Thursday, December 16, 2010

Yay! Spam!

Look i won some money


Dear Gmail user
You won £ 500,000.00GBP. (CGPN):**************, Ticket number: **************,
Serial numbers:/BTD/***********, Lucky numbers:12-12-23-35-40-41(12). Contact
Mr. Graham Benfield for more details: E-mail: g.benfield121@gmail.com

Sincerely,
Mrs. Bettina Paulson

Awesome!!!!

Wednesday, December 8, 2010

The Next Game

Heres some concept type stuff that ive been working on for my next game.


"But Josh!!! You need to finish your other game before you go making a new one. You have deadlines!!!"
Yeah, I know, but heres the deal:

At this stage, my tower defense game is going to receive about 3 more features. (Most of which can be seen on my checklist that i posted on this blog not too long ago) And the rest of the stuff is polishing, balancing, making images look better, lame stuff like that.

Which is very good!

but.. It doesn't challenge me at all.
Its like busy work from your history teacher named Eric.

And theres only so much of that busy work that i can do before my mind explodes.

So consider the last few days working on this NEW game to be nothing more than a very short break that will end soon.

It WILL end soon. Because, yes, I have deadlines.

Which i will talk about at another time.
Kbai.

Tuesday, December 7, 2010

Interview With Guy Who Knows Stuff

Forum Mod
Design and programming developer
Game developer for EGOSOFT
games for steam
Language developer called Epoch


questions

What language should i be using?
What kind of goals are good to have?
what would be best to spend my time working on?
What are some good resources out there to use?
How is college going to help me?


Recommendation: start *small*. Write Pong. Write Tic-tac-toe. Write Tetris. That'll give you an idea as to how long it'll take to make a small, simple game. Now, multiply that time by 100 for a bottom estimate of how long it'll take to do a simple commercial game. Multiply by at least 1000 for how to do the super-big hit of the year.

Well you could watch the Itunes Standford Java or C++ video's if you are bored with Python.
If you go on to college you will most likely have to learn Java or C++ sooner or later.
Looking back to when I was your age though I would just keep writing programs/games in Python if you are already comfortable with it.
Besides like you said you've only made "small" stuff from what it sounds like. When you start making complete games is where it starts getting hard!

Keep using Python. Really develop your skills there and put out some high-quality, finished, polished games. If you ever encounter a situation that Python cannot handle (and this is a big "if"), then you can start worrying about what other tools to pick up. Depending on the problem you run into, you may want to go with C#, or Java, or Lua, or LISP, or whatever. Maybe you'll have to take a dip in the inky, rotted, corrosive brine that is C++ (although I hope for your sake that you don't!).

Finish every project you start.

Every time you finish a project, when you pick your next project, pick something that you don't actually know how to do. This will ensure that you are constantly stretching yourself and learning new things. Just be careful not to bite off more than you can chew.

Lastly, but most importantly, enjoy it. If you stop having fun programming, go the **** outside and do something else that you actually like doing. Life is too short to waste your youth on preparing for a career that you don't actually enjoy.

I believe there is an old saying. Those who can't, teach. You will find that even if your teachers have experience in the working world it is usually decades out of date. Remember the degree is a piece of paper that gets your resume past filters, and the learning begins when you get your first job.

Sunday, December 5, 2010

symphony of specters

This company makes music for indie games
they have some really good stuff and are a great reference point for me as far as what video game music should sound like
symphony of specters
its too bad for me that they charge for music but i still use them as inspiration when making music for my games.

Inspirational Video!!!

This interview talks a little bit about the indie game development community and it also talks about joining music and the game together really awesomely.
(which is something that i want to focus on with my next game)
(it also has some really cool music playing in the background)


PixelJunk Shooter 2 Developer Interview - E3 2010 from Jeriaska on Vimeo.


Heres another Interview that talks about combining narrative and video game design
(which is also something i want to do for my next game)

Gemini Rue Designer Interview - E3 2010 from Jeriaska on Vimeo.

Thursday, December 2, 2010

A Cool Bug

Alot of people think that bugs in software are serious issues that ruin and cause destruction everywhere they go.
I, however, like to classify bugs into 2 different groups.

