Introduction

The little fireflies were out to have fun, but then it suddenly became dark and now they're lost ... Help them get back home!

In Fire Flight you fly through a valley full of trees, a dark & mysterious cave and a dangerous volcanic landscape - always illuminating the dark and on the lookout for those little mini fireflies.

However, Fireflight is no ordinary game: If you have connected the HeartLive-sensor to your PC via USB, then your heart coherence will be measured and visualized by the aura of the firefly. If your heart is calm and relaxed, then the aura will be bright & green and you can see a lot of your surroundings - but only in case your heart is able to adjust well to stressful situations. If it can't, your heart coherence drops, the aura turns red and you can see less of your environment. The influence of your vital signs to the game is also called "biofeedback".

HeartLive is a software package for people who are regularly exposed to stress, fatigue or dizziness - and are eager to solve these problems and overcome them. I was hired by Stichting Heart Live to design and produce an action game for this software package. Technically, the game can be played endlessly, as it was designed so that the levels are repeatedly permutated. As therapy sessions are not infinite, you play the first two levels (forest and cave) for 2 minutes and the last level (the volcanoes) until you are hit by a fireball. Highscores are for those, who travel the longest distance and collect the most fireflies!

Synopsis

Stromberg is a German television series which is produced by Brainpool and broadcast on the commercial television channel ProSieben. The show premiered in 2004; since then, five seasons have aired. It has become one of the most popular comedy shows in German-speaking countries and was honored with many awards such as the Deutscher Fernsehpreis. The show takes place at the office of the fictional insurance company Capitol Insurance, where the trivial day-to-day events take place in an eerie atmosphere oscillating between bullying and sycophancy.

In 2006, wetain created the game STROMBERG: Büro ist Krieg!, which features the main cast and popular scenes and places from the 2nd season as a minigame collection. Its release was coupled with the premiere of season three. The game received the German Game Developer's Award as best midprice game of 2007. Prototyping and production took about nine months and coincided with my freshman year at university; I wrote 5 out of 8 minigames.

buy at Amazon.de

Introduction

In my bachelor thesis I present a method for estimating discrete head poses from grayscale images. The original title of my thesis is "Dynamische Kopfposenerkennung anhand statistischer Gesichtsmerkmale". The thesis has not been officially published yet and is only available in German.

The method is based on texture models that associate certain statistical facial features to discrete head poses. The learned models are based on Gabor graphs and model occurence probabilities, relative positioning and the mean statistical texture of each facial feature of the model. A total of 93 mean pose-models are used to recognize head poses from 0°.. ±90° (yaw axis) and 0°.. ±45° (pitch axis). Each model is evaluated against a normalized grayscale image of the human face. After evaluation, the model with the highest similarity value "wins" and the associated discrete head pose is proclaimed as the estimated one.

In addition, an integrated approach is presented, which can be used to extract and normalize the human face from color image sequences by exploiting several simple methods as follows: Bayesian skin color detection in CIE-lab color space; image thresholding; region labeling; and Viola-Jones face detection using Haar cascades for frontal- & side-views of the face. The normalization is based upon anthropometrical assumptions.

read my thesis (PDF, German)

Introduction

Santa's elves were about to deliver the very last gifts to Santa Claus. Unfortunately, they didn't notice that all the toys got lost into the starry sky... now it is up to Rudi, the reindeer with the red nose, to collect all lost presents to save Christmas! Experience fun and action at the Northpole with the elves, wicked penguins, eskimo villagers and lots of gifts to collect.

RUDI is a game for everyone. It is easy to learn, but hard to master: each gift you collect adds a sleigh to your chain... don't cross them! Santa will give you some delicious gingerbread cookies for every sleigh at the end of each level, so make sure to collect as many as possible. You will control Rudi with the cursor keys only - if you are a hardcore gamer, you will love it too, as some packets are really well-hidden and require a lot of skill to capture them.

This is an open source christmas game (GPL) and a remake of an old prototype from 2002 I did back then with Oliver Berg and his Ruhr-IT team. I decided to give it a shot again - with only 75 days left until Christmas 2007 when I started, I rewrote the game and designed and modeled the North pole and its details. Felix Caffier did the characters, Kevin MacLeod contributed the music. Alongside we wrote a beginner's do-it-yourself workshop (CC licensed) for the Gamestudio game engine (A7). In February 2008, RUDI won the 1st prize in the Gamestudio Winter contest.

download game installer + source + workshop

Introduction

Glück auf! In Untertagebau-Simulator 2011 you can experience the job as a mineworker throughout 20 missions. Dive into this deep mining simulation game from Astragon (Farming Simulator 2011, Ports of Call), control detailed mining machines and win precious metals & minerals from four different mine types (coal, salt, iron & gold). The game comes with a great, realistic machine park: Work with coal ploughs, manlifts, roadheaders, flint mills or increase the size of your tunnels with a rotary hammer and various explosives. Dump trucks and bulldozers are also part of your fleet.

Vulkanware was team in charge of development of the game. They hired me for some additional programming tasks in early 2011. My main objectives were the camera programming, the vehicle control & animation and some surface shaders (terrain, normalmapping and reflections).

buy at Amazon.de

Introduction

a7titude is a game of skill with lots of puzzles for which you need a steady hand. The game includes two levels, each made up with 14 puzzles; and although it is easy to learn, it is difficult to master! There is still no way you'll ever stop playing, though, because you'll get caught up by the abstract level design and the soundtrack from Norwegian electronica artist Binärpilot - so you can not stop playing this game.

