Nicholas | January 24, 2012
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Monday, And Not Done

So it’s Monday (technically Tuesday morning) and I am not done Pazaak. That’s cause my couch has it out for me, and every weekend, as soon as I sit on it, I fall asleep. True story. I’m scared, send help.

However, I just sat here for about 2 hours and started tying up loose ends. By loose ends I mean ai. Yeah that was fun…

I’ve been keeping track of how long I’ve been working on this project, I started taking notes of what I did when I did it, but I was so busy working on it at those times, that I didn’t get time to post about it, hence my memory of EXACTLY what I did when is a little blurry.

I will say at the time of this post I have worked on Pazaak for approximately 24 hours and 15 minutes…so let’s call it 24 hours.

That includes a little bit of artwork and design on my part, but VERY little. 99% of the art and design was Katlyn’s handiwork. Honestly, most of the time that I’ve spent on this project has been me redesigning the framework. Cause as the project went on, I realized how I should have been building stuff to make life easier in the long run. And this is why I like zerging prototypes out in Flash. As much as I really want to dislike Flash, and it being on it’s descendancy and dying and all that, I really do appreciate it for what it is, a R.A.D. tool.

So at this point, I would like to say that I’m at maybe 80% complete, or at least as far as I would like to get before “releasing” it. Still to do:

  • Add betting and keeping track of your money/credits.
  • Adding a “campaign” to give the game a direction and purpose.
  • Adding tooltip pop up windows that the player will use to enter bets.
  • Adding a store to buy more cards. (with in-game money).

I’m sure there is more, but I’ll remember it as I go along and scope creep rears its beautiful head and spits in my face to remind me of other shit that I wanted to get in the game.

But for now, I would like to say that I’m in beta. Mainly cause I need some people to beta test the game, specifically the AI.

Now, I go on my couch to watch some tv and then to sleep.

-Nicholas

Category: Game Projects, Gaming, Pazaak | Tags: , , , ,
Nicholas | January 18, 2012
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New Year, New Project(s)

So XNA is over. And on to Animation and Modelling. Which means I have a little more free time to program on the side. So naturally, I started a new game.

Last year some time, a friend recommended I recreate Pazaak. The card game from Bioware’s Knights of the Old Republic. After looking into it, I found many sites with the actual game online. So people have already ported it, but I figure why not still do it. It’ll be an interesting game format to wrap my brain around. I figure at the start I’ll do it in flash to get the prototype done and understand what I will need to make the game how I want it. Later on I hope to port it over to other platforms, but we’ll see.

I started Pazaak yesterday and spent maybe about 2 hours getting some artwork done (by Katlyn) and organizing and figuring out some structure and placements for the game. After that, I spent another 4 hours or so getting the card art implemented and moving around via dragging. It’s coming along swimmingly. Getting the card to drag around on the mouse cursor was a fun thought process. Feels good having that working.

Sadly, I realized while lying in bed that I could (and would need to) change the entire structure that I currently have to optimize code and simplify things.

So tomorrow I get to restructure everything. Should be an enjoyable time.

Other than Pazaak and my game projects, I am also still heading the RAID project in triOS. I started a project amongst the students (mainly the afternoon students, i.e. noobs). The aim of the project is to have a game that we could all be happy with, that everyone worked on. Headed by a student as opposed to a teacher, I hope will take some of the pressure off of the responsibilities of the project.

So far, the students are very enthusiastic and are working pretty hard. It’s tough to really get the ball rolling though, as the noobs don’t know how to code yet. So it’s a matter of trying to teach them, and also guide them and show them how group projects work. So on top of learning how project managers and SVN’s work, I am trying to get them to get used to working with their peers, and within a group.

Personally, if I had this type of thing around when I had just started school, I think it would’ve helped a lot. It would have at least helped Rob and the other teachers, since we would’ve had a headstart on the work, and understood the basics more before we were actually taught them throughout the program.

Anyway, for now, I leave with that. Before the end of the weekend I should be able to post a little more, maybe have a screenshot or two for Screenshot Saturday.

-Nicholas.

Category: Flash, Gaming, General Information, Pazaak, RAID | Tags: , , , , , ,
Nicholas | December 31, 2011
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Happy New Year!

Last post of the year. Thought I’d recap my year. At least the highlights. I’m sure I’ll forget some good stuff, but no one else will ever know. :)

This year was particularly good for me. School was great. I officially learned to code, and started coding. At this point I probably have eight to twelve games/prototypes under my belt. Some from class projects, but most from side projects that I decided to work on myself.

I officially found my place in life in coding. I realized quickly that I really enjoy it, and this is what I want to be doing, and I’m good at it. This time next year, I should be part of the working force within the video game industry, and it’ll be awesome.

