Snails in the dark

Another photography contest on 3dbuzz with the topic "night photograph". So I was thinking the other night, what animal could be "static" enough to take a picture of in the dark. So I got this idea that I would photograph a snail and because it would take such a long time for the camera to take the shot, the snail would look incredibly fast :-D Well see for yourself :

I spend quite a lot of time observing snails during last night and trying to find a good shot. I wanted to take a completely different photo but I found it very difficult to focus on a specific point in the picture because of the mode I had to use on my camera. So now I have lots of photographs of snails out of focus. Oh well. At least this one turned out quite ok.

Detail and context

I took part in another small photography contest over at 3DBuzz. This time the topic was two pictures put together. One being ta detail and the other putting in into context. Here are a few attempts for the contest.

Global Game Jam 2011 - I Love Kakapo

We have participated in the game development marathon this year where you have to create a computer game in 48 hours. It's a great success for me that we made it in time to a fun to play result. We used the XNA framework and created a simple 2D platformer with 3D graphics.
This year's topic was extinction and we got this great idea for a game:
It's about saving the Kakapo parrots from extinction. These lovely parrots which live in New Zealand have never had any natural predators and with evolution gradually degraded (lost their ability to fly, got fatter and so on...). One day a new predator was brought to the island where they live and nearly all of them were eradicated. Today there's only about 150 of them. What's more, when mating, the male sits somewhere in the forest and makes these deep sounds trying to attract a female. Sadly, because the frequency of the sound is so low, it's very hard to tell where is it coming from - therefore the female hardly ever finds him.

In our game you have to guide the female to her future partner. If you succeed you control the next generation of the kakapo in the next level which is slower and can't fly as well.

We didn't manage to implement everything we wanted in the game so we sat down a few days after the event and added some graphics, a better head's up display, 3D sound effects(yay!) and corrected some bugs to make the game complete.
A couple of screenshots here:





And here is a video of the final version.

You can download the one we managed to do in 48 hours here, on the Global Game Jam's website. And the updated version can be downloaded here.

A couple of night photographs from Brno

I've been trying to take a nice picture for a small contest at 3DBuzz.com with the topic Winter Wonderland. Since I have my tripod with me I decided to go for a night picture with lots of lights and a more saturated color. Here are a few photos I Took:

this one is an attempt for an HDR photograph:

Ray's Brainy Quote v0.2

A new version of my little gadget. I had to fix a problem with reloading the quotes. It didn't reload properly because of the windows sidebar cache. So that's fixed now and quotes are loading properly. I have also added a new version of both styles. It's smaller now and doesn't take so much space. (screenshots are below, you can choose it in the settings) Let me know what you think. :)

How to update?

- download the new version

- unzip

- double click it and choose replace old version :)

Download:

Link 1

Link 2

Link 3 (windows live gallery)

Ray's Brainy Quote

I like reading quotes and I find it quite neat to have one written on my desktop. A nice feature would be if it updated automatically once a day and if you could choose the topic of it.

So there I was looking for something which would be at least close to what I wanted and found many things I didn't like at all. There was no other way than to create my own little application.

I chose the website Brainy Quote as a source of quotes and wrote a simple but sufficient widget for the windows sidebar which display a nice quote every day. You can choose from four topics (love / nature / art / fun) or simply go for one without a specified topic. It wouldn't be me If I didn't draw the icons and created at least two styles you could choose from.

So here it is, version 0.1, if you'd like to try it, I'd be more than happy. All you have to do is download it, unzip it and double click it. Done. Here are some screenshots and links for download:

Download:

Link 1

Link 2