"Yeah, this gameplay is obviously brilliant. Its simplicity is part of that, no doubt." - Artimus Bena

The game was specifically developed for the 100 lines of code contest in June 2008 (organized by Conitec Datasystems, Germany) - and the time was wearing thin! It took me about 2 months for the production of the game. In addition to programming, design and production of the assets, a lot of time went into shrinking the program code in order to meet the criteria - namely, that the game has to have a maximum of only 100 lines of code and the source file must not exceed a size of 10 KB. Everything is data-driven: the game setup and the camera paths are all encoded in the maps and 3D models. With many compiler defines, macros and other filthy hacks I was finally able to meet the criteria. The only remaining problem is that the code looks more like egyptian hieroglyphs than like C code, but who cares, I won the 2nd prize ☺

download game installer + source

source code (press F to drag)

Introduction

SSAO for Gamestudio A7 & A8 is an integrated shader solution to approximate ambient occlusion in real-time as a post-processing effect for arbitrary 3D scenes. Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO) adds realism to a 3D scene, since it darkens creases, holes and closely aligned surfaces and gives the viewer a higher perception of depth, geometry and curvatures.

Unlike others, this SSAO solution offers a high degree of quality -and- performance: It auto-recognizes surface types of most objects, deals with soft-alpha- and cut-out transparent objects. Moreover, it creates a clear AO map without edge-bleeding, processes the mesh normals to avoid AO bleeding between orthogonal surfaces and works with the Gamestudio particle system, as well as supporting GPU-animated characters and ignores decals. This solution is a standalone component and can be easily integrated into any existing Gamestudio project for A7 or A8 (sic!). It integrates very well into existing shader chains and adapts automatically to screen resolution changes and can still produce fullscreen depth- or normalmaps, even if is turned off, so that you can recycle them for your own post-processing effects.

The shader solution is MIT licensed and can be integrated with just one #include in your Lite-C project. You can customize it with a rich set of variables and compiler defines, so that it perfectly fits your project and uses memory and CPU/GPU cycles as few as possible.

download SSAO v0.6 source + demos

SSAO on GPU animated crowd + PSSM + DOF

support for foliage with cut-out based alpha

support for soft alpha sprites, decals, fog and static meshes

Sponza Atrium scene from Crytek

Gouraud shading + SSAO

support for stencil shadows

clear SSAO image

support for point particles

Introduction

Do you know Lotti... no? Ok, look, he is tiny, he is cute and guess what? It rained this morning and it was so cool, because Lotti saw a rainbow for the first time in his life, so big, so colorful,... so awesome! And it got even better: He spotted something magical right at the end of the rainbow - a pot of gold.

And nobody knows what came over him, but Lotti took a run, jumped and flew high up in the air to get some of that gold. That's Lotti! That is... the Lotter-Effect!

In The Lotter-Effect, it's up to you to jump higher and higher with Lotti, collecting lost coins and, ultimately, getting to the pot of gold. Enjoy Lotti's crazy character animations and play three stages with increasing difficulty, featuring moving & static clouds, birds, asteroids and cool environments.

Together with Sven "Kiyaku" Paroth, I developed this amazing little game in less than 12 hours overnight at the Dusmania 10 game developers meeting in Summer 2008. We prototyped the gameplay & level template relatively fast, threw in three stages - and spent half of the time on the details, because we wanted to make a game that looks nice and is quite addictive - and it worked! The game made the 1st prize in the contest among a dozen of other entries, which all shared the same theme: "rainbows and stuff".

download game installer

Introduction

Syntax Tree Viewer is a visualization tool for syntax trees in -format. These precomputed sentence derivations will be rendered as bunches of syntax trees in a nice-to-look-at and smooth-to-navigate fashion. The tool is targeted at educational purposes in linguistic courses at schools and universities.

The tool emerged from a students project, in which the participants wrote a PERL based sentence parser, for which they algorithmically utilized context-free grammars to derive possible sentence structures. Syntax Tree Viewer served as the visualization part of the toolset, which was invoked right after the parsing process. The development of Syntax Tree Viewer was at most challenging when it came to the actual rendering of the tree structures. In the end, I chose to use a 3D engine for both speed & interactivity reasons.

Monster aren't dangerous - they are just misunderstood. And what do an artificial creature, a scarecrow and a vampire have in common? Exactly! Nothing!!!

Introduction

In Monster Mega Mayhem you control one of three individual monsters: Jack the scarecrow, Kevin the creature or Lucy the vampire. Slaughter through more than 30 stages with style, on land, in water and in the... no... wait, not in water... however, it's fun anyway. You have to kill people, scare kids, collect points & witness strange events. Each monster has its own stages, special moves and bonus objects. Combined with easily understandable controls, this is pure and mindless fun!

The game has been in development by IceValk Entertainment since 2004; after an outflow of people, production was on hold. I joined in August 2007, took the source and simply finished the game so that it was ready to ship on Halloween the same year.

buy the game for 5 US $ via share*it