Study now, party later?

The semester is coming to a close and with that comes exams and the busiest time of the year. However, it also feels like the end and that means we're close to the break. So the next 2 weeks is going to be a constant effort to balance time. It is very important to take enough time to study enough for all of my 5 exams but there is something to be said for downtime as well. 

If I were to study non stop for the next 2 weeks I would probably come out the other side in pretty rough shape which is definitely not ideal. The same goes for the other way, if I neglect to study and get caught up doing something unproductive, I would likely not be here next year... So there needs to be a balance. I have spent many hours in the library the last 2 weeks and this has helped a lot allowing me to get a head-start on my studies rather than just studying a few days before. 

So over the next 2 weeks I will be studying to the point that I feel comfortable that I know enough for my exams and in my downtime I will be playing the Sega Genesis I just picked up for fun. I also have to catch up on Game of Thrones so I'm going to do that as well.

Almost there!

Hopefully I don't end up like Dexter
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGlOAzKpJDk

Gamecon Done! EXAMS EXAMS EXAMS!!!!!

So Gamecon went really well! We had a great turn out and lots of people played our game! We had a high score board to to try and get people to compete for the #1 spot to which a few people really took to and played multiple times. Also having a controller was a great addition as more people are more comfortable playing games on controllers than on keyboard and mouse. We were very happy with our showing!

The next step is, I think we are going to try and publish our game on mobile. We feel that we have a good idea and it would be perfect to port over to the Android and IOS platforms. This would probably be done on Unity so this might be a big investment from us if we want to take it to the next level. So I hope that works out!

Another bit of news, our programmer has decided to take next year off to pursue making his own games and work for a year. So best of luck to him!

Finally, the first exam is next Monday (Accounting) so studying is in full swing. Busy week, busy year, almost done!  

GAMECON!

We did it! We are in for Gamecon! Going to be a busy week but I'm glad we made it! Now time to polish our game and get it ready! This week we are adding controller support and lots of shaders to make our game look interesting! For me personally I will be doing more things with sound design and getting us set up for the showcase. This will be things like printing flyers, planning a booth, and helping with controller support.

We think it will be much better if we get our game running with a controller at Gamecon so we can hand something physical to people viewing the games. It will also help us (hopefully) stand out.

Also this week I am really crunching down on the studying. I figure the best way to do well is to start early instead of the day before. I am caught up on my notes and I just need to get review notes together then go through text book problems. Hopefully all goes well, I am looking forward immensely to 3rd year!

Sorry for the short blog.

Sounds and The Final Product

A large part of this week has been recording sounds and implementing them into the game. We now have menu sounds and music playing when the game starts. The last thing we have to add is a death screen but we do have collision for when the player will die so that is already done we just need to add the end of the game. So sound is good to go!

Working towards a goal is a good thing to do. And this goal is to be considered for Level Up Toronto. We find out today if we make it and I have to say I'm feeling pretty good and pretty confident that we will make it! We have all our enemies (5 in total) loaded into the game and interacting with the player and our player is moving around, the score is going up, and it is actually a game now.

The next step after the school year ends is deciding whether or not to continue this game or make a new one and that will depend largely on how people view our final product at either gamescon or LevelUp. So depending on that we will decide to move forward or start something new.

Another thing I should note is I have started learning how to use unity and I must say it is immensely easy! I enjoy developing with it very much and even challenged myself to make a game every week. I will see if I can keep that up especially with exams approaching.

MIDTERMS ARE OVER!

It's official, midterms are over! And with the end of midterms comes the final stretch. This is crunch time for both the game and for school work. On the game side we now have movement in our new build and actual gameplay! So our game is now a game... kind of. We have movement and the score goes up but there are no enemies... or obstacles... or a menu. This is all happening this week so this should be the end of the "no gameplay" problem.

New Screen Shot

We added a new score counter as our previous one was just a place holder and was very ugly. (bright green)

Also this week after I finish some homework questions, (hopefully I get to 40 points this week) I will be adding our music and sound for the entire game. This will actually make our game have more immersion and add a level of detail. I have written 3 songs and done the menu sounds.

https://soundcloud.com/noahvannest/death-music (this is the music that will play when the player looses the game)

The last piece of the puzzle this week is finishing our animations for our character so that they can attack and slide on the walls. Our 3D artist/animator has been... slow in completing the animation so it's not there yet. We do have a way to load them in though so that's part of it already done.