I also met MANY cool people this year, all within the Toronto’s game circle and industry. Twitter played a huge part in that. That’s where most of the communication takes place. Such a great tool for networking. That Rob guy really knew what he was talking about. ;)

I beat a couple games this year too. Amazingly. I wish I had it in me to “review” them, but I don’t. Maybe 2012 I’ll do that. If I beat a game, I’ll give my completely unbiased opinion on it.

Game I beat this year (from what I remember) in no particular order:

  • Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood
  • Mass Effect 2
  • Uncharted 3 (BEST GAME EVAR)
  • Batman: Arkham Asylum
  • Gears of War 3
  • Ocarina of Time 3D
  • Super Mario 3D Land (For 3DS)
  • Mario Kart 7
  • Jamestown
  • God of War 3
  • Castlevania: Lords of Shadow

I’m sure there may have been a couple more, but these are all that I remember. And now that I look at the list, I beat a decent amount of games this year, I’m proud. Cause I don’t normally beat games, far less even play them after I buy them.

For 2012 I want to try to maybe make a prototype/game every month. (Or at least 12 games for the year, whichever one is easier). This does not include anything made FOR class.

Apart from that resolution, I have a couple others that I’m working on that I don’t feel like sharing. So yeah…

Anyway, for those couple of people that actually read these posts, I wish you a very Happy New Year. I hope it’s as productive and successful for you as it should be. Take care of yourselves and be safe.

Here’s to a safe and productive 2012! \o/

-Nicholas.

Category: General Information | Tags: , ,
Nicholas | December 19, 2011
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Trinidad & Updates

So I’m back home in Trinidad for the holidays. I have had many things happen since last post, and I really need to talk about them. But right now, I’m lazy. So I figured I’d write a post about the post that I’m going to write next time I write a post. SMRT aint I?

So here are the things next on the post itenirary…

GPC game and its process of creation. New people met over the last few weeks, and how awesome they are. XNA 3D project(s). A new project that I started in association with the school. Holidays in Trinidad.

I think that’s about it. I also have to start thinking about what my 2011 recap post will be recapping. It was a good year, there’s a lot I could write about.

But for now, I’m gonna lie down and maybe watch some Breaking Bad. I’m trying to beat two games this week, I won’t say which two yet, cause I don’t want to jinx it. So I started to play the first one a little while ago, but I started to fall asleep immediately, as usual. So tomorrow I start a rage run through.

Bai!!

-Nicholas

 

P.S. Trinidad is still too frigging hot.

Category: General Information | Tags: , , , , , ,
Nicholas | December 10, 2011
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GPC, XNA And The Like…

With one more week of class left in the year, I am working on my submission for GPCv10. The themes are “Dreams” and “Collectibles”. These are actually the themes from the very first GPC. As this is the one year anniversary of the GPC they chose those themes as sort of an homage to the inception of the challenge. (See what I did there? Inception, dreams…forget it.)

The concept that Katlyn and I came up with got slightly out of hand, but I think I got through the majority of it tonight. I won’t explain anything about it. Especially since there are really only three more days left in the challenge, so you’ll see it soon enough.

Also, if you aren’t following Katlyn on twitter, do it now. Best artist EVARR!!! And coolest person I’ve met, since I met myself many many years ago that time that I came back from the future… More on that yesterday.

Other than the GPC, I have a class project going on in school. It started this week. I, of course, have a bunch of shit on my plate. So I gotta finish up this GPC and start working on that stuff. I go back home to Trinidad next Saturday. I’ll be there till the new year, so I hope to get the majority of that work done while down there… in the heat. (vomit).

Anyway, I’m either going to sleep, or start coding the next part to this game. Soooo much left to do. Not sure if I’ll get it done, but I’ll sure as shit try. I’ll post a screen shot tomorrow for #ScreenshotSaturday.

For now…. Peaz.

-Nicholas.

 

Category: Dreamers, Game Projects, Game Prototype Challenge, General Information | Tags: , , , , , , ,
Nicholas | December 4, 2011
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Drunk People

Drunk people are funny.

Reason: Cause I’m sober.

- Nicholas.

Category: General Information | Tags:
Nicholas | November 25, 2011
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“FAITHLESS” HUMANITY?

If you don’t know what the Scrawl Experiment is, go edumacate yourself… Or read my TL;DR explanation.

The words on the website ask a question, and you answer it via any medium of your choosing. You can write a short story, record a video, sing a song, make a game (this one I plan to do ONE day). I decided to make an effort and try to submit something. I wanted to make a game originally, but this “theme”/question would’ve required too many predetermined scenarios, and I didn’t really have too much time, or imagination to do it. Maybe I’ll still try to do something over the holidays. It’ll be interesting.

