Our team just finished the teaser for Kid the World Saver:

If you’ll be at GDC look for us at the IGF pavilion.

Its such an honor to have made it into the student showcase with Kid the World Saver. There were some really cool and high quality things submitted this year and I was sweating bullets till the very end.

Just from USC there was some fun stuff like Mike Rossmassler’s Flora, Andre Clark’s multi-screened Minor Battle, and Jamie Antonisse’s Spectre which offers some real innovations in interactive storytelling.

I’m still trying to process it all. I just hope we can have a strong showing at GDC.

Over at the University of Rochester’s Synchronization group I did a bit of work on the multithreading in games issue. Michael Scott and team have been working on a Transactional Memory system called RSTM. The whole goal of TM is to try to make multithreading easy by giving coders easy to use deadlock free atomic sections. The result of my work was Swarm, the scalable multithreaded game engine.

The results offered by swarm also led to a conference paper that is accessable from Michael Scott’s website.

I’ve just completed a prototype of a digital version of Legos. There were a series of interesting design challenges associated with making the transition from physical toy to computer game, but the end result seemed to turn out ok.

You can grab the game here. Left click to drag the bricks, and right click to detach them. Escape will clear them and end the program.

Of course the game could use a bit of polish, but I think it demonstrates the concept. If you are really interested in the design choices behind the demo, you can grab the writeup in pdf form here.