Featured, Games

Grimball – A new breed of action games

By Jonas on March 2nd, 2005

GrimBall is a fast paced 3D action game demo by Custom Red Software Studios. It focuses a lot on light puzzle solving, fast paced combat, and overcoming obstacles. It’s a cross between elements from Sonic the Hedgehog, Marble Madness, and old-school shoot-em-ups. This was the first game developed on Custom Red’s in-house engine. My primary roll in this project was as a programmer working with visual fx, gameplay, physics and artificial intelligence.

The game features real-time soft shadows and color bleeding on the static environment using vertex based precomputed radiance transfer. We had a day/night cycle where the sun moved across the hemisphere, dramatically changing the ambiance and demonstrating the soft shadows (but the game was too fast for some people to even notice it turned from day to night!).

It rendered well on a Geforce 4 using vertex shader 1.1 and no pixel shader. We had a pixel shader 2.0 pipe-line as well with added normal mapping and better lighting.

The first prototype was finished in the year 2004 and the second prototype in 2005.

Screenshots

Screeshots from the first prototype, mixed levels.