WOO!

Or more precicely Sandra and Woo

Oddly enough I found this comic through a banner ad posted on Something Awful's LP archive. I was reading through the epic that is Boatmurdered (no graphic violence, unless you count a white ASCII smiley turning into a red ASCII smiley as violent) I wasn't entirely sure what to expect but the ad interested me so I clicked. And have lost many hours reading through a highly approachable, yet surprisingly mature comic strip. Amusingly, the ad is still running now.

Initially it's something like Calvin and Hobbes... yet it's nothing like Calvin and Hobbes at the same time. The characters are all older (Sandra's 11, at least at first) and more mature. There's also more budding romance. In any case you should read it. The strip relies a great deal on characterization so some strips don't make much sense unless you know the characters but there's still plenty of strips which stand alone nicely.

Oh! And I almost forgot! There's a new Hawken trailer and more gameplay footage. I am itching to play this game so badly!

Looking Forward to this One

Well it's been... far too long since the last time I've posted here so I'm going to try to get back into the habit again.

Short story: I'm married, and have been since August 2010, work varies between satisfyingly challenging to insane, I have a pet cat named Doom, and I've barely had any time to do real hobby development work.

I'm going to keep things short so that I'm less likely to get overly lazy and stop posing for months at a time. I'm also not going to restrict my posts to anything in particular... beyond avoiding certain particulars of my job due to NDAs.

During work, I'll spend a smallish amount of time browsing the web. This helps to prevent me from going into mental vapor-lock and keeps me working faster than I would otherwise. I have a few sites I tend to go to that don't take much time to read, and relate just enough to what I'm doing that I don't switch out of the appropriate mindset for coding. One of these sites is the TIGsource blog. This is where I discovered a game that I'm very very excited to see. Hawken.

The game is a mech-sim like game with a pace more on the level of a classic multiplayer deathmatch. Either way, it's been far too long since I got a real fun mech game (years since I got Mechwarrior 4) and Hawken has a very nice feel based on the released gameplay footage. I also quite like its futuristic high tech shantytown setting. Hope the game turns out as awesome as it looks.

Three Projects... Four Projects... Five Projects!?!

Yes, well (conservatively) counting what I'm up to at RIM. The project I'm wrapping up is a particularly fun and rewarding one, creating a tool for providing detailed code coverage tracking for the various testing efforts within the OS Group. Sadly, the details aren't all that exciting. Mostly it's just processing gobs of similar data into an easily queried form. The majority of the work is in the logistics of collecting the data in a way that doesn't interfere with testing and manages to collect as much information is possible given the limitations of the testing environment. My other project(s) relate to some internal OS Group initiatives. I could tell you about them, but then I'd have to kill you ;)

So that's two...ish. Where's the other three? Well...

1. Space Combat Sim
   Yup, that thing is still going. Adding bots, improving the graphics, cleaning the code up and generally learning as much about 3D networked games as possible.
2. A shmup game developed from scratch for XNA on X-Box 360 and PC.
   Something simple for building a strong C# codebase that I can port to other projects. Goals here are making a programmable effects system and some decent GUI widgets.
3. Another shmup, using FlatRedBall
   Why? Because screw you! That's why... Actually I figured I'd just start messing around with plugging tools together just since that's normally not the way I make games.

Actually, to go on a boring long monologue...

I have finished only a few game projects, mainly for school. That tends to be because I approach the subject by first building tools and such, then building the game using them. I end up having so much fun making the tools that the project devolves into adding new features and refining code that I lose focus on making the game. Then I get bored and start a new project.

Now, I'm a tools developer professionally I can finally spend all hours of the working day making all sorts of exciting tools for a moderately hardcore development environment. This means that I'm not getting quite the same buzz from making yet more tools at home. So... time to make some fugging games!

Later d00dz! I'll try to keep the interval to next post to less than a month this time.

Some Inspiration

Lately I've been getting most of my coding jollies from my job as a tools developer at RIM. Mostly Python with a nice dose of C, SQL, and other stuff. Mainly fixing some reporting systems that go to external reports seen by management. Plus a dash of code janatorial work since nobody else seemed to be available/willing. After eight months doing solo work it's very nice to be working with a team again.

Anyway, that's not actually what I wanted to talk about. Today's just a shorty (I have a longer rant about myself coming later.) TIGSource recently posted a couple montages of a huge collection of free, indie games. I've played a few of them (Fraxy, Cave Story, Cho Ren Sha 68k, Prototype 2, Warning Forever, Clean Asia and one or two I can't recall... yea I'm a SHMUP fan) Holy hell there's some awesomeness.

Check it out!

So, What Now?

Well, today I spent a TON of time writing up blogs that I've been meaning to finish for a long time now. Three of them in fact! The first on exporting from Blender to XNA, the second on how the demos for Space Combat Sim went, and the third is a postmortem. But, I haven't talked about what I'm doing now, have I?

The short answer is that I have a job. In fact, I started my job before my "good demo" which was on May 4th. I'm working as a testing tools developer for Research in Motion. Unless you've been living under a rock for the past few years you've probably heard of their flagship product. Before I started this blog I worked as an intern for RIM over a period of 16 months. I work for the Operating Systems group which is responsible for all of the hardware drivers etc. that make the BlackBerry phone work. The culture of the OS Group, relaxed, friendly and fairly close knit, is what motivated me to return to RIM after finishing school. I'm quite happy working somewhere that I can spend the day working on hard technical problems with minimal political friction then finish the day by hanging around the pub.

My job now is to maintain and improve tools for automatically testing the Blackberry OS. Obviously I can't go into specific but I will be able to come out with articles on scripting, automation, testing and testing tools in a general sense. On top of the occasional post about work I'll still continue my game development work which means, of coure, more posts on Space Combat Sim and other projects as well.

Cheers.

About the Project...

I've always developed games as a hobby since I was a kid. I started with text-based games in QBASIC when I was about 7. Since then I've made shooters, puzzle games, tools and other stuff for my own amusement and the amusement of my friends in school. When I found out we had to do a large software project over eight months in our last year of school I immediately wanted to do a game.

The project, currently untitled, is a space combat simulator game in the same vein as the Freespace series and X-Wing series of games. The game is planned to be set up something like Quake 3 with one player hosting a game session and other players joining. Game types would be free for all (deathmatch, keep-away etc.) and team-vs-team (capital ship assault, etc.)

At this point I've finished enough of the initial planning and school-related junk that I can actually start development. I'm using XNA Game Studio 3.1 foras a development framework for the project. This provides a nice multi-platform base to work from and a good collection of documentation and sample code to boot. I'm mulling over using an existing graphics engine or rolling my own at the moment.

There seems to be a decent selection of graphics engines aimed at the XNA environment out there however most of the ones I've looked at are specifically aimed at rendering terrains which isn't particularly helpful. I've narrowed my list down to TXNA and Nuclex. My choice now comes down to how easily I can exploit the engine for my vile purposes and, if I can't whether it'd be easier to tear the engine apart or code what I need as I need it.

I'll be making my decision later this week.

About Me...

Hi, I'm a college student currently in the final year of my program at Conestoga College. One of the tasks we have to complete in order to graduate the program is to complete a software systems project over the next two semesters. For my project I chose to develop a multi-player action game on the XNA platform.

This blog will be about the various challenges that I encounter during the development of my game project. This includes coding issues, sceenshots, school-related crap and anything else I feel like blogging about. I intend to make a post on this blog at least once a week.


Besides this blog I'm also an occasional poster on the XNA community under the name "Dan Dan Dan Dan"