1) Cool
2) Not Cool

The "Not Cool" kinds of bugs are ALOT more common.

ALOT.

Those "Not Cool" bugs are stupid. EVERYONE hates them.

EVERYONE.

They will come at you from stupid obvious "noob" typos and
They come at you from the most obscure places.

Sometimes they cause your game to act retarted.
And other times (and more common) they will simply trip your game and leave you to read a large blob of (in my case red) text that your interpreter vomits back out at you after choking on a large piece of useless stuff.

But thats the sad side of bugs.

And to keep things interesting i decided that this post im going to be talking about the "Cool" side.

They are not very common. In fact, im pretty sure ive only ever had, something like 3 of them in my entire programming history.
One of them made me laugh in public, one was so cool that i had to keep it in my game, and the last one (which i came across today) caused me to struggle between looking into its frustrating cause, and marvel at its awesomeness.


Bug #1
The first one came when i was trying to program an enemy to chase me around the screen.
This was during my first graphical project so i was a total know nothing head. At the time, I had no knowledge of vectors, so the movement of my enemy was super basic. The main issue was that every frame, the enemy would move up to your same x position. But if the enemy had a greater speed than the distance from your x position to his, then he would jump past you to the other side.

If i was 5 above the enemy, then the enemy would be told to move up.
So lets say the enemy had a speed of 10.
when the enemy moves up, he is now going to go from 5 BELLOW me to 5 ABOVE me.
and the next frame the enemy would be in the same position as before, just on the opposite side.
This would cause a crazy effect where the enemy would spaz out and move up and down super super fast (30 times a second).
So this whole thing was confusing me greatly and i had no clue why the enemy was being a spaz. So i decided to turn up the movement speed and see what would happen. I put it to something like 300 and then when i ran it i had this blur of color flying from one side of the screen to the other very fast.

And also the enemy would kill me in one hit.

so there i was, trying to frantically stop any contact from an enemy who darted across the screen 30 times per second. It was crazy, unexpected, and (to me) very funny.

I happend to think it was so funny that i started laughing in the middle of math class and everyone started looking at me all wierd. Needless to say, that quick blur soon killed me, and i was left with no other options but to turn down the movement speed and get on with my life.

Bug # 2
this one involved a new tower that i was working on for my tower defense game called the homing tower. It would shoot an orb that would follow the target until it made contact. The orb would then explode and damage the target.

I had the homing towers working for awhile when i happened to be messing with something and the collisions got disabled with the orbs and the enemies. This caused a (really) cool bug where the orb would fly to the enemy and pass right through, then turn around and go right back towards it. This one is very similar to Bug #1but a whole lot cooler.

So i was sitting there watching this awesome thing zig and zag its way around the enemy desperately trying to register some kind of collision that would end its meaningless existence. But I knew the collision would never come, and i also knew that this sporadic orb looked a whole lot like a fly. Which is when I thought something like: "Whoah!! thats awesome!! im gonna turn that into its own tower!"

Which is exactly what i did.

Bug # 3
This one was really cool, but not really feasible as an actual tower.
It happened when i was working on my new beam towers. In order to get their new attack type working, I had to change a bunch of general ways that attacks and targeting was handled.

After i got them working, I then tested the orbital towers again.

They didnt work.

So after fixing some of those "Not Cool" bugs, they were working again, but not the way that i was expecting.

The thing about the orbital towers is that the target of their shots is actually the tower itself. It constantly circles around the tower and tries to get down to its center (which some programming of their velocity and stuff has made sure) will never happen. Even though their target is the center, I have made it so anytime they hit an enemy, they will do damage.

So due to some label and naming errors, for some reason the target was not the actual tower, but became the nearest enemy they could find. This created a sort of cool effect because all of a sudden the shot would orbit around a moving enemy and it would move in more of a cork screw pattern instead of a real orbit.

This one took me a while to figure out the issue. and I would love to keep a tower like that in my game but it really cant hit anything. So until i can find a way to make it useful i guess i will just have to tell stories about it.

There you go, my 3 different "Cool" bugs.

wow this post is really long.
1051 words to be exact
thanks and have a nice day.