Kevin.Life.Update(fDeltaTime);

So I have tons to talk about and I apologize for neglecting you my sweet sweet Tumblr and followers. So on the agenda for this post (not in order) is my on-site interview with an awesome game company, the impending release of Scott Pilgrim vs The World, and just general life.
So let me start with life! Life after college has been quite sssslowwwwwwwww. I’ve found myself sleeping in too late and just staring into space for a while. I’ve been trying to busy myself with working on side projects, researching new stuff, and applying to jobs. <-This really hasn’t picked up pace until this week.
My TWITTER life on the other hand is booming. I’ve been meeting quite a load of new people and overall just enjoying the experience that Twitter brings me. It’s been pretty awesome, Scott Pilgrim fans really know how to band together.
LAST WEEK ON THE OTHER HAND: Was pretty awesome, I hung out with people I never really had time to hang out with while in school. It was a nice kinda beginning of summer and end of school week. Earlier in the week I had received news that I was to fly out to a game development studio for an on-site interview and I was just over all ecstatic.
The interview went well I think. I had a few bumps here and there that really threw me off my axis but all in all I think I preformed pretty well. I’m not really at liberty to say what exactly happened there but just know that all of it was pretty awesome and it’d be an honor to work with these guys.
SOOOOO, THAT HAPPENED and then I flew back to FL to hang out at Kai Ting’s house for two days while I played the CRAP out of Scott Pilgrim vs The World: The Game. I must say, I haven’t been addicted to a game in quite sometime. This game isn’t even revolutionary it’s just such an amazing fan game that I can’t put it down. Co-op mode is probably the most fun though, there is so much replay factor in it when you have three other buddies playing as Sex Bob-omb and Ramona. I recommend it to anyone who is a fan of the series or wants to play a fun beat-em-up with friends.
The Scott Pilgrim Original Score and soundtrack remind me of a simpler time back in the high school days were me and someone I once cared about could just take long walks and forget everything. It really is a pretty strong soundtrack to me and it reminds me of time long gone but just still recently experienced. My life is flashing before me unfortunately. I hope it mellows out soon. I really want to go back to New York and visit all my friends again and just ya know, exist for a bit.
Impending awesome is just around the corner! I can’t believe that FOUR weeks ago I saw the pre-screening of Scott Pilgrim vs The World. Time really flies these days I guess…but yet so slow. I am giddy as a japanese school girl right now thinking about how amazing this movie was and how I get to watch it again! I really can’t wait for tonight. I get to meet up with my friends, have fun, watch and amazing movie, and just for a little…exist without a goal. Just enjoy myself and life. I’ve been applying to jobs a LOT lately and I already swore to myself that I am going to work on Bioshock 3 (now titled Infinite) so I need to break out the Unreal guides and start busting ass on both applying and learning.
It is so TOTALLY ON!

Life taking is taking the form of a sine wave...

I’m sitting here at 2:17am coming from working on my game eating the usual college dinner thinking “God, why am I so shitty? Why am I so bad at EVERYTHING!?”. Exaggerated? Maybe, but that is definitely my mindset right now.

I’ve had quite the last week and a half to say the least. Last week I was pulled back home to New York to help mend my family and get everything back in to one piece. Funny how that works out, the same boy who swore his family away and wanted nothing to do with them is now fighting to keep everything together. In the last few months I’ve grown closer to my family and have been warming up to the concept of accepting them. I really owe it to my mother, she has been holding my life together for so long now that I need to do my BEST for her in everything I do. So coming home to make her life easier, however detrimental it was for me and my work, was a no brainer.

Back on topic though, today I got an offer to take a programming test for quite the amazing game development studio. Instead of getting happy though, I panic and start thinking about how inadequate I am, how I am gonna bomb this test, and how I need to stress out about studying because I don’t know anything. It’s odd really, because I am confident in my own abilities and I know I am pretty good at what I do (I will never admit this in person) but for some reason I feel like I’m just incompetent when something important comes by.

