[OLPC-GSoC] Introductions and... can you hear that?

[Brian Jordan]

Hi friends!

My name is Brian Jordan, I'm a sophomore studying computer science at
Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT. I am part of the our
intelligent agents (AI) lab working on game AI research. I am also
well-versed in sound design and creation for video games.

My involvement with OLPC began in June 2007 when me and my brothers
decided to make the trek from Connecticut to the Boston Game Jam [1]
and make a game for the XO in less than 3 days. We went in with our
laptops, some sound recording equipment, and came out with an
obscenely fun game (ask the moms of the kids who play tested our game
SprayPlay on the last day, it was hard to get them to stop playing!).
I also contributed sounds and sound design methodologies to a couple
other teams (Kuku Anakula and 3D Pong). We won the OLPC Award (GDC
passes!) for the game rated most fun by kids. If you are interested in
game programming (especially with PyGame), Game Jams are a great way
to get started fast and get rewarding feedback on your work.

I have 2 to 3 project proposals, and I hope to execute the project
that OLPC finds best fits its view for gaming and game development
on/for the XO. I am going to respond to this post with the short
summaries of the projects and links to their wiki pages. In short,
they are...
1. SprayPlay [2] - Using the newly developed Elements [3] Box2D
physics API to improve performance of SprayPlay on the XO and allow
users to draw playfields (functionality implemented using Element's
Box2D calls).
2. (possibly a part of project 1) Integrating audio calls with actions
like collisions (crunch goes the box), friction threshholds (scraaape
goes the object dragging on the floor), rotation speed (whooosh goes
the spinning ball) in Elements
3. Implementing a python game AI toolkit as part of or interfacing
with PyGame. Would provide functions for using node and edge / grid
map representations, A* (and Djikstra's, BFS, DFS) search, minimax
decision making, influence or cost mapping, adjacency matrices, etc.

Resources:
[1] http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Game_Jam_Boston_June_2007
[2] http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Spray_Play
[3] http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Elements