game Dynamics" to guide the car's physical interactions in the game world.

What went right:
Initially I had problems with my camera system because I was just modifying the transforms of the camera by multiplying them by sin and cosin values. I switched to a vector based camera system and got much better results.
Using a 3rd party physics engine let me rapidly integrate physics into the game world without too much work and time. It took me less than 2 weeks to get a working proof of concept that seemed convincing to most people I showed the demo to.

What went wrong:
Using a 3rd party physics solution has its pros and cons. One benefit was that I was able to rapidly prototype a physics based car. However this also gave me problems with the game engine's collision system, in particular, mesh to mesh collision. The mesh collision system is based on an instruction called "c_move" which is a vector based movement system. My car moved based on "forces". Since I wasn't using c_move to generate my vehicle's movement, the engine could not detect mesh to mesh collisions (although collision with BSP geometry seemed fine). To get around this, I had to create a rigid body "cube", make it non-renderable, and match it's transforms to any NPC vehicles to get collision. It's a nasty hack, but it provided basic collision and didn't look half bad in action.

Technology:
- 3D Game Studio Engine
- Newton Game Dynamics Physics Engine

Download video (right click, save as target):
- Video 1 (Proof of Concept)

Project Description:
I began writing the design document for Spirits of Arion in June 2005. This was my first real game project. It's an action RPG based in the Zelda/Kingdom Hearts style of gaming. Programming the camera, and movement system was a real "treat" and exercise. I did 95% of the modeling, and level/environmental design. My good friend Sergio Sykes helped me with the animation of characters including friendly NPCs, and enemy characters. I did all the GUI, Camera, and movement scripting. I also was able to integrate some basic A.I for enemy NPCs.

What went right:
This being my first game project, I think it was a good experience to start off with a middleware engine that had such a well developed toolset to work with. The scripting, modeling, and world building environments were very user friendly. It allowed me to learn a lot about how to build a simple asset creation pipeline.

What went wrong:
There was a lot of inexperience on my part entering this project. A lot was learned by taking a project like this head on, but in retrospect, I think a 3D action RPG might have been a bit too vast of a project to undertake as a "first time" game project. The lessons learned I consider invaluable however.