Digital Dave

So, I took an extended break away from the blog and away from, almost, everything else.  I decided to spend some time playing games while I have that luxury during school breaks.  During the semester, I rarely play anything.  This was a good time to relax and fiddle around.

One game that I played, and that I highly recommend is called ‘Peggle.’   It is a really simple game.  Pretty darn good design.  It will have you laughing for the first couple of boards.  The presentation had me rolling.  I showed it to Megan, and she was laughing pretty hard, too.  The game actually reminded me of Plinko from the Price is Right, which is still my favorite game on that show.  The objective of Peggle is to fire your ball into a maze of blue, red, pink, and green pegs.  Once all of the red pegs have been hit, then that level is complete.  Also, any peg that you hit is removed after each turn.  There are really interesting power ups for each stage that adds some flare to the game.  My favorite is the dragon ball. >;oD

But, yeah… Go try the trial.

So, my schedule for this semester is finalized.  I have the hardest time coming up with a legit schedule.  I hate taking simplistic classes for an easy A, and I don’t like classes that will not benefit me in any way. I attend classes with an open mind, and I am willing to learn about anything, which I couldn’t say while I was growing up.  I took education for granted growing up in a family where graduating high school was a rarity in itself.  I’ll write more about this later.

• General Psychology
• Intro to Operation Management
• Enterprise Information Systems (Database Class. PHP, MySQL, MS Access, Web Design)
• Interactive Computer Graphics (OpenGL)
• IS Project

Snowball Fight has been thrown to the side.  I had fun, and the project was something decent to introduce me to network coding, but I just don’t have the time (or desire at this time) to direct toward it.  The game is nearly playable 1 vs. 1.  My hopes is to get that working, and call it good.  I have a semester game project starting, and that will get my full attention…….

If I could decide what, exactly, I want to do. ;|

I must have thought about 50 different things through the break TRYING to come up with a semester project that is A) Not out of reach, and B) Something fun.  I keep running around in circles, thinking that I should just ‘clone’ something that is out there.  Or remix it somehow.  I have one unique idea that would be feasible, but it needs a lot more thought put into it.

I’ve thought about doing a 3D Bomberman that would get me introduced to the world of 3D.  In addition, I also thought about doing a 2D clone type game of Harvest Moon (a favorite of mine).  I also thought about taking a board game, and developing a computer game based off of it –  Khet, Ticket to Ride.  The interesting aspect of porting a board game is that I could code a networked portion of the game.  That is purely for fun.  These games would definitely be better implemented online and distributed through something like Facebook.  That is, if you could avoid getting sued (see: scrabulous)…  I also thought about doing a casual game, like Bejeweled.

GDC is a little more than 4 weeks away! Woofa, time is flying. O_O! *bites nails*

I did find somebody to stay with.  So that should help a lot on the finance side of things.

I’ve selected the business card that I will be distributing, and it’s off to the printing presses now.  I’m getting 250 cards, which will be way more than enough, but I don’t need to risk NOT having any since I’ll be there the entire week. Thanks Darius, and all the other individuals whom gave me feedback on my card designs.

How about the Stock Market? Cup of Recession, anyone?

*equips -The Ak’na Plate of Recession- armor* Hope I can heal myself from this one.  Good luck, if you are in the market.  The market is already down 9%, and it’s only been 17 days… ;|

I couldn’t forget to blog about the wedding.  We have our location booked, and our photographer booked.  We have set the date of July 25th, 2009.  Yes… That’s right… 18 months from now.  We have this ball rolling already.  That does mean that I might be moving to California alone while she gets everything ready.  Oh well, at least I’ll be able to give full attention to my new job.

I fully anticipate and expect a challenging course for an intersession course, but this class that I was going to take just blew me away.   The course only lasts 15 days (actually 12).

Just a few points:

1. Class goes from M-F from 1:00pm to 5:30pm including 1 Saturday.
2. Daily Quizes
3. Daily Assignments (Including Readings, etc…)
4. Research Presentation that includes collaborating with about 4 other people, writing a proposal, writing a report, and then creating the actual presentation.
5. A final writing that revolves around a book

So, essentially, you’d spend 4 1/2 hours in class, collaborate with your peers for 1-2+ hours, read for the daily assignments, and complete a quiz every day for 12 days (3 days are omitted, because those last three days are presentation time).

I understand that it’s an intersession course, but dang!  This class is incredibly interesting, and the professor is amazing, but that is just an incredible amount of work for 12 days and I don’t feel like going into hibernation to get what was supposed to be a ‘fun and interesting course’ to take during intersession.

Ah, well.  Things happen for a reason.

