EA Skateit Nintendo DS demo with Papervision3D

Dec 16, 2008 10

Those of you who follow my blog, may remember the Paperskate3D demo I published back in the summer. Back then I said that I’ll post the rest of the story someday. So here it is.

It was originally created for the Paperking3D contest organized by the Pv3D team. There were many awesome project sent it for this contest, including Vectorvision – the cool 3d vector library. The skate demo didn’t make it to the top 3 but it received a honorable mention, which made me very happy.

But the best came a bit later, when I was contacted by Revolutive Design from Vancouver. Based on the original application, together we created a demo for Skateit, a new skating game from Electronic Arts targeted for Nintendo DS.

To biggest improvement over the original version is the new way the skateboard is controlled by the user. While before it was based on keyboard, in the EA demo it is modeled on the “Flickit” system which allows to control the skateboard with the stylus on the DS. To simulate this in Flash, I used mouse gesture recognition based on the excellent class provided by Didier Brun. This class was originally intended to identify written characters, but I was able to adapt it to my needs pretty easily. In the demo, it is used to recognize gestures for 20 different tricks.

To access the demo go to the EA website and click the large button in the middle right of the screen. Have fun!

Categories: 3D, Actionscript 3, Papervision3D