This isn’t just programming though this is with everything.

I’ve said before I feel like a bad person. I truly feel like I am a bad person and maybe that’s because of my nature to constantly want to be the best and be disappointed when I am not. It’s not a competitive thing it’s just if I am capable of being something why not do it and do it to it’s maximum potential?
With programming it’s people who get super in-depth with architecture and low level stuff that really make me feel like I know nothing. I was near scared shitless about this test until I had a buddy of mine tell me how it was kinda like. (He couldn’t say much of course)

And as a person, well. An old friend of mine seems kinda down (from what I can tell) about some stuff they’ve been going through and said person even talked about re-vamping and improving. This is the same person I think is a perfect role-model for being an amazing Human. So if she’s feeling that way and I am nowhere near close to that.

Stuff like this kinda gets me down. Especially when I look at my past. I am not a good person, I’ve done shitty things, and I am not GOOD at things.

But despite all this there is that part of me that ignores that and just keeps on trucking. Keeps learning, revamping, improving, and growing. So even though I feel down about who I am and what I can do I WANT to do better.

I want to be better.

I’m kinda stuck in limbo on that. It’s a constant tug-o-war. Maybe it’s the stress of turning our gold build next Monday. Two whole years of hard work have come down to this. I’ve got half a week to panic, half a week to improve this game, and half a week to show people what I’m worth.

No biggie? Right?

When it rains...it pours.

It’s funny really, I was working in the studio stressed as it was and I got a phone call. I remember mumbling, “Already? Can I just get one second of work in?”. I had been quite busy all day answering questions doing the whole “Art Lesion” thing.
I went and answered the phone and moved over to the windows. I remember looking at the down pour and thinking “Man, it’s so fitting for things to go wrong today.” Unfortunately I was spot on, things did go wrong…and then they got worse.
I was pummeled, hammered almost, with tasks and requirements that made my already overwhelming tasks that much more stressful. I keep remembering in the back of my head though “I’ve done more with less, I can make this work. I am capable of it” but for some reason it didn’t translate to my actions. I broke down, I got angry, and I got sad. Something I’ve been doing a lot more of lately and is a characteristic I don’t really like. It’s something I’ve got to work past and overcome.
These issues though all precede the phone call I received. I have next week “off” from school but I was still planning to crunch for Gold turn in. I never planned on flying back to New York but after this phone call I knew I had to. Enough had happened that I knew I needed to be home with my family. I wanted to resist it, I wanted my family to keep strong without me, but after hearing my mothers voice today I realized I couldn’t anymore.
I won’t get into the specifics but this has been an issue that has been eating away at the foundation of my family for months. Divorces are never nice and it’s always more than the two parties involved that get hurt. Unfortunately for me and mine one of ours became a casualty who was caught in the cross fire.
I’ve made it clear that I am not coming back for pleasure and I am indeed still focused on my project’s gold milestone. My family is my priority though, they need me now and that’s all that matters.
I just wish the timing wasn’t as bad as it is. It’s time to clutch it, I hope I can do it all and not break down from the stress. GG ME :|

Changing time with an atom bomb...

This is probably one of my favorite quotes...

“Most believe that what’s done is done; you cannot change fate, no matter how hard you try. And those who challenge what is destined will always be met with disappointment, for fate has a way of charting its own course. But before one surrenders to the hands of destiny, one might consider the power of the human spirit, and the force that lies in one’s own free will”

                                                                                               -Michael Emerson

Inspiration...

Early in my life I was prone to ignore what was the norm for people. I always thought of myself as someone to whom the rules don’t apply. I was wrong. (we’ll get on that at another time) Influences and people I looked up to were one of those things I rejected. I never believed in someone else and I never looked up to someone else for motivation. (Obviously I was young and naive)
Today I spoke to an old friend about some exciting new changes in her life. She spoke of all the amazing things that may be coming and the outstanding things that she is doing with her life. I am left near speechless just reading the things she has devoted her time to. I always try my best to help people out but I am not ACTIVE in helping out others. I don’t go out of my way to do it. She does, she has done so much in giving back to the community and our youth. She really is someone to look up to as an inspiration to do better. She’s an example to lead by.
I always think that people are inherently good. I’ve been proved wrong many times but I always continue on with that thought because I knew there was someone out there that would prove me right.
I think I’ve found that one person. There is a shining light in the darkness. Lets hope I can find more like her to make that light brighter.

