Game Club: Year One

There's a new post up on TSU Game Club blog about the games we've been working on over our first school year.

Check it out! [Link]

It's My Birthday, I Won't Post If I Want To

So another month has gone by, things have happened and not happened.
Such is Life...

This post will carry on mainly as a series of updates on what's happened since my last post and tangible upcoming plans. Dev work happens sometimes in my life, but school isn't conducive to that... Good thing I have a job waiting for me as a .Net Developer in VA this June!

Well my chief announcement is that I've completed my 23 trip around Sol!

Outside of that, my life has settled into an anxious waiting stage where I don't have too much productivity in my day to day, but I'm trying to relish and enjoy experiences in life as my time as an undergraduate finally comes to an end.  Finally being able to think, comprehend, and plan a bit further in advance than I was earlier in the semester due to a myriad of brain failures and an overall inability to can or even anymore. (It's ok if that didn't make sense to you because the internet is a terrible place to be)

  Gambino's latest video because of reasons

^ Quoting the ashy Leroy Brown
"It's been a long time coming.. " < Yo Gotti
I take quotes from SUCH good role models, right?!

Continuing with announcements, I'm going to be attending HackNashville5 this weekend with no plan, only the intention of meeting cool people, getting some swag and maybe producing something of quality. (Where is my current direction in life?  - Good Question.. I'm working on that... <dark ages>)
Expect a more serious, work related update this weekend during (likely after) Hack Nashville and hopefully a bit more after the infamous May 10.

Life is happening. The waves are turbulent. I'll turn up somewhere.

Game Design of The Key

Hey everybody!

I've noticed that the game I made at this year's Global Game Jam, The Key has been getting quite a number of views and since I haven't had much IRL or online feedback from it, I figured I'd try to leave these series of thoughts that I'd hope to make a regular posting a bit after the release of projects that aren't simple arcade clones with some hype music thrown in...

As another reiteration, the theme of the Jam was "We see things not as they are, but as we are". With that in mind, I took a introspective look at who we ( I ) are.  And what I found was that we are many things, but what we largely identify as who we are as individuals is due to our encounters, experiences, and memories. We're all different, but so similar on this journey of life and self understanding.

The motif of a journey, and life at large, led me to form the game into a maze. Life is very much so a maze and we have to keep moving forward hoping to find our path towards the end.  The choices we have available aren't always clear cut nor do they reveal all of the pros and cons. Another idea that contributed to the overall design of the "correct" maze path is to always jump on a new path (opportunity) that comes your way. The further you get into it, it's more than likely a good decision to turn onto this new path if it takes you to a new level (color).

The minimum aesthetics that I did implement in those 10-12? hours was a color scheme that takes you from this area of gray, through all the different chakras more simply, all the colors of the rainbow!

From the tooter to the slightly above your head region...

So the maze has 7 different color regions each with 2 different key objects. I never came up with a name for these metaphorical objects, but they can either help you by giving you more time or halt your progress of self discovery.  Each of the good keys, has a meaning attached to it in the form of a short sentence that should elicit some thought/emotion/memory of your own life that is related to the chakra of whichever color region that you're in (Red = Life, etc.).

The bad keys, conversely, are the hidden evils or setbacks of life. Instead of the thought provoking messages with the good keys, the bad keys include funny (to me) references and messages to hopefully make your mis-steps not as punishing.  A few even offer things to consider in life: "All that glitters is not gold."

Beyond the maze of self-discovery and enlightenment, there is also The Darkness, another realm inside your mind in which you find yourself isolated and possibly lost. Besides yourself, the floor, and what little bit of light that you have left within yourself, there is the slightly ominous sound of The Darkness. It beckons for you to show you the way out and get you back on your journey. Or you can stay and endlessly respawn into the darkness.

That about wraps up the higher level designs for the game, the game has an intentionally small view port so that you can't see the too much of the rest of the maze beyond your immediate area. It also is controlled via keyboard arrow keys, that's transferable to a controller also, but I've wondered if I should toy with a touch guided control scheme if this project gets revitalized and ported to mobile. 

