Programming: Teenage Mutant Ninja Puppets

This is a little physics game that I presented at Breakpoint 2007 at Easter. It’s a 96KB executable for Windows.

I had originally designed it for PLAYSTATION®3 and had no intentions to enter at it a demo party, but some friends of mine convinced me to reduce the size from >3.5MB to the required 96KB. Needless to say some features had to go. The nice 2kx2k texture for the font: gone. The detailed texture for the curtains: vanished. The multiple layers of backgrounds larger than the screen: history. Ah well.
So it features:

1. My own physics engine based on the Verlet integrator.
   1. Characters have no predefined animation, you move the head and the movements of the body are procedurally generated accordingly.
   2. The characters have a skeleton made off springs. Hard springs link make up the bones, soft springs link parts like the hands to the feet.
   3. Collisions generate slow-motion and motion-blur, matrix-style. Cheesy, but I like it (:
   4. Cloth animation for the curtain.
2. Weapons: Whip, chains, stick, nunchucks, sword (buggy, looks like a screwdriver).
3. Cell-shading, reflections, shadows, pows – all fake.
4. A.I. Easy to hard, where hard is *hard*. Kicks your ass.
5. Big boss. Literally. It’s twice your size.
6. Story mode.
   1. You start off as a regular Jo and you gotta save the girl.
   2. As you progress through the levels, you get more enemies at once and they get tougher.
   3. Then you fight ninjas, and when you beat them, you become a ninja!
   4. Then comes the big boss.
   5. There’s also a custom mode where you choose the number of human players, CPUs, bosses, weapons, etc…
7. Poor sound effects, music *
8. Keyboard or analog stick controls.
9. Network support, up to 32 players *
10. Menu, mapped on the faces of a cube. It’s simple, but effective, I would do it again.
11. More that I forget, I spent months on it.

Features marked with the * had to be removed from the build to fit in the 96KB version.
Get it from pouet.net. (There’s a better video of it there too).

Updated: I posted the big version here.

See the video after the jump.

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Project: Cardboard stereo amp and speaker

A quick post about an old amp I made 10 odd years ago when I got my first PC (being a Mac fan before that). It’s a 5.25″ stereo amp with volume control to use one of the slots at the front of the PC tower.

I’m still using it as my main means of listening to pandora.com while I’m tinkering. Its most reliable feature is the regular hiss that requires a slap to get rid of it. One day I’ll get around to resolder the contacts inside to make it sound a little nicer, but then it’ll lose a little of its charm.

Strictly speaking, the case is cardboard not the amp, but let’s don’t argue about minor details. There’s a single speaker, so it’s not entirely necessary to have a stereo amp, but that way it’s future proof, right ?

See all the pictures in the flickr set.

Project: Papercraft skull

There is a PDF on skulladay.com to make a great little skull with an articulated jaw.

I made a couple out of ordinary printer paper and a proper nice A4 card. It looks like it would make a great little head for a puppet, or a robot ?

View all the pictures in the flickr set.

Project: 50p coin ring

Inspired by Bre’s Weekend Project again, I decided to spend a night making a ring out of a 50p coin. A night. Right.

In a nutshell, you take a pre-1964 90% silver US half-dollar, hold it on its edge and gently tap it with a light hammer. You rotate the coin as you tap around the edge for an hour or so, until you’ve flattened the thing to a ring shape. Then you drill the middle out, Dremel the sharp bits, polish the surface, and offer it to your WAG as you pretend you had to choose between the ring and a new laptop but you went for the ring.

My first mistake was to use a 1977 heptagon shaped 50p coin, 75% copper and 25% nickel – hardly jeweler quality. I couldn’t have chosen one of the new light 8 gram from 1997, no, I had to pick an old 13.5g block of compact lead. Then I didn’t have a clamp, or a decent drill, or a Dremel. All in all, I spent all week banging on the thing.

I’m very pleased the the result though! It’s nice and smooth on the outside, but rough enough that no-one will ever doubt that I made it myself (: The text “Elizabeth II” and “1977” is still on the inside, along with “pence” (the 50 is half gone, does that make it worth 25p ?)

See all the pictures on the flickr set.

Project: Duct-tape wallet

This is an old entry but seeing as how I’m still using this wallet a year later, I think it’s fair that I should post about it.

Inspired by Bre Pettis in his Weekend Project, I set off to make my own wallet entirely out of Scotch. While the end result looked strangely similar to the one Bre presented, I followed his instructions only loosely. I started off following closely, but quickly found out that it wasn’t as simple as it looked and that I could take some shortcuts. Not all the shortcuts were wise, but it turned out ok in the end.

Project: Oscilloscope clock

I just finished building a great kit I ordered recently from dutchtronix. It’s an AVR kit that outputs the signals to display a working clock on your oscilloscope in X-Y mode. It works wonderfully!

The microcontroller is the Atmega Atmel 168, same as used with the Arduino. That’s really convenient because I have a few spares lying around, so I’m hoping to use this kit and reprogram different microcontrollers to display different things in vector graphics.

Building the kit itself was really easy, all the components are standard. The only little difficulty was to power the thing in the end. It requires a steady 5V and I had to cut a USB cable to get my laptop to provide to power. The site has schematics to build a the power supply, so I’ll get the additional components, they don’t come with the kit. It will be useful to build the serial cable too, to reflash the firmware to the more recent 2.6 version, which has an improved user interface.

The author was kind enough to send me the asm source code. I’m hoping programing the atmel in C using the arduino will be fast enough to make my changes; if not I might need to come up with plan B.

You can order the kit from dutchtronix.com.

See the pictures on the flickr set.

Building the kit in 22 seconds:

Nothing to see yet !

I haven’t started writing yet. In the meantime, see my current projects:

Oscilloscope clock: Google pages.

Bluetooth headphones: Flickr.

More to come soon !

Lionel.