Captain Kaboom: Lost in space

Sometime back in december, our research team came across a blog post (http://www.screenjunkies.com/movies/movie-lists/10-best-space-documentaries/) that we follow. It detailed numerous documentaries on space and celestial objects. Such literature yields a lot of ideas for game designs. We stumbled across numerous objects that could be used to make a decent game out of it. There after, surfaced the angry birds space game that further refined our thinking of how a game in space would be made. So we created a focus group comprising of engineers, designer and illustrators to work out details of this new idea.

Selecting objects for a game is never an easy job but its best accomplished by level designers. We included a few level designers in the team who would identify the type of objects required to create a physics based puzzle game that would intrigue the user to waste more and more of his office time. Our engineers created technology demonstrations and proof of concepts using the objects described in the technical documents.  Though still work in progress, you will be able to see some ideas and objects implemented for our upcoming game.

Summarily saying, spaceships, aliens, planets with gravitational fields, black holes that eat up even planets, asteroids, shooting projectiles and laser beams, randomly appearing worm holes that teleport you to the other level, alien planets with their own defense shields, levels where you cannot fire a single round so as to complete the level in a stealthy way, bonuses and artifacts floating in the space, collecting fuel and other resources for the endeavor and a lot more. This and more is being worked up at CubixLabs Inc. and in near future we intend for you to make free time, fun time through our games.

Videos: link1 link2 link3 link4 link5 link6 link7

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Civics Lab Project for Secretbuilders

Working at Folio3 exposed me to high end clients who brought in requirements that are unique and rare. ‘Your place’ is one such client.

Game Play

The project requirements dictated that a game be built that will put the player in-charge as a congress-person and expose him to civic issues and problems. Consequently, teaching him/her about civic responsibilities and roles. When the game starts the player chooses an avatar that depicts him and selects an adviser who would guide him through the game. The city placed under his responsibility is Philadelphia and the city is divided into sections, much like puzzle pieces. When the player clears a puzzle piece, a new one unlocks. There are 3 types of puzzle pieces: Urban, Rural and Suburban. All with relevant problems and tasks to that region.When a user addresses a problem, the adviser presents advise relevant to each option the user selects. Upon selection of a solution to a problem, impact analysis is displayed. There are 4 indices that are impacted by a decision: Money, Health, Safety and Security. All the aforementioned indices are accumulated to calculate the ‘Popularity’ of the congress-person (the user).

Project Members

Maliha Khan – Project Manager

Muhammed Ali Khan – Flash Developer (Myself)

Khulood Ali – Java Developer

Owais Usmani – Quality Assurance Engineer

Salman Talpur – Graphic Designer

Techincal Details

The game was deployed at SecretBuilders and the maps used came from YouCity. A number of APIs were used in the development of the game: TweenLite, TextAnim and Adobe Serialization. The game engines design was based on a derivative of Finite State Machine. Some code was reused from the SecretBuilders API as that was part of the contract.The Flash interface communicated with a Java-based web service that maintains the game state for each user. User avatars and other information came from the SecretBuilder platform. To reward the user some SecretBuilders mini-games were used as well.

Snapshots