ZombieTycoon & Molehill Session at FlashGamingSummit

ZombieTycoon & Molehill Session at FlashGamingSummit: "

I, Speaker

This weekend I was a speaker in a conference for the very first time.

And then, monday at this one

I must say, it was damn exiting. Event more when it’s to talk about the very first game using the a technology that people has waited for years.

Adobe has even used our project as the featured  game using Molehill for it’s official beta release.

The session was shared between Luc beaulieu (CTO) and me, both representing Frima Studio.

My session was about many techniques we used to create ZombieTyccon and how we managed to work with the limitations defined in Molehill.

I though it could be great to share this to everyone.

The session

download the Slides (powerpoint)

The videos

There was many videos in the slides, so now they are all on YouTube.

Here is a little demo of hundreds of zombies walking around in the level 3. (If you wonder why they are so strong, well… I wanted them to stay alive until the end of the level! )

 

But here is the real way to kill zombies. First, get guns, then, kill em!

 

And again the level 3

 

Here is the particle system. You can see smoke, shells, fire, even the health bars are particles.

 

In my slides I’m talking about the possibility of rendering 16K particles per draw call. This is what it looks like.

 

Thats is our character animation system. It use the DualQuaternion technique, with animation blending (transition). In this demo, notice the characters are changing animation multiple time and it’s always very smooth.

 

We also support dynamic lighting to help creating great ambiance.

You can see the influence of the light on the fence, the ground, the avatars,  all objects near the barrels. You can also see that this dynamic light is using a very smooth falloff.

 

In this video, the machine gun is blinking a dynamic light at every gun shot. You can see the influence on the avatars, the ground and many other objects.

 

While using dynamic lighting is heavy on the GPU, using fake volumetric lighting is a lot more lightweight. To create this, we set a couple particles under the streetlights and the police’s cars lights

 

Again, in order to make the game run faster, we used fake projected shadows. Using particle aligned to the ground, we cast shadow behind dynamic object depending on light position and intensity, we stretch the particle to fit.

 

Finaly, this is the the gameplay of the first level (tutorial)

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