I found a Marketing class that revolves around marketing on the internet.  I’ve been involved and have witnessed independent projects go from design->development->release,  and the most critical problem that I see is the failure to get their name/branding OUT there!  Independent developers do not have any space for lack-luster effort if they expect to get at least a little compensation for their time and future projects.  Face it, you might not think that you care about making any money, but if you spend 3 to 4 years developing a project and crunch many, many hours, while spending your own money on the project for art assets, music, or other things, you are going to need some sort of motivation to continue pushing yourself to develop another independent project.  Likely, you will want to create a better game, so that money will only help you progress toward your dreams.

Now that I have another couple weeks before the semester starts, I plan on finishing the snowball fight, pending that I can get a distribution package to work.  ;\

If you are going to a University, or even if you are in high school, that does not offer any sort of game development courses, the Game Institute is having their yearly Christmas tuition discount — 20% off.   I highly recommend the place.   I’ve taken a couple courses through them and I haven’t been disappointed.    Self paced, game development centered, great staff, organized content, and fair prices win me over.  Just thought I’d note that for anybody who was curious about the place.

After being thrown completely off course last week from the ice storm, I plan on jumping back on the Snowball Fight bandwagon tomorrow.   There are a lot of things I want to do to it, and I really want to finish it.  I’ve been thinking that I need to add some sort of chat system to it.  It would be semi-silly to host a snowball fight with people out there, have them log in, throw a snowball, and log out, without the chance of knowing who they are.  So, we’ll see if I can pull this one out.  The game window is pretty small, so I don’t have a lot of room to work with.  I suppose, at a minimum, I can just allow people to log in with a user name that could easily allow people to I.D. each other.  I don’t know, I’m still thinking about this.

So, I survived another semester.   Not nearly as well as I wanted too, but I did.  I’ll save my educational pain for another post.

After doing some optimization on my packets that I send to the client, I decided it was time to put in some more functionality into the game.   I still have further optimization that I can do on those packets, but I figured I’d move on so I could get something else finished before the due date.  I did end up testing it on two different machines, and it ran pretty well.

So, when I developed my Breakout Clone, I wasn’t really concerned with anything but firing up, and if it hit something, bounce off into a direction that seemed logical.  I knew that wouldn’t cut it in this game.  I couldn’t restrict somebody from throwing something left, right, up, or down.  So, after refreshing myself on some trig, I got it to the point where the snowball will be thrown based off of the angle where the user clicked.   It was a lot easier than I was making it out to be, but half the battle is understanding what in the heck you’re doing.

Anyway, I have some pictures.  Of course, I plan on restricting this so one player can’t claim complete and utter domination over another, but I do plan on having it be a bit on the chaotic side. >;o)

And My Favorite…

I also changed the cursor. The prior cursor just wasn’t going to cut it.

Well, I’ve completed my initial ‘base’ task for my networking project. The big concern for the project was to at least have it to where I could have two players running around simultaneously. This, alone, should easily net me an A on the project. There are still people who have yet to start on a final project. Call me an over-achiever, but I enjoy myself some game dev time. >;)

I’ll need to do some testing with somebody to make sure that what I’ve got works well from two different locations. Running it on my poor laptop isn’t netting me the results that I need, and that’s probably because when I fire up the server, I have 2 threads running. Firing up a client, nets 1 thread. Add that with two games, utilizing SDL, and you’ve got yourself a ‘lag fest’ consuming tons of system resources, even over the local host. I’m pretty confident that the code is well enough to maintain a constant stream of data back and forth, without all of this other processes going on, but we’ll see.

Essentially, my logic goes something like this.

I have a ‘PlayerPosPacket’ structure that consists of the x, y, avatarNumber, playerNumber, and the totalPlayers (maintained by the server packet) for each player connected.

With that in hand, I can easily pack up the players data points from the current player objects, send it on to the server, the server can unpack it, re-assign the new values to the objects, repack the new values (catching any updated movements), and send it back to the client with the updated structure. And the process revolves just like that.

I would post code, but the project hasn’t been turned in yet and I don’t want to violate any school rules in the rare case somebody finds this blog. I’ll save ‘code-and-show’ until the end of next week.

After I do some testing, I’ll be sitting down to write down the tasks that I want to complete by Christmas Eve, doing some housekeeping on the code base, and moving on to throwing objects.

Well, today it snowed pretty heavily for a few hours.  It ended up blanketing the ground, and giving Calix (my Siberian Husky) quite a treat to feast his eyes on. Enjoy some pictures, will you? I love taking them, although he doesn’t cooperate as well as my girlfriends Chihuahua, so I have to come up with unique ways to trick him into posing.