Overlaying the mechanic of searching for the end and finding the correct key, is a time mechanic. It could be metaphorically linked to the notion of our limited time in life to do the very same act, but I added it in as more out of a "need" for a sense of urgency for the player. After observing the one actual real life playtest that I was able to have and getting his feedback, the time mechanic could be lightened somewhat, but I'm not sure to what extent I would do that (more fun tweaking and testing!)

That's all that I think that I can go on about right now about the game. It may or may not be revitalized, fine-tuned and prettified, but for now it's on ice.  If you haven't actually played it, try it out. Otherwise, share the game with others if you're a fan!

And as always, feel free to let me know what you think about the game or my design behind in the section below or on Twitter.

GDC Blew My Mind

Last week was my first time attending the Game Developers Conference (GDC)!

It was my third time out in San Francisco, CA and it was quite a jolly good show. I had made the last minute decision to attend after seeing how cheap the Expo Passes were. I still hurt my bank a bit on the flight out there...
Thanks be to the most amaze sensei ever, John Garcia, 3D Artist at Kixeye and SCAD alum, for his supreme level of hospitality: blessed me with an air mattress, tours around the city, and some of the best advice for a young whippersnapper like me! :3

Tiny Excel version of my schedule (click to read)

My favorite batch of sessions was the 3 Day Indie Minority RoundTable. It was very enlightening and encouraging to see other other minority indie devs from around the world (Still need to go through my list of business cards to connect with everyone I met).
Speaking of business cards, they are the new swag, apparently. I had to get some from VistaPrint last minute to make sure I could commune with my fellow devs

I actually have a card design from last semester that I forgot about, so I think I'll get this printed out after doing some slight redesigns.

Bonus Points if you know the acronyms

 My next favorite talks were the Ask The Expert Programmers Panel featuring Mike Acton of Insomniac Games, Sven Bergstrom of Celsius Game Studios/underscorediscovery, Brett Douville: Indie, Anna Kipnis of Double Fine Productions, and Jeff Ward of Willowtree Apps. They had a balance of Indie, 2 Engine Programmers and 2 Gameplay Programmers and I really enjoyed all the wisdom they had for the largely student crowd.

I also gained more confidence in my future aspirations and had many questions about my present-future career choices answered for me. I don't believe I want anything to do with AAA, except maybe Bungie if I could be so fortunate; I want to go Indie (work with a team/studio or later start my own) eventually; I can get a tech related job ( Entry Level Developer or QA) and still develop my games/skills on the side; Atlanta may very well be my destination since I'm not too sure about life in CA; and lastly "Keep Calm and Make Games".

Now to shout out the Amaze exhibits/demos: Sulon Technologies "Cortex" is my favorite from the lineup of VR tech. It incorporates AR tech so it allows you to bring your games to you and seems like a more viable path to immersion than a fully VR system since your whole body is involved, sans smell.

Pretty Headset

Group Play

One of my favorite announcements came from Unreal with UE4. I'm already working on improving my skills with C++ so I'm definitely interested in possibly catching up with the new stuff in Unreal; haven't really messed with it or learned it beyond UT3 Editor and the more basic differences in UDK.

I think that about wraps up my experiences and feels from last week. Hopefully, I'll be able to go next year, meet more people and have more lasting connections!

Check out this album for more pictures from the trip: XD

Have You Been Round the Block?

My small game is now available for play on Android through Google Play and on the Windows Phone Store!

For those of you without Android, but you have a computer, check it out here on the blog.

All social media accounts (sans G+) can be found with the username @TSU_TheBlock
Twitter
Instagram

This has been an exciting and eventful morning for me. I burnt my bacon (resulted in greasy pork rinds essentially... kinda yum but not that great to ingest).  I hastily went to all my media platforms to share the news of the release of the game, and so far, it's all been positive vibes! Unfortunately, I don't have any stats on downloads or reviews yet... but soon... soon...

Now, I think I'll try to update my social media for about the next couple of weeks, but I think I might be able to transfer this project onto some of the Game Club members to run as an ongoing and evolving project that continues to hold the essence of TSU and its students. : D

My new game focus is going to be on Project Dreamer, so stay tuned!

WILT: HTML & CSS

Yesterday in "What I Learned Today"

We got to CSS in my Intro to Web Development class. I love this new (to me) concept, because it moves web dev a step closer to actual programming languages I'm used to by being able to create a class style sheet that contains the attributes for the rest of your pages.

