Welcome to Street Smart Detroit

This site is dedicated to the development of a "serious game" about homelessness. The concept for the game is gameplay that would raise awareness of homelessness issues. In the medium of a game, the player would see the issues of homelessness through the eyes of the homeless. The game would include some facts about homelessness with the goal of educating the player, but would primarily focus on changing attitudes - or in the words of one advocate - make people see the homeless as human.

Update

The newsest version of the demo is up. It is the same as the last demo except that I have been working on developing the environment so that you cannot fall off the edge of the world. Also, I have added the guard dog, which will eventually chase you around and attack you, and the bus, which will arrive once you have collected you bus ticket and are ready to go to the next level.

New (alpha) demo ready

The demo now gives you something to do. Go around and collect all 10 cans to get enough money for bus fare.

Unity 3D 2.5 now available

Unity 3D 2.5 is now available for Windows and Mac. I have been playing around with it and you can also now view my initial experimentations with the new game engine for use in Street Smart Detroit here. Unity also allows you to play through a web browser! Very exciting. Of course, what you will see there now is just a taste of where we are going and what you can expect to see from Street Smart Detroit in the future. Thanks to Michael Taylor for permission to use his model of downtown Detroit both for us

Posted February 8th, 2009 by bradjensen68

Re-reassessing the game engine

OK, I was thinking about FPS Creator, but then I volunteered with at the local Global Game Jam site and got to take a look at Unity 3d. Wow. So much better than anything else I have used or even seen. The pipeline is incredibly easy and scripting is nice. Although level creation will be harder with Unity than FPS creator, everything else is so much better. Unity it is! I only have a 30 day beta evaluation license, though, so I can't wait until they release Unity for Windows. I will post some new pictures soon.

Reviewing Engine

After many months of struggling with the Torque game engine, I am now in the process of learning and evaluating FPS Creator as my game engine of choice. Although Torque is admittedly a very sophisticated game engine and does exterior environments extremely well, it is also hard to use and (how to say this gently) "quirky" I have been particularly frustrated with the creation of interior spaces and the "hit and miss" nature of importing objects from other formats as well as the relative lack of model packs available for purchase for Torque. Although, I am very loathe to toss away a lot of

Posted September 9th, 2008 by bradjensen68