Why do I feel like it’s always on me to save the day?

I’ve noticed this trend with me. Maybe it’s because I was never a leader type back in my childhood. Nobody trusted me and nobody believed in me. Now here in FS people do and maybe I feel too much like it’s my obligation to do everything for everyone. To be THAT guy. I kinda stuck in limbo about how I feel about it too. I guess this is #oneaday right?

Day.Better()

So today started out horrible. I woke up after little to no sleep all grumpy like still feeling miserable. Our team had a meeting with Rob Coble the Career Development Industry Outreach Manager. He enlightened us on the resume building process and touched up on networking (a subject I happen to like).

Afterwords I got a text from my roommate notifying me that my electricity had gotten cut. This is a cause of an on going falling out between my two parents. Awesome, right? So on top of all of the crap this week I had that hit me. But things quickly got better as I was given a deadline. I work amazing under pressure so this was a blessing in disguise. I swiftly finished my task for my deadline and instantly felt better.

Soon afterward I met up with someone who I generally enjoy being with. This made me infinitely more happy as I went on to dinner. After dinner I came back and saw this person again just to get another dose of awesome.

Amazingly right after I got a text confirming that all of my issues this past week have been resolved and life can return to normal. It's like all of the weights on my back were suddenly lifted and I could work to my potential again.

Watch out final project, I'm back.

Meh.Feel();

I haven't been feeling so hot these last couple of days. I don't really know if it's from one reason or a multiple but SOMETHING IS causing it. I received some terrible news yesterday and I haven't really felt like working since then. I've been so angry and saddened that I can't really keep focus on this project. I really hope this changes because I WANT to make an amazing game and I WANT to be excited about work but as of right now I'm not. I feel like I'm constantly letting my team down as of late as I haven't really been on task these last couple of assignments. I mean I only have one more task to do but I feel like if life hadn't decided to crap on me I woulda had this done last week. I mean I can't even play the Halo: Reach beta anymore. I need to relax I think. I hope we meet code freeze so I can just get some time to myself.

Blog schedule.

As production picks up and the Halo: Reach beta goes on blogging will go down to a one day a week thing. Sorry :(

Impending Awesome!

So today was a pretty relaxing day in terms of work. A bit of my work that was planned for this milestone got changed around. Yesterday was interesting as our team had some issues with re-structuring our game but we had our EP come in and sort things out for us.

Feature Frag 1 is now about polishing and completing our CORE gameplay mechanics. As the rendering guy on the team I'm more tasked with fixing the art pipe line and helping out with feedback withing our game. All in all a short and sweet day!

Also the Halo: Reach Beta starts early tomorrow for special people! I hope I get in early! I really can't wait to play the game, it looks like they've improved so much on their last game! A ton of the new gameplay mechanics have me excited! Anyways, thats all for tonight!

Cathedral.Built("Yeah, we did");

So the proof of concept milestone presentations went extremely well! Dark Matter is looking quite nice if I do say so myself. After long team-wide 19 hour crunch days for the last 5 days we all took the night off to relax and rest up for whats to come. I DID say that we at Avant-Garde were going to be SPRINTING towards our goal of finishing Dark Matter and blowing people away.

While we have hit our fare share of blockers it seems that we have been able to overcome them time after time. We no longer have team issues for now, we recovered our build from an alienbrain crash mid submission, AND our artists were able to re-rig and edit the assets just in time for a late sunday submission.

Unfortunately we had to push past code freeze because of our set backs but they extra time really allowed us to push our idea on to the players and show them what exactly we're about doing. The next two days will be filled with modifying the technical documentation and fixing bugs/hacks in our code base.

