Samuel Batista

XCOM: Enemy Unknown

CrazySam — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 18:48:07 +0000

I can’t share any information on this recently announced title yet. Visit the Game Informer’s coverage for all available public information.

Job Title: User Interface Programmer
Responsibilities: UI Programming
Release: TBA

Section 8: Prejudice

CrazySam — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 20:21:30 +0000

My first entry into the world of triple-A video game development: a First Person Shooter with a heavy focus on online play that aims to please the hardcore shooter fan with a deep, team based combat system and a few unique mechanics.

http://www.warisprejudice.com/

Launch Trailer

Announcement Trailer

Job Title: Junior Programmer
Responsibilities: UI Programming, Online Matchmaking, Bug Fixin, Post Release Damage Control
Release: Apr 20, 2011

The game was developed using the Unreal Engine and Scaleform for UI, so I got the chance to get quite familiar with Unreal Script and Actionscript. I’ve also had my hand on Invites, Matchmaking Queries, Presence, and other online related functionality, on both PS3 and Xbox architectures.

ATOM

CrazySam — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 23:38:49 +0000

ATOM is a top down shooter where the player controls the ship with the mouse and controls the direction that bullets get shot by rotating nodes that float around the player.

This was my first complete game project. It was written in C++ with DirectX for graphics and FMOD for sound.

The entire game was designed, prototyped and produced in just over two weeks.

Flash Bitmap and Spectrum Experiments

CrazySam — Fri, 14 May 2010 20:54:03 +0000

About the Experiments

This was my first attempt to learn Action Script and Flex.

I began by researching and implementing a way to do double buffered rendering directly on a Canvas (Flex Container). Objects and states would render directly into a BitmapData buffer and when the render loop was done I copied every pixel from the BitMapData into the Canvas.

This has a disadvantage, you can’t use Flash’s display classes (Image, Sprite, Movie Clip) to draw your objects, you have to do it all manually, pixel by pixel. Loading and displaying images as bitmaps wasn’t complicated, but it made operations such as rotating and scaling very difficult (because I had to implement them myself).

However, this worked in my favor, because I originally implemented the Star-Field state by scaling bitmap images of 20*20 pixels. This brought my framerate down to about 20. But then I decided to try to draw the spheres myself manually and see what the performance difference was. I implemented a quick “drawCircle” function and my framerate shot straight to 100.

Working on the pixel level taught me some important skills: how to manipulate pixel data with matrices (to scale and rotate), and how I can get a massive performance boost by doing my own pixel coloring, instead of using images (which is essential in flash).

Full Source code is available for viewing and downloading.

Note: This is a Flex Project, so you will need to have the Flex SDK to be able to compile it.

FlashDevelop Plugins

CrazySam — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 20:26:12 +0000

Intro to why I made these: TODO

Find Files Plugin

Find files in Project or in a specific Folder.
Configurable Keyboard Short (go to plugin settings): Alt+ Shift + O
Powerful string metrics API to get accurate results even if word is misspelled

Simple Perforce Plugin

Now with automatic checkout of read only files!

Simple Perforce integration with FlashDevelop.
Easy to use – all options in right click context menu.
Supports Open for Edit, Diff File Against Depot, Add to Source Control and Revert commands.

Be sure to check each plugins settings before usage.
Go to “Tools->Program Settings->Plugin Name” or hit F10 in FlashDevelop.

Audio Analyzing Tool

CrazySam — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 18:45:21 +0000

Late in the program, in our Engine Development class we are given a research assignment of our choice. Many people tend to focus on advanced tech, such as Normal Mapping or Terrain Tessellation, but being a game programmer and a designer I chose to research something that could enhance the immersion of the player. I’ve been fascinated with Audio Integration in games so I decided to research Real-Time Beat Detection.

My goal was to create a system that would allow the designer to integrate audio and gameplay in a way that the gameplay wouldn’t necessarily be restricted by the audio, as is the case with many rhythm-based games.

This tool is a C# music player that uses FMOD for audio playback and data gathering and OpenGL for rendering. The beat detection is very basic and doesn’t work very well, I ran out of time before I could implement a more sophisticated Beat Detection Algorithm.

However, this program contains several impressive features:

C# audio playback using Managed FMOD
Fully Multi-threaded Audio Sampling
C# OpenGL implementation using Tao Framework

My greatest achievement in this project is the multi-threaded system I implemented to keep the program running at a stable frame rate while doing processor heavy operations with the audio data (FFT processing, Beat Detection).

Check out the provided documentation for implementation details.

Digital Warfare

CrazySam — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 08:32:41 +0000

Please visit www.lucky5games.com for more information.

Siege Drummers

CrazySam — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 08:47:49 +0000

Siege Drummers was another class project. This time we were put in a team of three and we were told to create a game that had a unique control scheme.

We decided to create a game that would use the Rock Band drum kit in a unique way. The goal of Siege Drummers is to hit a combination of drum pads (buttons) faster than your opponent.

I programmed the user interface, the core gameplay of the game, the FMOD sound wrapper and the animation system. I also wrote the majority of the documentation of the game: the design document and manual.

The game took two months to complete. One month for pre-production and tool production and one month for game production.

Note: There are 5 people in the credits because twice during the development process we got “team-swapped”, which means a member of our team switches with a member of another team for a week. The fact that we had two of our team members (myself included) swapped and still completed the project on time and relatively bug free shows our commitment and ability to adapt.

Our teachers created the “wheel of misfortune” to simulate real-world setbacks during the course of development. Every team must spin the wheel twice during the final month of development and out of all possible misfortunes getting “team-swapped” is by far the worst.

WARNING: The game requires an Xbox360 controller or the Rock Band drum kit to work.

OpenGL Translating Textures Demo

CrazySam — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 00:23:20 +0000

New York Matrix was a little tech demo I created for my OpenGL class.

This project shows my greatest skill: creativity. I decided to load a full model of a city from Google 3D Warehouse, fully replace its textures with matrix textures, and animate the textures.

This project is very much a hack, since all textures move synchronously instead of having their own individual scroll speed and direction. But even hacked, it looks pretty cool.

2D Animation Editor

CrazySam — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 06:10:00 +0000

This tool was created to make the animations for the Siege Drummers game. It took me two weeks to create it.

This project was created with C# and a C# implementation of Direct 3D that mimics the way the game renders.

This tool isn’t portable because it was designed with the Siege Drummers architecture in mind. However this tool is a good example of simple, yet powerful UI design.