Neat!

I have all that stuff up on my GitHub for anyone into that. Hit the link above! (or here)
[or on the previous line]



{It's here too}

What I Learned Today

Today, I spent a good deal of the day conquering the mysteries of HttpWebRequests, HttpWebResponses, WebClients, and the evil dark space of Windows Phone App Development....

I emerged Victorious! (With the help of the mostly powerful Juacall)

I also implemented some threading with the async methods, but Juacall soon helped me find a simpler way that would eliminate the need for all those extra methods and threading through the System.Net.Http class library. I weeped because after FINALLY, it's been a few weeks of trying to learn and figure this out on my own free time, I've finally been able to POST variables to our server, and use the response it gave back!

Progress (and Programming) are very cruel mistresses indeed.

We're going places with Qwest, where exactly is TBD...

What have you learned today?! (Or this week??)

Game Club President

Update Round 2: 

The TSU Game Programming Club

As of the start of this semester, I've been serving as President of the Game Programming Club at TSU!
As the old head of the group of students, I try to coordinate and help everyone on our journey to becoming game developers.

We meet every Thursday in McCord Lab 11 at 4:30. Usually we open up with whatever announcements may come as projects evolve, sometimes a short gamedev video such as one's shown at previous meetings about what the dark side of the industry could be like as well as the wise words from the great folks at Extra Credits.  Then we roll on into our tutorial sessions.
Since the group is largely freshmen and sophomores, and lack a depth of programming experience, we're using Unity due to its quick start up and low barrier of entry. Dr. Erdemir is leading most of the tutorials with Blake and I assisting, and by the end of the semester, everyone is the club should have at least one very nice Unity Game Project and a certificate for our extra curricular activities.

The long term plan for the club is to remove the tutorial sessions as they become full classes and hopefully a concentration in our Computer Science Department and spend meeting time coming together, discussing our ventures, Indie/AAA related issues, and of course playtesting and working on projects.  I've tried to instill this doctrine at each meeting and in our media groups and by compiling a list of resources for everyone to make use of here. Hopefully future student leaders can continue and direct the needs of the group as we become more skilled and successful.

This is just the beginning of what I hope continues to be a legacy of greatness!

Please stay tuned here or more specifically here for all news from the group blog,
run by Danielle Heik of FocusFitandFab.com

Qwest

One of the larger projects I've been consumed with is an App Called Qwest.

Where Did February Go?

Happy Black History Month!

Hopefully, you know more than you previously did about how awesome people come from all backgrounds and how we should all be learning about the full history of humanity and our how past effects the present and the future, if we don't learn from previous missteps.
Don't forget these lessons!
//If you've forgotten or was never made to not be ignorant on peace, love, and historical knowledge, comment/email me and I can send you some links to enlighten you!!

Anyway, I've been sick, interviewing for jobs, coordinating clubs and trying to attend class (whoops), and doing homework. Nary any time to get into the nitty gritty on my projects... To make up for this, I'll update with a post on my different organizational obligations (Game Club, WOO!) and another post on how things are going with my app team on Qwest later on tonight, before or after meeting with the .

Till then

Fight the power!

TSU Game Programming Club

Edit: This post should have happened weeks ago... anyway, Happy Belated!

The Game Programming Club is a newly formed club in Tennessee State University's Computer Science Department by Professor Erdemir. During fall semester, students joined groups and worked together to learn and create using the Unity3D game engine.  The club and students are all energized and hopefully we'll be on a good footing to having a great and sustainable resource for the student body!

Here are some of the pictures from the final meeting of the Club at Tennessee State University back in December.

Some introductions of new members

A bowling game presentation

Pirate Island Themed Bowling Game

Most members, pre-meeting

My team member, Blake presenting our Battle Zone Remake

Jeff and team member(sorry) presenting their bowling game Razz

Jeff' gave a post game presentation on what he learned over the first semester working with Unity.

Global Game Jam 2014!

Alright, I'm done!

GGJ14 was a (personal) success!

You can try the game out via the page link above or here.

This year was my first ever Global Game Jam event. I jammed out with the awesome people of Nashville Game Developers! I think the jam continues until tonight (Sunday at 10) or so, but I'm dying from being at it for most of the day.

