IGK is an annual game development conference in Poland and quite a fun one at that (not that I've been at many gamedev conferences). This year it started 29 of March and ended 1 of April in the evening (if counting the unofficial annual afterparty that is). The conference consists of a series of talks in the first two days and a 7 hours team gamedev compo. This year, as last year, I both had the opportunity to give a talk and to start in the compo, with quite decent results (for someone not really involved in game dev anymore).

The talk.

My talk this year was about "Evolution in video cards" (org. "Ewolucja układów graficznych") - it was [supposed to be] a series of interesting inventions and solutions in the field of graphics chips / video cards mostly from the '80 and '90 of the last century, that I've found out about during my dive into computer history. I guess the audience also decided that this is an interesting topic since my talk was voted to be the most interesting talk of the conference.

And now I have good news and bad news.
The good news is that the slides are made in English and that I'll share them in a couple of days. The second good news is that I have a video of the talk (courtesy of oshogbo).
The bad news is that the talk was in Polish (well, for some this might actually be the good news), and that the video is of rather low quality (though there is a slim possibility that in some time the official high-quality video will be released).

In any case, I'll upload the video to Youtube in a few days and I'll share the slides then as well. Also, I'm tempted to write a longer blog post about on the same topic covering all the things I've talked about.

The game.

The annual 7 hours team (max 4 person) gamedev compo is one of my favorite events of each year. Sometimes it goes better (e.g. at IGK 2008 our team won) and sometimes worse (like last three years). This year it went quite well (our team was 4th; 15 teams started and it the level of productions was really good).

The compo topic was "Escape" (with "Icy Towers" given as an example) and as mentioned before there was ca. 7 hours to create the game (starting from some basic frameworks). Anyway, the Vexillium had two (sub)teams starting this year:
Team \r\n: Xa (art), j00ru and me (code)
Team ę: Unavowed and oshogbo

Our (sub)team created a game called "Jet Escape" (screen above) in C++ / SDL / OpenGL. Even though we used OpenGL, a big part of the screen (the foreground) was drawn in old 2D fashion - per-pixel operations, bliting, etc, and this was converted to an OpenGL texture to be displayed on the screen (actually these 2D operations were coded from ground up during the compo). The background and the "HUD" was "drawn" in OpenGL.
One of the parts I'm most proud of is the "fire layer" - it's basically a 8-bit layer with an old-school fire effect recalculated every frame, rendered with a smoke-into-fire palette in the end. So, if I wanted something to burn up or explode, I just blitted it (it's sprite) to the fire layer and it burned away (notice the burning/exploding mine and the plane burning in two places on the screen shot; or best just watch the video at the bottom). I'll probably describe this in detail in another post.

You can download the game here (the package contains win32 executables + source; the game also works on GNU/Linux - please refer to README file on information how to compile; it might or might not work on OSX, didn't test):
Download: JetEscape.zip (6MB; win32 execs + data + source).

Video:


And that's that I guess.
(As for the unofficial afterparty, let's just say we proved it's possible to squeeze 16 people with laptops to a small hotel room, and play quite a few rounds of Urban Terror ;>)

Others about IGK:
IGK-9'2012 - Photo Gallery at Adam Sawicki's home page.
Prison Escape: Game from IGK Compo at xion.log.