Legion

LEGION:
Date: May 2016
Concept: In Legion you play on one of two teams. Legion is a single consciousness made up from assimilated parts. Each consciousness adds to Legion with each assimilation brings something to Legion, allowing it to grow and become more. Legion has a singular directive, to make everything part of itself. It does not know why it does this only that it must. The rogue team consists of characters that are trying to avoid being assimilated by Legion. They need to avoid being caught at all costs. They need to outrun, outsmart and outmaneuver it if they want to remain themselves.
The game ends when either Legion has assimilated all the rogues or the game timer ends. If the game timer ends, the rogue team wins.

This is a preview of Legion. Read the full post (195 words, 3 images, estimated 47 secs reading time)

Dreams

Date: October, 2015
Development Time: 4 weeks
Concept: Dreams was a first-person, action-adventure-RPG originally designed by one of the winners of the BAFTA Young Game Designers award.

Team of 17
Platform: Windows, 1st Person
Engine: Unity Engine

Role: Producer

Extra Notes:
First term course project for Abertay University master’s students.
This game’s original concept was a BAFTA Game Concept Award (10-14 yrs) winner. Abertay was asked by BAFTA to develop the game concept further. In 5 weeks, a team of masters students who had not really worked together before were to come together to develop this game concept.
It was my job to be a producer for this team and this game.

This is a preview of Dreams. Read the full post (136 words, 5 images, estimated 33 secs reading time)

Kernel mode constructs

I’ve been reading Jeffrey Richter’s book, CLR via C#, lately, and near the end of the book, I found this interest bit on threading.

He starts by telling us about two types of threading constructs: User-mode constructs that use special CPU instructions, and Kernel-mode constructs offered by Windows.

User-mode constructs handle all the thread management in the hardware, which means that it’s fast. When it blocks, Windows can’t tell. This is good because the OS won’t create a new thread (using resources). It’s bad, however, if the thread spins for a long time in the CPU, as it means that a CPU core is idle and can’t be used until the thread can be unblocked.

This is a preview of Kernel mode constructs. Read the full post (432 words, estimated 1:44 mins reading time)