Theme: "We see things not as they are, but as we are"

This theme led to ideas that were very meta and even mindbendingly complicated to break down to a bare game mechanic sensibly.  It's something that we've already seen in games time and time again in games where different characters/character features give the player different in game reactions. After thinking on it during our brainstorm friday night, and most of Saturday morning, and even as I was in Franklin crafting this idea, I settled the evolved version of my one of my original ideas: a maze.

It's pretty simple, except it's not... Travel into the depths of your memories and maybe you can reflect on yourself and how you see things!

We Dared to Be Brilliant!

Brilliantly satirical, that is!

I'm speaking of my comrades Kyle and Khoa, who, along with myself, attempted to game the idea of the theme of Ludum Dare 28.  The theme was You Only Get One. With that, we embarked on creating a game in which You can Only Get One new game a year. So you pick one game, play it for an imaginary year, and then the next year, you can get something new!  You can read more on the idea and was accomplished before our magnificent project swan dived to a post compo/jam finish at  Kyle's Ludum Dare Blog Posts.

Here's my screenshot for the Fighter component of the game.

And here is a link if you want to try out the madness yourself:

I'll be back sometime this week with end of semester updates!

TGIBT (Thank God It's Break Time)

?It is day what?

Alrightey then.
November has been a weird month with a topsy turvy schedule. Since I was with you last, I've finished contributions to the Alpha Build of Project Bala with the implementation of 2 enemy types and a few enemy enemy behaviors; started up a remake of Battle Zone with a movable tank and have begun setting up the project framework through my quick lessons from most honorable leader Kyle Bolton; created an ugly, but functioning (enough) trombone; and made a few strides with Round The Block when other matters weren't pressing my brain to mush.

By the end of the year, I'll be done with Round the Block by virtue of not spending forever to release something.  I just need to add in power ups that change the ball speed, sounds, and slight design touch ups. The trombone is in a phase of interface modification and fixing the screen layout for Android.

I'll try to come back again for a good semester wrap up post within the next two weeks.

Happy Holidays!

WORKING, Working, working

Ok, so this week's post is pretty much a quick rundown of the ideas, ventures I'm currently undertaking:

> Round the Block has reached a few quick milestones this week following my take-over of library computers as my own work station. With the quick implementation of 3 of my proposed 7 or so power ups for the game, I feel I'm making steady progress amid the myriad of other responsibilities I have going on. Stay tuned for this one. It began as a small stepping stone, and with all the experience I'm gaining through this and by working with Kyle Bolton on Bala, I think I'll be able to make this a bit better than my original scope intended.. but then there's the RELEASE SOMETHING stigma that is constantly haunting and drumming through my mind! D:

> This week began with the goal of making the Fire Demon for Project Bala. The character is one of the various enemy types for the games and generally works as a living, angry fireball. Pour water on it, it dies; blow air on it, it grows! The creation and testing of this character has been pretty fun so far. For the coming week, I'll be refining and tweaking the Fire Demon ever closer to perfection and also implement the menacing Tu Spooky.

> Tennessee State University now has a game club simply titled "TSU Game Programming Club". I'm about the only senior level student participating as faculty and club adviser Dr. Erdemir has taken to establish it with mostly freshmen to promote longevity, involvement and commitment to the group. Since I am more experienced, I'm taking a leadership role with the Game Club by being lead developer in the A level group. Our game for the semester is a recreation of Battlezone in the Unity3D game engine. I'll be posting more updates with that as time goes on. After meeting up to discuss our first milestones and project set up, I'm setting up the Framework that our codebase for the game will follow by learning and working from Kyle's example.

> I've been in conversation with some guys about how to go about developing a "shmup" (SHoot eM UP - Space Invaders - Galaga - etc.) game. The idea was thrown around for using Unity, C#, or C++.  I really want to get the experience and knowledge of getting closer to fully programming a game without a pre-built engine so this small game, might be something that is doable in C++ with a two man team. We'd have a bit of learning and prep to do, so we'll see where this pipedream goes...