Anyway, just let it be known that I am in no way a writer. And I also rambled quite a bit on a tangent, but tried to keep the tangent applicable to the question.

Here is my Scrawl submission for the month of November.

 

When was the last time someone/something renewed your faith in humanity? What was it?

 

I don’t consider myself a cynical guy. I don’t generally have a lot of faith in the general populace, but every so often one or two surpass my expectations. Maybe it’s where I was born and lived out my formative years. That country’s general public doesn’t help anyone believe that the human race is one that you could place your faith in. I will admit though that when I moved to Canada, the people up here are a lot “nicer” than the public in Trinidad. And while being nicer doesn’t mean that I have faith that you would “help a brutha” out if I truly needed it, it does help me somewhat believe that there is hope.

The human race as a whole is slowly moving away from being one that faith could/should be placed in. There are a lot of factors that affect the “faithfulness” of humanity (that’s the word I’m going to use from now on, cause it’s easier), e.g. Religion, Politics, conspiracy theories…the list goes on, but I won’t dwell on many of them. My targeted topic is technology.

Technology is a very very necessary evil. There is no escaping it. It’s everywhere. And in this day and age, it’s needed by almost everyone just to live their everyday life. Being a geek myself, I love technology but that doesn’t mean that I don’t hate what people have made it into. And once again, this is a very broad topic so to narrow it down a little, I focus my attention to social networks and the like (not the “like” button mind you, although that is a huge dumb-factor of this whole scenario).

Humanity (for the most part at least) has put social networking on a pedestal. Of course I refer mainly to Facebook. People regard facebook as the be all and end all of all their information flow. Be it for news, or to find out when their “best friend’s” birthday is. And what do they do when they see breaking news on facebook? They click a “like” button, and go back to tending their crops on the very website. When it’s their friend’s birthday, they post on their wall, “HAPPY BIRTHDAY!”. This, as a friend of mine put it years ago, is the equivalent of sticking a post-it on my door. If this person is your friend, call them and wish them a happy birthday. Man, in this day and age, even a text would be acceptable. Maybe even as far as an email. But don’t post on my wall just because you want to be on that bandwagon of people that don’t know any better except saying something on Facebook. For this reason I specifically take my birthday off of my profile the day before the actual date. I don’t need these people on my “friends” list wishing me happy birthday just so they could feel that they did their duty as a “friend”.  Social networking essentially takes all the actual social-ness out of our lives. No one calls people, no one visits people (unless invited to an event THROUGH facebook) anymore. Social networking is how we interact now. And to this, I shake my head greatly.

Don’t get me wrong though, social networking has its place and purpose. I try to use them for those purposes mainly, which are SOCIAL NETWORKING. I’m a game developer (in development) and that industry is run on networking. So I try to keep active within those networks. I don’t care if you’re going for ice cream with your nieces, or if you have an interview and really really really hope you get the job. Go write a blog about it if it’s that important. Or better yet, MARRY IT if you care about it that much, but guess what… I don’t! Why do you find it necessary to inform all of the internetz that you are going to work, and then after you’re going to meet a friend to play Modern Warfare while listening to Celine Dion? I will admit that I have and do make posts about playing video games for 12 hours straight, or “check-in” when I’m at a concert with a friend. So I’m not entirely innocent, but I definitely make it a point to not go to the extents as most others do. I make a conscious effort to not do that.

People put too much faith in this technology age, and thus creates less “faithfulness” in them. I can’t possibly count on a race that depends on a website being “up” so that they could make sure that their crops are still growing and haven’t withered yet. I call BS.

There are people out there that make me believe that there is hope though. People who are using this technology for the betterment of others and themselves. People who go out of their way to help others. People who give up their time to make sure that the people around them are comfortable. These people are the good ones. And as long as they don’t get sucked into the deep hole that the rest of humanity is in, I think maybe humanity has a chance.

Okay… I don’t consider myself a very cynical guy…

Category: General Information, The Scrawl | Tags: , , , , , ,
Nicholas | November 24, 2011
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Cloverquips Review: The Sims Medieval

Amanda Lei is a Toronto based chic-geek writer. (Her description, not mine). She is the creator of The Scrawl. Very funny, very cool girl. You should visit her site, and often. Cause she updates a hell of a lot more than I do, and her updates are a lot funnier and more interesting than most of the shit that I post.

Recently she wrote a review on the new Sims game: The Sims Medieval. I highly suggest you read it, but you can’t blame me if she makes you want to buy it. That’s what she did to me at least.

Just wanted to make a small post and plug her blog, the scrawl experiment, and spread the interest in the game that she instilled in me.

Read the review. DO IT!

