This year I participated in my first game jam, the Global Game Jam 2018. With a team of artists, programmers and a sound designer, we made a video game within 48 hours.

This is my graduation project I did in computer science. The goal was to come up with a method to generate 3D meshes of building roofs from point cloud data. The point cloud data was taken with aerial LIDAR scanners and is available online. In addition, I used building layout polygons, which are also available as open data. I tested several strategies to generate a mesh and I’ll explain the best one in this post.

I wrote two programs that run on my LED matrix. They have different approaches and different aims. This post describes one of them. 

I built an LED matrix out of 256 WS2812 LEDs. This post will describe which materials I used and which I tried with no success so you don’t have to.

This is a shader I made that renders a flight through a starfield. It’s meant to look like the galactic map that you can see in No Man’s Sky. Here is a link to the project on shadertoy:

No Man’s Starfield

This spring, I spent some time at SAP’s commercial hackerspace. I wanted to explore how computer vision can be used with embedded devices and robotics. I built a demo that can detect QR codes and similar symbols and point a laser at them. Possible applications of this are putting QR codes on objects to help the robot locate them and grab or manipulate objects. Another possible use case is local navigation. A robot could infer its own location and orientation in space by detecting QR codes with known locations.

This is a game prototype I’m currently working on. The game is played online, on a real world map and the location of the player is also the location ingame, just like in Ingress.

This is a 16×16 RGB LED matrix, made of 256 WS2812B LEDs. It’s powered by a Raspberry Pi and can display images and animations. With a game controller attached, it can play games.

I’d like to share two game prototypes I made a few years ago. The first one is based on Tetris:

It was written in C++ with bare-bones OpenGL. Once you press shift, the game enters a “fast mode”, where the down button takes a piece all the way down and if you don’t press it for three seconds, it will drop where it is. This is meant to be a fast-paced version of the original Tetris.

I made a procedural pixelart generator that is inspired by the art style of the upcoming space adventure game No Man’s Sky.

Check it out and generate your own pixelart:

https://marian42.github.io/proceduralart/