It's been a tough week. Good night.

"Assembling a cathedral out of a hurricane"

Yesterday I ran what we call in the video game industry a "crunch". Well whats a crunch? Why is it useful? Why is it bad? Is it a bad sign? Fear not readers. I'm going to answer all of these questions.

What is a crunch?
Essentially a crunch is when a person works and pours hours and hours past the scheduled and mandated work to get their work done/make their work better.
Why is it useful?
Crunch, for the most part, makes you get your shit together. Crunch happens usually around a milestone turn in. Be it an internal milestone or an external one crunch is when you devote every second of those days before the turn-in to working. I LOVE crunch because I work amazing under pressure. Crunch, however, takes a toll on your quality of life. Make sure you plan a crunch before a free day. Coma days are amazing.
What is a coma day?
A day you devote to sleeping past 12 hours.
Why is a crunch bad?
During crunch it's possible to completely break your game. Crunch is spawned by a multitude of reasons: Your behind on your work, you want to cram as much as you can into your game, or you need to do other peoples work to do yours.
Is it a bad sign?
Usually crunch is a bad sign. Unless it's voluntary. 

So why am I talking about crunch?
Yesterday I worked a 19 hour work day. With only 3 hours of sleep before then and when I woke up for today's 8 hour work session. I got my work done a day ahead of schedule AND I was able to get it into our build.

So our game has rendering now which is amazing but we're behind. VERY, VERY BEHIND. I've been stressed but now I am trying VERY, VERY hard to keep cool. Today I'm going to rest for a long time before tomorrows work session. I'm crunching again, I WANT a good game.

Hurricane warning:
So today myself, Brian my teammate, and David another teammate had an incident. This revolved around some personal attacks from David to myself and Brian and we weren't going to put up with this. The way we were attacked today is completely un-professional and un-acceptable. I'm dissapointed with not only what happened today but also how it affected our work cycle today. Constant setbacks aren't a good thing and we need to get ready for POC or FF1 is going to end up just as poorly.

I'm just going to use tonight to relax, calm down, and relieve stress. I'm enjoying today as much as I can because I know for the next 3 months I'm going to be SPRINTING to this gold turn in. I want this project to shine like nothing else before it and to pull this off we need to remove blockers like incidents like these and potentially, if it comes down to it, the people behind it.

I've spent two years of my life training to be able to do this. This project is my statement of what I learned and what I can do and I am not going to let ANYONE get in the way of that. If I have to crunch everyday I WILL. I am dedicated to this industry and I want my feelings and goals to be reflected in this game. I hate to sound so cut throat but that's how I need to be.

These two years of my life are GOING to be sent out with a bang. Of this I promise myself and my family who have supported me.

I apologize for this turning into a rant but I've got very, very mixed feelings right now.

Said a wise man: Life is a chessboard of nights and days...

"Said a wise man: life is a chessboard of nights and days. Where God, using men as his pawns, plays. Hither and thither moves, and checkmate, and slays, and one by one he places them back in the box. For each pawn has its fate, as does each player, as does God. Fate will be met."

Before I get into the video above I'll talk about production at Team Avant-Garde. We're finally back on track for the production cycle which is nice.

Sadly, however just as soon as we get back on track our deadline is effectively pushed up. On Wednesday we need to have a playable demo of our game which effectively means my time to work was cut down a day.
I ran into minor annoyances with the team today. One person kept bugging me every five seconds only to argue about meaningless things. He said some things I didn't agree on but I let him be. If it causes issues later on then the proof will be self evident.

It's going to be a very VERY hellish week until code freeze on Saturday morning.

As for the video and quote, I cannot tell you how much this has caused me to be creatively motivated the last couple of days! I've got a burst of creativity that cannot be contained! I've started up viral marketing for my game.

