A Kickass Laser Videogame

Do you enjoy programming videogames?

Do you like lasers?

Are you free this weekend (Sept. 20th—22nd)?

If so, you should come and join our team, which is participating in this weekend's Georgia Game Jam. Hosted at Southern Polytechnic State University in Marietta, the event is a 48-hour game programming marathon and competition. There will be free food, drinks, prizes, various opportunities for resume bullet points, and more.

Our Team Will Blow the Competition Away

(Probably…)

Instead of programming a game for the screen, we're going a very non-traditional route. We have two RGB 60,000 point per second laser projectors with a total combined power output of 4W. These projectors are controlled via the network through simple socket programming.

We essentially have two extremely fast laser projectors that can trace a series of coordinates over time. It's essentially just like drawing; think SVG or Bezier curves.

What do you think you could do with that kind of hardware?

Some Examples of What We've Done

For last year's Game Jam, I programmed Laser Asteroids. It is quite primitive, but I was literally brand new to lasing. This was done with only one projector and it was powered by a netbook.

This Year, We're Doing Much More!

We'll probably be developing a platformer or a fast-paced shoot-em-up. Depends on whether or not we want to stick with the Game Jam theme. You can bring your own ideas, of course.

Presently our “team” consists of myself and another cross-platform [Python, JS, C++11] developer. As much of the code is already in Python, we'll probably stick with that for now, although we may port some of the graphics engine to C++11 in the days leading up to the event.

If you grok Git && (Python || C++11), are free this weekend, and you want to program videogames—come join our team already damnit!

We also need an artist that knows something or two about SVG and animation keyframing. We want to create animated sprites!

And just as an FYI, the winning team gets some cool stuff from the CDC. But even if we don't win, we're going to take this project to the next level soon with Kickstarter. An (S)NES emulator on a Skyscraper? Or how about Tetris?

All code will be released under a permissive BSD/MIT license.

My contact information follows:

Brandon Thomas

bt@brand.io

678-744-6080

Should I mention that you can also project onto 20-story buildings and blank billboards?

Be Awesome

…JOIN US!