Lastly we have a new idea for a level/boss fight. At one point a dragon will come from the bottom of the screen and eat the player. The player will think they have died and lost but then a boss vs. screen will flash and the walls will now become the inside of the dragon. The player has to battle to the top of the dragon and attack it's heart 3 times to defeat the boss.

So this is crunch time. The game is going to be done soon hopefully!

Shaders

I've been working on some interesting shaders this week for the game and others for homework questions. Doing this has given me a lot of practice with glsl coding and making myself familiar with shaders and lighting effects. I actually had a lot of fun doing this and would love to continue working on it for the rest of the semester to get our game looking very cool.

selective colouring shader (green)

Also this week, we have added shader support fully to our game and added better lighting and models. Though we now don't have any gameplay... so that is what's happening this week. Our game looks alot better now graphically which is a big plus.

before

after

Finally, we received notice that we are in the top running to go to level up which is great news! Our hard work is paying off! We hope to go this year it would be alot of fun.

Midterms!

It's midterm time... yay!

This is a good thing I guess. It makes me review everything so far and especially with reading week just before all of them. I have 5 in total the first being graphics, then accounting, then business... etc. They actually get easier as I go on which is always nice.

One point I wanted to bring up is; why don't we have a first semester reading week? It would make everything so much easier especially during the midterms of first semester.  I would have loved a break before our animation midterm. Would've been very helpful.

I do enjoy reviewing everything though. It is a good practice especially when I have already taken notes for the whole semester. Great way to stay on top of everything! So I am ready! Let's do this!

Homework

We are approaching the halfway point of the semester and with that it's time to start handing in some homework questions. While working on them I have encountered some problems mostly in the code heavy questions.

Dan is an amazing TA. He has been very helpful in every aspect and I have learned more from him than any other TA. That being said, with the homework questions we have been instructed not to hand in the same code as he gives us in the tutorials but he does some of the homework questions note for note in class. For example, the upcoming expiring question about the lighting has already been done in class but we are not allowed to hand it in as is. This is strange because there is only one way to do specific types of lighting... So how do we do them differently?

But it has been good for me. I have had to actually learn what we are doing in the class and that is definitely a good thing. I also really enjoy doing shaders which is a new thing to me. They are really cool and I enjoy visually being able to see things changing. Looking forward to the rest of this semester!

Kickin' it into Gear

So the framework on the game is done! Officially that is. We now have everything we need to load everything into the game. That means animations, models, sound, music, and everything else! This is a big step for us as our game is now underway officially. So here we go!

Last week we added .md5 file support which allows us to get animations into our game (i.e. no more static t-pose characters flying around screen) these files were the ones used in doom which is pretty neat. I loved playing doom as a kid... I'm amazed my parents would let me play it when I was so young. It's cool now that I finally understand how these games work and I'm making my own. Really opens my eyes.

DOOM

This step of getting fully animated models into the game is a big one. Our original goal for our game was to have a large variety of enemies that would appear on screen so we have to start working on getting one fully animated model into the game each week. This is going to be a large work load for our animator and artists.

Main character animation plans

As a side note... our lead level designer has decided to leave the course which is both sad and troublesome. He is a great friend who will be missed and a great level designer. This will add some strain on the rest of our team and we won't know until next week if we are getting a new member. There is also a chance our group will be dissolved into other groups... Which I hope does not happen because I am really enjoying this years game. We will miss you Colin.

Fort Fortnight Studios 2013 (Not pictured, Josh Liew)

So this is a bit of a curve ball but I think we got this. We are all close friends and just like doing the work so here we go! Things are finally underway!

To end.... a joke. This is a little relevant to last week's blog talking about work loads. (I'm not sure why he' holding a sword in this picture...)