Our Main character Mark is on a search and rescue mission and his ship gets attacked by aliens. Our viral marketing takes place after this, where Mark's brother Dimitri who is a news anchor starts exposing the truth about what happened. The UEC is dismissing all of Dimitri's comments but Dimitri will soon get some help. :D

As you can see I'm in full creative mode! I just need to finish my renderer before wed...this'll be fun.

Sometimes, things go wrong.

Today the team I am a part of, Team Avant-Garde, had our Technical Design Document reviewed.

To say the least I am saddened, in disbelief, and slightly angry. Instead of production we have to go back to fixing the Tec Design Doc and STILL do the proof of concept(POC) coding. I already feel pressured for time and this doesn't quite help at all.

I've been boxed in as of late. I feel slightly pressured to get my work done ahead of time because people NEED it to do their work. Problem is, it hasn't been assigned to me yet.

So on top of being ushered along to finish our work early I've got people depending on me finishing my code fast so they can get back to work. Top this off with fixing all of our issues with the TDD and I'm very, VERY stressed.

But it's not all bad. I'm looking forward to BLOWING MINDS with our POC. If we meet the milestone we'll have a very nice game by the end of Feature Frag 1(Milestone acceptance for 100% of our core gameplay).

I guess I gotta keep trucking.


Oh and side note: I got mentioned at a networking seminar the other day by Darius Kazemi. Thought that was pretty cool :D

Halo 2 signs off tonight. Oh an production stuff

Today was quite an interesting work day. Official first day of production started today and it went amazingly well. I was assigned to the Texture Manager which is a two day task. I ended up nearly finishing it even though I was taken off times to work on some touch up technical documentation.

Our External Producer and Art Director were pleased that we planned out more than half of our core for POC. Our EP and AD said the fact that we are naturally challenging ourselves and that we have consistently good things is a very good sign.

All in all a great work day.

Side note:

Halo 2 signs off tonight with a HUGE bang. Bungie has promised Halo: Reach goodies to everyone who plays. I used to be a competitive gamer in the past and Halo 2 was a HUGE chunk of my life back then so re-playing it tonight is going to bring back great memories.

Thats all for tonight!

Murphy's Law and My SGP Experience

"Anything that can go wrong will go wrong".
- Murphy's law

How odd that this saying becomes a law when you start working in a creative industry like Video Games. For the last month, I've been plagues with certain establishments over charging my credit card, bills not getting paid because my money had up and left my account, and just today my electric was cut off temporarily because of certain personal issues back home. How does this relate to video games and the development cycle? Easy, prior to heading into my five month final game project I had little to no issues in this area. This "law" plays an intensified effect on the programmers in this industry especially. ANYTHING, could go wrong when programming for a game and if the proper steps aren't taken to avoid these issues ahead of time then ANYTHING and EVERYTHING WILL go wrong.

I speak from experience in this area, during a three day crunch before "gold" turn in for my two month Structure of Game Production (SGP) class EVERYTHING went wrong. Entire features got cut, downsized, or down right re-written. It's like a train loosing control and shooting towards the end destination. We didn't crash horribly but we crashed. We burned our gold disc on the ride to our expo and finished burning the disc as we pulled up to the entrance. I slapped the disc in it's case and SPRINTED towards the door. As I got to the door and opened it Keyvan our instructor grabbed the disc from my hand and escorted me in. Talk about cutting it close, we were technically late but we were hoping our sacrifices in sleep and time would make up with our finished product.

Remember Murphy's law? Well when you cut, reconstruct, and re-integrate full features into a game with no time to test them it comes back to bite you. Our game had crashes in certain section due to some hacking and assets being re-written during our final integration. When the bat enemies attacked and hit you it would sometimes cause the game to crash due to a subscript out of range error. It was slightly embarressing to have our game collapse on some people due to this. Also, our menu system was re-designed the night before and because of this certain features weren't implemented and sometimes it would lock up on the player.