First Snow

I’m making some great headway on the snowball fight. I should have an update soon, relatively speaking. I have a COBOL project due tomorrow, so I need to finish that first.

Not because I have to, but because I wasn’t feeling tired, so I thought I would spend the night working on my Snowball fight game.  So I picked up some new tracks from iTunes, and went to town.   I want to get this thing working really well for my networking class.  I still have 10 days to finish it, for that deadline.  So, we’ll see how far I get, but there are a few things that I will not even be worrying about until after the deadline.  Modes (yep, modes!), menu screen, user interface, and …. AUDIO… Come one, don’t you want to ping your buddy over the head to the tune of a remixed Jingle Bells?  I think (or hope) I can mix something good together.

I have 2 1/2 weeks until my next semester class begins (Jan 2nd).  So, by Christmas Eve, I hope to have this thing fully decked out for distribution.

I figured I would update the blog with my progress this evening.

Well, my systems were not designed exactly right, particularly how I was dealing with players being introduced to the server and client.  Luckily, it wasn’t bad at all to fix.  I was also having some fun trying to get the client and server to work from the same application, but I eventually got them working.  That was mainly due to downloading boost and needing to get a little familiar with it.  I particular wanted it to use it for Threading.   Right now, I just bump a thread to handle the code that will accept a new connection.

For testing purposes, the server can drop in players, up to 6 (or however many is defined), onto the game map.  Collision detection works fine, the players move around just fine (one at a time), and things look like they’ll work well from a data transmission point of view.

This might look familiar to you, from a few entries ago. But, now we’ve got some multi-colored jackets.

Which makes me wonder if you’re thinking, “Multi-colored jackets? How do we…”

Free for All.

Manipulating the map is simple. I have plans to drop in my Calix Map Editor with the download so the server master can create a custom map, and transmit that new map to the connecting players. So, the mode of gameplay will be: Teams, and Free for All.

But, before all that, I’m going to get back to the code. Next up is to finalize the code for communication between the server and client(s).

Well, first… Activision Blizzard? I can’t say that the name has a nice ring to it, and I’m pretty confident in saying that this merger surprised everybody. I hold no regression on mergers like this, due to the fact that I don’t like to jump to conclusions. I hope for the best for the merger, and with that, there is a Goliath that will be up right next to Electronic Arts now.

But, really… Activision Blizzard? I completely understand name branding, but… Oh, well. Let’s see what games come out of this.

I saw Stephen King’s The Mist this weekend. Somebody really needs to make a game with all of the crazy ass creatures that Mr. King has thought up… That would be one horrifying game… Oh, and the movie? I’d at least recommend watching it once. It’s not your typical movie with your typical ending, which is good.

So, in my continuing effort to become a game developer (programmer, designer, cola boy) some day, I thought I should start experiencing an area of gaming that I have really lacked playing. Board Games. Brenda inspired me the other day when she compiled a list of favorite board games that her users recommended in a prior post (before I found her blog). I saw that list, and was dumbfounded. There were a LOT of games that I never touched.

It’s never to late to do anything in life. I picked up Carcassonne, and the girlfriend and I are having a blast with it.

I’m making slow progress on the Networking game. I’ve put in the ability to start a server, connect to a server, send data, receive data. I just need to get them all to work together now, nicely. More on this soon.

In a prior entry, I wrote about a final project for my networking class.  Well, scratch that idea.

I turned the concept into a multiplayer snowball fight.  I figure it would be pretty fun to sling a snowball at your friend for the sake of the holiday season that is fast approaching.   I will be trying to reach a limit of 3 on 3, with anybody over 6 players being in spectator mode, with the ability to join in once a player disconnects.

I redid the artwork and added a few more pieces, finished the input system, and I finished the collision detection system this morning.

Here is an in-progress shot!

Well, up next is some of the networking system. We’ll see how well my systems were designed for a client and server interaction.

I am completely amazed that they even teach this language anymore.  I understand that there is a plethora of code written in this language, and that people don’t want to spend the time/money/energy to update their code, but do they really think that teaching this is worth it?  I mean, I can not imagine any kid growing up, these days, thinking they really want to be a COBOL programmer…  This is a generation of fast cars and bad a… Wait.  Fast computers, rapidly increasing technology, cheaper per $ GB… You would think that people would have their sights on newer tools. I certainly do.

I’m not saying that I hate the language, or that it is difficult to program in, but couldn’t I spend my time in a better ‘required’ class than this?

You know things are bad when your department head agrees with you, and wants to get rid of the class, but says that he can’t because there is still a need for COBOL programmers.