> Employment! How do you even do that??
I've been looking for Developer/Programmer, QA, general tech support jobs in the greater area of Nashville, TN.  I've been sort of freaking out from the anxiety of the real world and finding employment, so I've been searching and casting my net... So far, no bites or catches or whatever fisherman analogy fits here. This article, however, lifted my spirits slightly if most of my competition are incompetent non-programmers. This search of monetary gain and self preservation has also landed me on a few freelancer websites and the wealth of jobs that I could do (given the time, because if you're reading this, you clearly see I have TONS of time lying around. I'M STILL A COLLEGE STUDENT).
So, I'll definitely at least be a freelance developer! I still have street performing sax player as a fall back and cardboard house artist as a fall back to that.

To wrap up this post, I bid you good readers to ponder this question that's inspired from the esteemed artist, Big Boi:
Do you have a #BackUpPlanToTheBackUpPlanToBackUpTheBackUpPlan ?

Back to Reality...

Last week was #TSUHC2K13 or Tennessee State University Homecoming Week of 2013 for the hashtag impaired. Now that the madness has ended, I have to catch up on a bit of uneducational and pointless student duties that may have gone undone in the calamity.

In the realm, of the accomplished, I contributed to the enemy firing mechanic in Project Bala. You can follow that blog here for all the latest with that project from all team members (eventually). This is latest post more or less covers what the game is and where it will be for this first quarter target build.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled news, I've got a background working for the levels. Need to lower the opacity or overlay it with some layer that fades it... Advice is ALWAYS welcome.

I have goal points to get to, but I haven't been accurate in estimating times for hitting these.:

• PowerUps - Detailed/Unimplemented
• Main Levels - Detailed/Drawn Out/Unimplemented (Waiting to make everything function for Level so I can just duplicate and rearrange level layouts. Should be a quick step!)
• Sounds - Haven't thought to much about
• Finalized Designs - Still waiting till everything else is done.

Deadlines.. How do they work???
I'll update the playable build once I fix the background (and implement at least one of the powerups) by Wednesday night.

Random Tech Link of the Post: This post right here explained Genetic Algorithms way more than a certain professor did... Check out UK Developer Lee Jacobson. Follow his Twitter. and follow mine!

I'm Outy 5000!

Break!? What Break?!?

This is a long post.
BE
PRE
PARED!!!

Late News on RtB Progress for the Week

Level designs and implementation on Round the Block is a key concern for this week!
Made progress in setting out how the first level will look. Changed the size of the bricks, paddle and ball.

It looks nice, just need to change the physics on how the ball moves... It was a simple bouncing and adding velocity movement that I learned to implement from HowToMakeMobileGames but I'm not happy with that ball motion for this game because it's a bit too simple and it doesn't have even a pseudo realistic feel to it.
 

The RtB page will be updated with this latest build when I can get back to my room but I just sorted out the look of the RtB page, which was wonky because of the style block that was in the Unity default html (Yay learning!)

Another thing on the to-do list is to design the powerups (things that fall from the blocks to change the current gameplay) and implement them in the game...
Other than that, it's just the same old grind.


Peace! ImOut(myMind);

The Dreamer Concept Posters

As previously stated, one of my game ideas, "The Dreamer" is slowly taking form. So I decided to use a poster assignment this morning in Graphic Design to work on generating thoughts on the visual look of the game.

Click Below for the Designs

New Blog Page for Round The Block!

Alrighty, then!

So, over the weekend, I got to a point where the basics of Completing a Level, Losing a Level, Rudimentary Menu Layout & Function, Block color editing, ball, and paddle movement all work!

It's still ugly and the gameplay is NOWHERE near completion! Need to tweak brick, ball and paddle size, ball speed, add in power up items and design the layouts for the blocks for each level.

The delay, and my fail, of this post all hinged on the fact that I didn't know how to use the build files from Unity and the links that I had found before TSU's internet went to the ICU were from older versions of Unity that put out a slightly different version of the HTML file. However thanks to the good folks of BIG (Blacks In Gaming) Facebook page, the visual walkthrough I had been looking for helped me over the hurdle. The line where the link to the hosted .unity3d file change from being after an "if statement" to being in the initialization of a UnityObjectURL.

But, now that that's all solved, I now have a page, that you should see in a tab above to my latest build of Round the Block!

Think I'll try to sketch out the images I want the blocks to make on each level and hopefully post an update with sketches and description of the overall goal with the final image in the next couple of days.

Stay tuned for more!