My Work

Here is my first sketch to color concept on phone. I've done some others but this is the one I like most. Tools used Adobe Draw, Adonit pro, sketchBookX

Was trying my hand at drawing baby this was a very quick sketch .. about 15 mins max.. pretty happy with the result.

I've been working on lol-wars for the mobile for a couple of days now. The gameplay is pretty much the same as the original html5 version, but the experience is what i've been working on. The major problem with the html5 version was the use of firebase for handling the communication between the players and also to keep track of who is online. Frankly the code was all messed up and all over the place. I did however learnt how to use angular material and get familiar with the riot's developer api. For the mobile version i've tried doing it with unity, quickly realising that i was spending way too much time without much progress. I was trying to figure out the gameplay flow while trying to figure how it's done and eventually the project got sidelined. I still loved the idea but wasn't able to motivate myself to get it done in unity, so i thought to myself that getting the game done was more important to me than doing it in a particular tech. I needed this ga

Drawing 7-11-2015 i've been using mischief to practice drawing everyday.. i thought ill' keep posting the sketches for my future ref. So i can track the improvement if at all there is any.

If you have used cocosbuilder editor for animating / creating scenes in cocos2d-x you would have realised that there is a lot of boilerplate code, the code that is pretty much always copy paste from something you have done before. 1) Initialising the member variables 2) Adding the member functions 3) Binding the member variables 4) Binding the methods to callbacks. 5) Loading the ccb file. All this is pretty much the same for all the classes  you write for using cocosbuilder ui. I've done a bunch of work before parsing the ccb files but never occurred to me that i could write a script to generate the code. That is exactly what happened when one of my colleagues exclaimed.. this is pretty much same code for every class why dont' we write a script for it.. Well that is exactly what i did and here is the git repo for it.. https://github.com/vkbsb/ccbClassGen The usage is simple and will mostly work. I do believe this can still be improved and would like people to

some random doodles today... looks like i need more practice with the drawing tablet. 

Found a new infinite canvas drawing tool for mac.. i was an avid user of mypaint, an opensource project which provides infinite canvas and is pretty good on windows and linux. On mac you will need to install macports which seems to be a little problematic .. as in i couldnt' get it to work when i tried today so i started looking for a native mac app. I found a bunch of them but the one which is free and is pretty good to use is Mischief. Here is a drawing i made in it, i used wacom bamboo to draw after a while, i used gimp to edit the exported png from mischief. Hope you like it.

Wanted to experiment with simple face and this what I ended up with.

I've been planning on improving the lolwars game so it looks better on the mobile in portrait mode. To get this done we had to redesign the card layout and also think about usability of the design for easily clicking on the stats that matter. So Here are the designs i made for the cards The idea was to try and keep the focus on the stats.. each of these designs has it's own merits but the important thing is to keep trying.. :) Most of the Chinese artists.. use the red and gold combination and i love it, the fourth option is me trying to emulate that same color scheme. I've learnt a bunch of things in inkscape recently and have been using them for the card design. Hopefully ill' get better at this.

Have you ever had a discussion about the game that you just played?..how about that awesome game where you took down a bunch of enemies or turrets..or provided amazing support to your team? Well we have built a small trump card game with the data from the last couple of games that you played in league of legends. We built this for the api challenge that has started recently, asking developers to build some apps using the api they provide to expose the user/game data to other apps. You can see it in action here If you wish to try it out..have a go at it.. Note that this is still a proof of concept with a bunch of use cases still not handled... You should be able to play with your friends without problems though. You can play LoL Wars If you would like to contribute to the project Head to github project

The Godot engine is a pretty good alternative for any of the 2D/3D open source engines out there. One if the features that got me excited about the engine was the Html5 support. With one click of the button you can export the game onto any of the platforms android, iOS, mac, Linux and html5. The only problem... The h5 exporter didn't work right out of the box for 1.0 version of Godot. I looked at it and was unable to figure out what was going on. I searched their forums, Facebook page and the only answer I got was that it was broken and that the devs knew about it. The html5 exporter was based on emscripten . I downloaded the source code and tried to compile for h5. The platforms is described as JavaScript. The compilation was working fine but linking not so much. It would report a lot of unresolved symbols .. The basic things like gd script were not working. I had to look up how scons worked. Had to figure out why the existing build wasn't working. ... Then I came ac

If you have not heard about GoDot game engine,.. you should check it out right away.. godotengine.org Last time, i wrote a blog post about my experience making a simple physics game to GoDot Engine. Though there are a bunch of free options announced during the GDC this year, i thought ill' contribute to the engine. The one piece that is most important for game dev is the pipeline for the engine. One of the most common tools used for 2D animations is Flash. I have been using a library called Super Animation for almost all the games we've made for android at TMG. It's  a  free tool which lets you convert swf files to .sam files. This file can then be loaded in Cocos2Dx using the Open source loader library  https://github.com/raymondlu/super-animation-samples I thought it would be a good idea to port this cpp library to GoDot so that i understand how to write custom modules for the engine. This is the video of the module in action. I have exposed

Last time i basically explained what it felt like using the GoDot engine gui while i was creating the simple game of Dont' touch the spikes. In this post i will cover how i went about setting up the scene and issues i faced. The Scene Setup Coming from cocos2d-x i'm used to Layers, Scenes as container objects to setup a gameplay scene. In GoDot however i was unable to find any such nodes. Instead i just had to use a Node2D . This is pretty much the starting point of the game scene structure. I then added a RigidBody2D named it Player. This was going to be the physics body for dealing with user inputs etc. I then added a Sprite to the RigidBody. If you have used unity you would start wondering where do i add the collisionbox component to the rigid body. Simple answer is .. you dont. You actually have to add a node called CollisionShape2D  as a child to the RigidBody2D to be able to detect physics collisions in the simulations. So the Scene tree looks lik

GoDot is an OpenSource 2D/3D game engine. There isn't any shortage of game engines these days. It's just a matter of preference and getting the pipeline ready for that engine that takes a while. I've been using cocos2d-x for a while now for most of my 2D games. GoDot Engine GUI But Iv'e been thinking about using a GUI based integrated Game engines for future projects so the obvious choice was Unity engine. Its a pretty stable platform and has a bunch of plugins for every thing you want to do, and is pretty much the gold standard for mobile development. There are still a couple of things i still don't like about it.. which includes the lack of control and large build size.. well if something isnt' working.. there is no way for me to figure out if it was my code issue or something wrong in the engine. The community is almost always there to help but its' not a guarantee. I was still searching for an engine that would be easy to use and would give me th

One of my friends had designed a simple 2d character that we wanted to use for a game. As one might expect.. it never got realised. So I thought ill' put up the asset for use by others who might be interested. This is how the animation will Look 135x240 pixels each piece I used blender to create a rigged model with the body parts as rectangles, then texture mapped it.  Animation and rendering were done using blender.  The final step of creating spritesheet was done using Gimp.