iPhone App - Simple iNotes

Finally I've decided to put my first iPhone app on App Store for FREE. Actually this has been done about half year ago but I didn't feel like putting it on App Store because I don't think my app is good enough to compete with others :(

Anyway, since my app now is on App Store, it is better for me to show other people by just giving them the download link and let them try out themselves. It is easier for my portfolio too :)

Simple iNotes is an iPhone note which allows you to manage your note in 1 place.

Key Features:

- Create different folders to categorize your notes.

- Photo notes allow you to import photo from your photo library and add your own captions/notes on it.

- Protect your notes by enabling the password protected.

*Screenshot from App Store

Here is a video tutorial teaching you on how to use Simple iNotes:

Get Simple iNotes here:

Hope you enjoy using this app :D

Spaceship Fighter - A Simple Shooting Game

Hello guys, after been through some series of beginner tutorials of Unity. I've came out a simple spaceship shooting game.

All the arts and models are taken from somewhere else.

It's not a fun game but it is my first experience of working in Unity!

All the scripting was done in C# :)

Here's are some screenshots:

*Game screenshot

*Player spaceship exploded (Particle effect)

*Lose screen

Video demo:

If you are interested to try out this simple game, you can download here:

Spaceship Fighter for Windows

Spaceship Fighter for Mac

Hope you enjoy :)

Unity - Game Development Tool

Recently I've been searching around about Unity and found out that it is really a great game development tool because it provides a lot of features which can simplified your works as you developing games.

I would say it is almost like a game engine because it handles collision, physics, audio, and rendering. Besides that, it does provide scripting ability (C# and Javascript) which allows you to code your own behaviors and apply it on your games. Cool, isn't it?

In terms of publication, it supports almost all platforms like Windows, Macintosh, iPhone, Android, Wii, PS3, and Xbox 360. The only thing which doesn't support is Open-Source OS like Linux. There are 2 versions of Unity which is Unity Standard and Unity Pro. For the product features comparison you can visit the following link:

Unity: License Comparison

It is not a tool just to develop some normal casual games but it can be developed for AAA games. Although it may not be as powerful as Unreal Engine but I believe Unity might be catching up in future!

Finally, I would like to say:

I Love Unity!

First Investigation Team: Intruder

Finally, I have finished developed another game by using XNA!

Basically it is a 2D real-time strategy game. All you need to do is conquer/eliminate your enemy bases.

This is my first time to develop a game with AI. The AI that's I've included is Decision Making + Finite State Machines. Although the AI is still not smart enough but hope that in future if I have free time I will try to improve it :)

Again, since I'm not an artist, so what I did was using google to find images and edit in Adobe Photoshop. Hope that you won't mind about it.

Enough of talk, here are some screenshots:

*Main menu screenshot

*In game screenshot 1

*In game screenshot 2

*Pause screeen

Video demo:

Download link here:

First Investigation Team: Intruder

PS: You need to have XNA Runtime Redistributable 4.0 and .NET Framework 4.0 installed before you can run this game.

Shader - Normal Mapping

Normal mapping. I guess this is one of the important technique in game development. It can gives u a high details of an model without the need of high poly model. Sounds cool isn't it? Anyway, Computer graphics always cool!

Before you can do a good normal mapping, you need to have a good normal map. Question.... how do I create normal map? Easy! Model a really high poly and detailed model, and generate normal map from it first (I believe most 3D software did provide the function of generating normal map) After you have generated the normal map, reduce your poly count until it fits your game :)

The concept behind normal mapping is, do the lighting calculation at Tangent Space aka Texture Coordinate Space. I don't think my explanation will be good. If you wish to know more about this, try to look at this page or this page.

In short, you need to find out TBN matrix and convert your lighting direction to the tangent space by multiplying with the TBN matrix.

TBN matrix is (Tangent, Binormal, Normal) matrix.

Here are some screenshots:

*Original model without applying normal mapping

*Same model after applying normal mapping

Download program demo here

Key Control:

1: Without applying normal mapping

2: Applying normal mapping

Shader - Toon Shading

Toon shading! Sounds interesting isn't it?

Well, basically toon shading is another simple technique which you can be easily done in shader. (I mean a basic toon shading. If you want to do advanced toon shading, of cause it is difficult)

Since mostly toon shading gives you an unrealistic lighting. Basically it just has about 3 or 4 bands of lighting. So what you need to do is clamping the lighting value based on the look-up table.

What is the look-up table? Well, it just store the pre-defined value which you are going to use for the lighting clamping. Which mean, if your look-up table has only 3 values. You final result of the whole model (lighting) will only have 3 values as well.

For example:

The lighting value for that particular pixel is 0.4f, by using look-up table:

if (light > 0.8f)

light = 1.3f;

else if (light > 0.5)

light = 0.9f;

else

light = 0.5f;

From the pseudocode above, you can see that, no matter what value you get from the calculation, it will convert to either one of the 3 pre-defined values.

Here are some screenshots:

*Original model

*After applying toon shading (You can see that there are only 3 intensity level of light on the model)

*Toon shading with outline

If you wish to know more about toon shading, you can wiki it.

Download program demo here

Key control:

1: Default model

2: Toon shading

3: Toon shading with black outline

4: Change the background color to white/black

Shader - Per-Pixel Lighting

Actually I just started to learn shader about 1 month. Finally I have something to show :)

First I would like to show is per-pixel lighting which I've done by myself after reading The Cg Tutorial. It is an awesome book and recommended to all beginners in shader programming.

Per-pixel lighting is simple, basically it is like per-vertex lighting but instead of putting all the codes in vertex shader, u put it in pixel shader. Well, in order to optimize the code, remember do all the position calculation in vertex shader first and only pass them to the pixel shader so that pixel shader don't need to do so many works.

Simple ey?

The only thing you need to know is, the theory of lighting in computer graphics!

Basically the equation of lighting is:

lighting = emissive + ambient + diffuse + specular

(Actually the emissive term doesn't seems like really important)

The formula above is the most basic lighting formula. Of cause there are more like adding attenuation. I haven't try that personally so I'm not going to talk more about that yet.

Enough of talking, here are some screenshots:

*Ambient light only

*Diffuse light only

*Specular light only

*Ambient + Diffuse + Specular (Facing the light)

*Ambient + Diffuse + Specular (Doesn't facing the light)

Video Demo:

Download program demo here

Key control:

1: All lighting added together

2: Ambient light only

3: Diffuse light only

4: Specular light only