Mark Cooke’s G-Mixer

About a month ago I was showing one of my friends – a bartender here in Tokyo – some applications on my iPhone. He asked “why is there no cocktail mixing application?” and I had to reply “I dunno!” And so Get Dirk Drunk was born.

What began as a simple cocktail mixing toy turned into the glorious game you see before you. In the game you play as the local bartender. Further explanation is on the website:

Dirk is your average guy out on the town on a Friday night. He has had a tough week slaving away for his corporate overlords and it is time for a drink. That’s where you come in. As the bartender of the local drinking establishment you’ve got to keep mixing drinks and pouring them into Dirk’s mouth to keep him drunk. If he sobers up, you lose!

So be a pal and Get Dirk Drunk!

If it isn’t obvious from the trailer the game has its tongue firmly planted in cheek. I built it in my spare time and it was easy to make time in my schedule as the game involves two things I enjoy: silly, crude humor and drinking.

I wanted to go through the full process of releasing an application – idea, design, development, hiring outsourcing, release preparation, marketing, licensing, etc. – to get more experience in the areas I haven’t had the chance to work in on the large teams I’ve been on. Specifically I wanted to gain more experience in the production side of the business and though this is a tiny minigame going through the process was valuable. It is onward and upwards from here.

Now, be a pal and go and help Get Dirk Drunk! iTunes store link.

(please drink responsibly)

Zombie Apocalypse, the recently announced zombie shooter for PSN and XBLA, is one of the games I have been working on recently. I worked primarily on gameplay, AI, weapon, and player control systems. I’m proud of the results and think it is especially fun when playing with your friends in the up-to-four player simultaneous multiplayer game modes. Congratulations to everyone involved at Nihilistic and Konami for finishing off the project strong.

Check out the video below for a sample of gameplay.

Can you understand how this works?

float InvSqrt (float x)
{
    float xhalf = 0.5f*x;
    int i = *(int*)&x;
    i = 0x5f3759df - (i>>1);
    x = *(float*)&i;
    x = x*(1.5f - xhalf*x*x);
    return x;
}

There are some crazy approximations in that code that take use of the x86 architecture and implementation details of IEEE floating point. It popped up in the open-source Quake 3 code base but apparently has a history going much further back.

An author at Beyond3D spent some time trying to figure out who wrote the code. Here’s the article on his findings. Pretty crazy. And for the record, no, I don’t understand how the math in that function actually works. It is pretty cool though.