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!