Luckily our game had a very good amount of content and polished aspects to it that we were able to stay afloat from the wreckage and come out with knowledge if nothing else. I think myself, Kai Ting, Ercan, and David all came out of that experience a little wiser and sadly slightly bitter. We now know, fear, and treat the development cycle with respect. This may cause us to come off as strict or picky within certain aspects but it's because we've been bitten by the development cycle and are trying to prevent those events from unfolding again.

NOTE: One thing I am really proud of is how close our game is to our concept art.

Here's some photos from our game Tainted Ink:
CONCEPT IMAGES:

GAMEPLAY SCREENS:


Tainted Ink is an Tattoo influence action/adventure platforming game for Windows XP and higher.

New York Tomorrow, Tech Docing

So I just found out this week that I am heading back to New York. Amazing-ish! I LOVE the fact that I am going home but I won't be able to enjoy it as much as I have to do Tech Doc assignments over the break. Once I finish those I have to research some new tech for our game.

I'm doing the Rendering, Menu, and Scene Managment module breakdowns as well as memory maps for each module. This should be fun! Anyways, this post was short and sweet!

Really this isn't a break but class work without the class. At least I get to see some friends and my dog right?????



[EDIT] HEY CARLOS, I DIDN'T HIT PUBLISH LAST NIGHT AND JUST REALIZED THIS. I'M REALLY SORRY - Kevin 4/3/10 3:20pm

Amazing day,,,surprisingly

I'm postponing the the second part of my Long road, short trip story until Friday. Today I want to talk about how for the first time in about two weeks I felt motivated. I know I know, this sounds bad but I'll explain.


So for the first time in two weeks, I felt motivated. Not just "hey we gotta do this because it's assigned" but more like "I WANT TO DO THIS. I WANT THIS TO BE AWESOME" and I think that is largely due to the fact that I am warming up to my team more and more. It's hard to become friends with people when you are forced into it. We clash and have fun and there really isn't a balance. Today, our team meshed so rediculously well it felt awesome just working with them. Some of us were sick but even so I felt like we could do ANYTHING we wanted to. It really was an amazing day.


Lets hope this carries on 'till tomorrow night!

Long road, short trip [Part 1]

I broke this up into two parts for the sake of readability. Or salvaging it at least, I will upload part two tomorrow.


So today I was asked why I came to Full Sail University. This is a tricky question to answer because of how long I've been involved with games as a whole.

Ever since I was a youngin' I've wanted to do SOMETHING with games and I think I really got the hint that I wanted to make games was after playing Final Fantasy 7. At the time I was too young to understand what the development process entailed but I was dumbstruck; I loved this medium and I NEEDED to work in it.

I started early with developing games. I had messed around with Game Maker, Multimedia Fusion, Flash, and of course The Games Factory. All these stemmed out from wanting to do sprite flashes.

For those of you un-aware with sprite flashes they are flash animations created using video game sprites. Mostly used for parodies of games but sometimes people used these to tell EPIC large scale stories. I was a fan of the latter.

So I went and messed around with Flash and Fireworks and gained some pretty basic skills in both. Little did I know how much these skills would pay off during my time here at Full Sail.

After getting tired and not really wanting to learn Flash and Fireworks I quit them both and moved on to MAKING games using TGF (The Games Factory).

Now before I went on to using TGF as my primary middleware I looked into Game Maker and MMF(Multimedia Fusion) because MMF was actually out at this point. MMF required me to know how to script and at this stage in my life I was scared of coding or math. This automatically discounted Game Maker as a viable tool because I didn't know how to do that either.

I had heard of TGF from playing Super South Park Brothers or something like that and Megaman vs Link I think it was. Anyways, the attraction screen at the end stating it was made by TGF caught my interest.

I noticed that TGF used a click board just like Klik n Play which I had experience with from my past. I was golden, CreateGames.Do() right???

Sorta...

My projects in this range are as follows:
Zero the 8 Bit Hero:
This game was a spin on the Megaman X series but was a semi satire. The plot is that zero was transformed into an 8 bit older version of himself and can only use his buster. He must navigate through Sigma's evil lair and destroy him to be restored. <- Lame amirite?

