Development Blog

Hello. Lack of updates, been insanely busy with school and what not. Had an interview with some top technical directors in the industry which I totally succumbed to pressure and failed to answer basic C++ questions to. However I learned a lot from this experience which I believe will make future interviews go a lot more smoothly.

Otherwise I added a new project that I’m messing around with here and there when I have time its called Dodge and Destroy. I didn’t get to cleaning up the code before my interview which cost me some points however I managed to clean up the source and make it a lot more nice! The game idea is inspired from geometry wars, I am using this project to mess around with OpenGL and some software engineering design patterns, as well as to have some fun!

As for tutorials, those are going on hold because of how busy I have been recently. Eventually they will come though; I want to restructure the design a bit, as my team and I will probably use some of the Tile Engine code when we port our game Dreams over to XNA. I cannot wait to get started on the design for that project! Eventually I believe we are hoping to get it up on XBLA and who knows from there what could happen! It would also be kind of rad to maybe port it to iPhone too but I am probably only saying that as I recently purchased one.

Anyway thats all I gotta say for now. Peace.

Finally added the installer for the 3D Pong program. Took forever (I know sorry) because of how busy I was with school and everything. But it’s up and everything.

In other news after all the headaches from doing this application for our school project, I got some advice from someone in the industry, and am thinking of working on a game project in C++ just to show on here. Anyways thats all I have to say for now.

Hello, just a little update on the tutorial. Well basically I’ve been really busy with school, and this next month will be absolutely insane as several group projects are going to be due by the end of the month. This means I have no idea when I am going to get to write up the tutorial about tile engines, but it will be coming.

When I have had a chance to do some coding outside of things for school, I’ve realized my tile engine is kind of turning into a part of a game engine which I am going to write. Note: the tutorial I am writing is going to go over concepts, and have small code samples to give you the idea behind how it works, and why tiles are great for creating levels in 2D games.

Also I am looking into creating a level editor for my engine which I may post up under projects, but that may not be done until later in the spring when I have time to sit down and do a lot of coding.

In other news still no SC2(Starcraft 2) beta key for me :(. This is probably a good thing because that game would probably take over my life haha. Also for any people who enjoy eSports, theres a chance that MLG may add SC2 to their league, which is HUGE. As of tonight they are uploading their first show match between Artosis and EG.Louder onto their youtube channel so check it out!

Been really insanely busy with school work and haven’t had much time to work on Coins. However its reading week this week, and my parents decided to randomly show up and bring me back up north for the week.

I’m hoping to finish up a lot of my school work during this time because as I have said its been insanely busy. However at the same time I am thinking about writing up a XNA//general 2D game development tutorial on Tile based games, and how to create a good “tile engine” that you can use in general for any type of tile based game. I am doing the tutorial in C# and XNA for simplicity however it can be easily reproduced in C++ using DirectX or other graphics libraries. It’s the idea thats important!

Anyway that is about all I have to say for now besides GO CANADA Vancouver 2010. Peace.

So I haven’t been updating lately because school has just been really really intense. Probably shouldn’t be on here right now but I’m taking a study break.

I’m currently thinking about putting up this small pong game I made a few years ago using XNA. I have to update some of the code though, but all in all should be easy to put up. The only reason I’m only considering this is because its very basic, while I love it, it’s still basic.

Also today Mass Effect 2 came out, and just wow. I was a huge fan of the first game, and having the ability to import my save file from the first game and seeing how my decisions affected the world is just .. really immersive. Only playing a couple hours into Mass Effect to I already feel like the decisions I’m making in that world really really have a huge impact. I also so far love the new combat system and am glad they got rid of that annoying inventory system. BioWare has really impressed me again, I haven’t felt this kind of immersion since the first Mass Effect or Fallout 3. Really wishing that I could have gotten the collectors edition but the store was sold out :(.. anyway really worth the price, amazing game so far.