AFRL (Air Force Research Lab) Game Lab

For the past year I have been heading the game lab at the AFRL in Mesa, Arizona. We have been building a few games for training as well as modifying some existing simulations to work with our games. I can't talk too much about the project, but I will explain a little.

Essentially, the lab has 4 different games that can play together in the same scenario. I needed to create processes to generate the same terrain, models, and animations for each game. So, someone in the flight simulator can fire a missile and can kill someone in the UAV simulator. It is a pretty neat system that is being used for many different training applications. The great thing about our networking system is that you can plug in our games alongside full fledged flight sims or real planes and do training exercises. It is pretty neat to see the graphical representation of a real plane show up in your sim, and to see him bomb your target.

Because we have this capability, it is important that our terrain matches real life. So, all of our terrain is generated from NASA elevation data for the world. Our test area is in the mountains north of Nellis Air Force Base right now.

iPhone development

When I got my iPhone, my personal project interests switched to iPhone development. I have two projects currently. Learning Objective-C wasn't too bad, and OpenGL ES is mostly the same as regular OpenGL.

My first game is a DOTA clone, as of right now I have a start menu, a map that can be zoomed or scrolled, and a player that will move along the map to where you touch.

My second game is called Tumbleweed, and I made it in the 3 hour drive going to Christmas at my parents. My brother was riding in the car, so I had him make some sprites for me. It was a fun challenge. You play as a tumbleweed trying to keep tumbling. The levels are auto generated and you dodge things like fences and cacti. Difficulty increase as you go. It was pretty fun to make this game then load it onto the iPhone and let my nephews play it when we arrived. Yay rapid prototyping.