 

-Nicholas

Category: Gaming, General Information | Tags: , , , ,
Nicholas | November 16, 2011
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Galavaders

Ok, so here’s the Galavaders post. I really shouldn’t be doing this at 4:40 in the morning, since I’m pretty sure I’ll just try to rush through the post because I want to go to sleep. But if I don’t do it now, I’ll just put it off again tomorrow.

Galavaders was fun. There were issues with it, but it was a lot of fun. First off, we got told about the project just about 2 weeks before it was due. I started working on it maybe one week before the due date. I didn’t really work on it for long periods or a lot. I just kinda took for granted that XNA is an easy framework and I would get through the game in no time. That being said, I pretty much did get through it quickly. The longest part of the project was getting the enemies to follow waypoints. The code for the waypoints was pretty much copied from my Mad Mask project and adapted to C#. Easy enough. After that, it took some time to figure out how to rotate the entities to face the waypoint, in order to take away some of the blocky feel when they followed the waypoints. That took a couple of nights of me asking on stackexchange and doing research myself to figure out the best way to rotate the sprites.

I finally got that done, and it was smooth sailing from there. The code got a little heavy because of the waypoint implementation. I could’ve implemented it a lot better, but time started to run out on me, so I just adapted it for it to work.

Then the hand in date got push from the friday to the next monday. So we got the weekend to work on it more. So I spent friday night, saturday whole day into the night/early sunday morning putting some polish on the game. Polish included a cheat code, an “In The Interest Of Time” screen and a very cool ending to the game. I kind of made the flow of the game with the presentation in mind. So I designed it to be short and to display what I needed to display.

It’s pretty cool. You can download it here. I still have to make a proper downloads page for all my games. I think I’ll just create my portfolio template and be done with it. That way people can just go to the portfolio, see a gameplay video, and decide for themselves if they want to download the game. Or play any of the other games I have up there. So that’s my current site project.

I updated the site a bit more, added some more elements. I have some plans for the portfolio page, so I’ll work on that over the next couple of weeks. I got incentive to do it from an encouter that I had over the weekend. More on that in the next post (hopefully that’ll come tomorrow).

Other than the portfolio, I also have oil panic and fish food to finish, as well as XNA labs, and an XNA 3D project. And one or two other projects that will remain a secret for now.

Anyway for now, that’s it. I’m gonna try to get a “early” night. By early I mean not 7 in the morning. Hopefully another post will be up tomorrow. So till then….

Category: Galavaders, Game Projects, Gaming, General Information | Tags: , , , ,
Nicholas | November 11, 2011
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Much Needed Update

Ok ok. So I haven’t posted in a while… Rob … so here goes. And I know it’s been a while, cause even Robs site got updated.

I JUST finished properly updating the rest of the site. Recent changes are, put the blog onto a subdomain. I changed the theme and look of both the site and the blog. Up until this evening, the blog’s look wasn’t updated to look like the main site. I finished implementing that tonight. There are still a couple other things to add and tweak, but those have got to wait. I got a lot on my plate right now.

Last week Uncharted 3 came out. I beat it that weekend. Best game I think I’ve ever played. I’m on my second playthrough now. And if you know me, you know that I don’t play through games more than once. Unless it’s like super mario rpg, or super mario world or something along the mario vein.

Last month was XNA 2D. The project for the month was to recreate a Galaga type game. I made a version called Galavaders. For now you can download it here if you trust me enough to download and install the requirements.

It’s written in XNA, which is a microsoft framework built upon .NET. So all requirements to play the game are official microsoft updates. In the works is a downloads page that will have video and screenshots of games that cannot be played in a browser, like Galavaders. This is to show the game a little before asking someone to download and install it on their machine. I’ll try to make that page by the end of next week. I’m also trying to finish a second XNA 2D game soon. Just a simple concept. More on that later.

Galavders will get its own post tomorrow, where I will partly document the development process. It could prove to be a slightly long post, so I’ll leave it to be its own.

I have also given myself a deadline of Saturday to finish Oil Panic. And next Saturday to finish Fish Food. I don’t think I ever made a post or spoke about Fish Food here. So I guess it’ll be a surprise next week! :) Katlyn is working on both projects with me. She’ll be finishing up the Oil Panic artwork by tomorrow, and then for Fish Food, if she wants, I’ll leave some part of the game for her to code. She needs the experience.

This month is XNA3D in class. It’s basically just like DirectX3D, but with a framework sitting on top of it. So a lot easier. Not sure what the course project will be yet, but I’ll be trying to do something that will help me build some utility classes that I can reuse in the third month of XNA, which is a month long project. More on that when the time arrives.

Anyway, for now I think I’ll call this post complete. I’m gonna maybe add categories to the blog page, and then get to my XNA labs that are due tomorrow.

-Nicholas

Category: General Information, Oil Panic | Tags: , , , , ,
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