Luigi gets revenge:
Using my Zero the 8 Bit Hero board I made some revisions and made the board all together better and added in some new features like saving and menu screens. I was progressively getting better at making these games.

I think the next one was called mario's nightmare and this one was a staple to all the things I had learned since starting.

It had saving, menus, levels with multiple enemies and moving platforms, boss battles, and a sequel that had...CUT SCENES. I'm nearly tearing up from all the memories.

Mind you that all these projects had been finished. I had several that were under development but I never got to finish before I quit game development for fear that I wasn't good at it, couldn't code, and sucked at math. These projects were a sequel to Zero the 8 Bit Hero, another Megaman X clone, a Metroid Game, Final Berserk Brawl which was a fighter, an earthbound RPG that was one of the greatest pieces of tech I had written at that time...or clicked, and a conceptual project called Break! that came in two versions. Code Blue and Red, each having their own stories that tied into each other.

Break! was about the "Nintendo Sprite Servers" being hacked into by a virus and you played as the anti-virus software on the server. You had to traverse through all of the Nintendo game "worlds" to track down this virus. I never got to making this game but I would have LOVED to do it.

Back on track though...

As you can see I seriously loved game development. But I wasn't good at coding and at the time I was terrible at math. I had very poor grades and I didn't care about school. What followed next just made my grades worse. I got into competitive gaming....


To be continued in part two tomorrow!

Bioshock 2: "They Called It Rapture" - Mark Meltzer

BIOSHOCK 2 SPOILERS FOLLOW:
RANDOM BLABBERING ENSUES AS WELL:
Hello again oh vast emptiness of the net, I've come to bring you new insight on the universe. Actually, I'm here to talk about Bioshock 2 and the impact of it's story. Allow me to preface this post with this: I adore the this game, and the original to no measurable extent. That said Bioshock 2 was an amazing game overall; rendering, gameplay, and audio all came together beautifully.

Viral Marketing:
Noticed I left out the story? Yeah, I'm devoting the rest of this post to that. So first off Mark Meltzer; What an amazing thing to implement the viral marketing into the actual story of the game. Those of you that know me know I am a HUGE fan of Cloverfield mainly because of it's viral marketing.
See: Mark Meltzer (Bioshock Wiki)

Mark Meltzer's Journey:
So while I may have LOVED the story to death I do have my issues with it. Mainly Mark's story and how it was, to be frank, shafted. I felt that Mark could have been a HUGE factor with the games overall progression. He's the anomaly in the situation, a top-sider who most definitely didn't belong. Mark's search for Cindy lead him to Rapture; Arriving during the events of the game almost made it seem like Mark was supposed to shape the story in some way. Mark's fate, which I will leave out of this post, is disappointing to say the least. Mark had quite the potential to be a very important character and while his story was told it could have been more widespread. Mark's story I suppose was for the more hardcore fanbase.

Rapture's Lore and it's place in Bioshock 2:
Moving on now, Sofia Lamb, Andrew Ryan, and Fontaine. These characters, while directly and indirectly, caused a chain of events that eventually caused both the first and second game's stories to unfold. I loved that the writers for Bioshock 2 incorporated the lore of Rapture in such a way that this game felt as if it was an integral part of Rapture's storyline and lore. The writers almost make referring to Rapture give off the same feeling as referring to The Island from LOST. While I don't want to sit here and summarize what happened in the game I felt that with all the work done on Rapture's lore this game was going to be a definitive large scale story; Maybe this is why I felt underwhelmed. Bioshock 2 expanded Rapture's lore nearly ten fold and allowed us as the player to experience and explore areas we had only heard about. For this I <3 you 2K Marin.