Time Management

Being the producer of my game development team can sometimes be a challenge. Sometimes people don't want to work or don't feel motivated or even feel like there's to much work to be done. So when dividing work up to give to each member of a team it is important to take this into consideration. This week my programmer is working on getting our frameworks done so we can properly code. This involves a lot of changing our current code and making cuts where the code is either using outdated tech or just sloppy. I thought this would not be a very difficult task but I was very very wrong.

5 days later and now we have a framework (more or less) but there is still a lot of code running through the CPU instead of the GPU. This makes our code slow and causes our game to take almost a full minute to compile. The worst part is our game is not very big with only a few models and hardly any animations. So what to do? My programmer is still ironing out details regarding the framework and my other programming competent artists are busy modelling away and animating. So I have started optimizing our code.

I am by no stretch a good programmer so this is a bit of a challenge for me. So far I am just reading up on how to do this. Converting our old openGL code into newer openGL code and figuring out where I can send data to the GPU for faster processing. This (stating it nicely) is driving me crazy. Taking old code and making it better is by no means a fun time for me but I am doing it. Slowly but surely I am doing it.

But where did this problem start? Why am I doing the job I asked my programmer to do? Well... It's due to time management. I underestimated the amount of work it would take to get our framework up to snuff and therefore I am picking up the extra work the needs to be done. I am by no means complaining that I have to code because I do like making a game and working on it but it was poor planning on my part to put excess work on others. So from here on out I will be rethinking my work divisions for my group.

This has been a bit of a serious blog so here's a programming joke...

A guy walks into a bar and asks for 1.4 root beers.
The bartender says "I'll have to charge you extra, that's a root beer float"
The guy says "In that case, better make it a double."

Week 1 Complete!

The first week of classes is done and I am looking forward to the next 4 months. Though some of them will be very challenging there is no reason they cant be overcome by work ethic and determination. This week has mostly consisted of getting ahead in the reading and making sure the framework for our game is up to par. This has been a lot of finding libraries to use or base our work off of. I have been working really hard this week and I hope to keep it up. Go me!

I purchased all of my text books this week. A lot of my fellow students are surprised I did this as they use digital books and other methods of finding them. I did this because in all honesty, I am getting sick of looking at a computer screen for many hours a day. It is very bad for my eyes and I just prefer the structure of a book. Flipping pages feels more like progress than scrolling through a PDF. So, $500 later and I have some motivation to do well.

I have also been working hard on music for my game. As producer I am also in charge of the audio for the game. This means music and sound effects. (menu sounds, attack sounds, etc.) This has by far been my favorite part of this course so far. I love writing and creating music as I am a musician myself. Over the course of the next month I am working on bringing my drums and guitars to my apartment in Oshawa so I can record the music for the game.

TL:DR: I AM VERY BUSY!

Song For Game: https://soundcloud.com/noahvannest/game-song-1

First Blog!

It's the start of a new semester and with that comes a slew of new classes and new beginnings. A second chance to wake yourself up from your previous slump and get your stuff together. Sounds pretty great when you talk about it but what about doing it? Over the last 4 months and maybe even year and a half I have realized that you can try all you want but it means nothing unless you do. So this is it, I know Dr. Hogue said that everyone types about turning a new leaf in their first blog and then peters off towards the end but this can be solved through organization and goals. 

I guess that's what I'm really trying to get at. The importance of goals. Without goals it is very easy to get lost in your work to be done. Doing this work is key and doing it on time is even more important. This works on a personal level as well as on a team. Being the producer for my game development team means I have to organize peoples time for them and make sure they are all on track. 

My group is Fort Fortnight Studios. We are making an endless runner game hopefully sometime for mobile platforms. Though we have a good start to our game the next 4 months of development time will be spent giving our game a unique feel and interesting aesthetic. (Oh and also adding animations to our models... kind of important) Being a producer has allowed me to see what everyone is doing in the development process. I'm in a unique position because I have my foot in the door of everyone of my team members, overseeing and critiquing. This can allow me to be a better group organizer and help anyone that needs it in the group. 

That being said, I am very excited for this semester! I feel this will be the semester where our games will really come to their own. We can work on giving them our own flair and feel and make them ours. So, to new beginnings! (As cliche as that sounds.)