Can epic stories be on a small scale:
My biggest gripe is the feeling I got after completing Bioshock 2. As far as story telling goes the writers did an amazing job; but, yet I feel underwhelmed, empty, and thinking “Is that it?.” My biggest gripe with it was the fact that they developed so much of Rapture's lore and the major characters behind it but yet they chose to hone in towards the end and tell only the story behind Eleanor's estranged family. I understand that Eleanor's family are essentially the new Ryan's of Rapture but I still feel as if something more could have been done with the story. Tenenbaum's involvement was too short for her to be justified to be included in the story; However, the sheer fact that she was included made me feel like they were obligated to tell a large scale story. Maybe it's because I am so partial to the original game that I feel the need to have some as epic as it was. Bioshock 2 is epic in it's own right but I still have the odd feeling of more needing to be done; As if my job was incomplete.

Maybe it's just me, don't get me wrong I love the game:
I absolutely LOVE this game and I will continue to do so forever. It left me feeling the same way Watchmen did. The writers told their story and told it well. As a player, however, I felt as if I failed to achieve a true ending to the game. Maybe this was intentional; maybe they wanted me to feel this way to relate to Eleanor. Either way, the game was amazing and I hope you all buy it and enjoy it!

I'll be updating this again soon with more content on my education, life, or whatever. Thanks again!

Night.Do("Work");

Excuse me as I butcher the English language:

Where to begin? Tonight was such a night; I guess it all started with the power outage at Full Sail. So this month I am taking a Networking class that deals how one would create internet/network capable programs.

Using an API called WINSOCK; WINSOCK is close to Unix net coding/base level of other APIs so what we're learning is more the concepts of networking rather than the API itself. I was in lab coding away at my server for a chat program when the teachers let us free to leave. I turn to my friend Tovar Shoaf and ask if he wants to stay and code lab, coincidentally enough the power goes out and I am forced to leave (as my battery is broken and I have no power for my laptop).

So I choose to go home and code some more on my server (secretly plotting to play Bioshock 2 and watch LOST instead), but alas my internet was down! I then came to the conclusion that this was the PERFECT opportunity to code my lab, and just as I was finishing up Tovar called me.

Tovar asked if I would like to come to the gym and work out; we had been discussing this before. I again took this as the PERFECT opportunity to do so and went along.

After a nice work out I come home and start talking with Josh, another one of my classmates, about what my plans for the night were. Amazingly then my internet comes back as if a reward for doing my work like I should have.

Suffice to say, tonight was not only productive but satisfying. Maybe I will keep this trend up???

Seeing as I am nearing final project I suppose I'll update this blog more often. I'll be uploading my past projects soon! So stay tuned!

Quote.Awsome();

“Most believe that what’s done is done; you cannot change fate, no matter how hard you try. And those who challenge what is destined will always be met with disappointment, for fate has a way of charting its own course. But before one surrenders to the hands of destiny, one might consider the power of the human spirit, and the force that lies in one’s own free will”

Vertex Decls :(

//The below code is entirely wrong. Don't use it
//This is an example of how OFF my vertex DECL was.
//Lets say I learned my lesson and learned some SWEET
//STUFF about D3D in the process
D3DVERTEXELEMENT9 decl[] =
{
{0,
0,
D3DDECLTYPE_FLOAT3,
D3DDECLMETHOD_DEFAULT,
D3DDECLUSAGE_POSITION,
0},

{0,
sizeof(D3DXVECTOR3),
D3DDECLTYPE_D3DCOLOR, /*COLORS!? DELICIOUS!*/
D3DDECLMETHOD_DEFAULT,
D3DDECLUSAGE_COLOR,
0},

{0,
sizeof(D3DXVECTOR3)+sizeof(D3DXCOLOR),/*EW*/
D3DDECLTYPE_FLOAT2,
D3DDECLMETHOD_DEFAULT,
D3DDECLUSAGE_TEXCOORD,
0},

{0,
sizeof(D3DXVECTOR3)+sizeof(D3DXCOLOR)+sizeof(D3DXVECTOR2),/*even more EW*/
D3DDECLTYPE_FLOAT3,
D3DDECLMETHOD_DEFAULT,
D3DDECLUSAGE_NORMAL,
0},

D3DDECL_END()
};