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This weekend was my first time participating in a game jam. The guys at Intuition Games were kind enough to host the event at their office in Ames. It was a pretty cool experience, thanks to everyone for making it a fun time. I had to end up ditching out on the last day as my son came home from vacation, so I'm not sure what the end results of the jam were.
I know I spent most of the weekend attempting to setup a frame for a prototype for what was titled Super False Alarm. A concept that was inspired by events that happened the first night of jam. A fire alarm went off in the building and after about 20 minutes, firemen showed up and told us we had to leave the building. It was an interesting sequence of events however, as five minutes later we were given the all clear. As we started approaching the building fireworks started going off in the background, synchronicity at its best .
 
This gave everyone some fuel for brainstorming ideas. It was Mike that first proposed the idea for Super False Alarm. Greg liked it and off we went attempting to come up with a functioning prototype by the end of the weekend. Brandon and I both fluctuated from attempting to learn to use the Unity game engine to make a 2.5D game, and simply getting custom engines adjusted to use for the project as Greg diligently developed art resources.
The idea of the game was that you were an employee at a company and you were making pop-corn that ended up setting off the fire alarm. When the fire department showed up and you were told to evacuate, you told them to stuff it. So, it was a game of stealth, trying to make it as long as possible without being captured by the firemen.
Other games that were being worked on in different teams included a Space Game with a sexual theme and miniature golf type of game play elements, that was meant to be included in the current TIGSOURCE competition. A game about Flaming Sex Zepplins, which I admit I regret not taking a peek at. And a game about hang gliding.
Evan and his Bad Ass goggles.
This was my first game jam and overall, I was not disappointed. What I did take a way from the experience is this however, go to a jam with some kind of plan. It being my first jam, I really didn't know what to expect and as such was not prepared what so ever. Attempting to learn new technology at the jam should not be a focus. Instead having an idea of what you may end up doing, and being familiar with the tools that you are going to be using will ensure that you can actually concentrate on developing the game. This could have been achieved in this instance by communicating better a head of time and talking with the guys that were attending about an approach to take so that when jam time arrived everyone was ready and on the same page.
There's another jam in August, but seeing how my work schedule has been, I may not be able to make it to that one, although, I may take the approach of participating remotely if possible. It was good fuel to get me going back into the right direction as with contract work and my day job taking up a lot of time this year, I've been neglecting my passion for game development for much too long. I met a lot of cool and interesting people and got to play some disc golf on a new course, which was totally bad ass.
I write a lot about time, and it seems like a good subject to write about, as it seems that it is the human condition to be obsessed with time. We live our lives calculating how long we have to complete a task, or how long it is until the next task arrives to complete. We are a race obsessed with time. Even the word 'race' which we use as a classification has time built into it.
With such a heavy emphasis that time has on our lives, I find it interesting that it isn't used as frequently in games as one would think. Sure there a puzzle games where you have to complete the puzzle before a timer runs out, and there are games where you have to do a timed trial or race, but what about in the aspect of narrative in games.
I haven't been working on game design for a while, because, hey you guessed it, I haven't had the time. But when I started designing the Wrath of the Scarecrow series back in 2007, time was put in as a major influence to the flow of the story. The game world would be setup to have triggers executed to carry the game in a different direction if a player was not in the right place at the right time. It is a very complex system that calls for dynamic branching that I have yet to experience in a game.
As I'm longing to get back to game development, I'm beginning to think more about specific elements that went into some of my designs that I would like to begin testing once Troglodyte is in a stable state, that can prototype and test out these ideas. If anyone has any good examples of time usage in a game, I'd love to check the out.
Later.
I'm trying to make it so that I don't miss this month completely from making a blog entry, and it looks like I've barely made it, but made it I have. Spring is hear and with it is a rejuvenated sense of purpose.
As I sit down to continue working on the GoG project this week and complete some good portions of it, I can't help but begin to get excited with anticipation to getting back to work on troglodyte. It's been almost two months since I've done any work on the game engine, and I have to say I'm getting antsy. GDC being last week made it all that much work, especially as I on looked to all the indie coverage. I really wanted to go this year, but it just wasn't the time yet. Thanks to all the guys at TIGSource that attended, for posting links to many many pics, videos, and wordage of what looked like an excellent experience.
The book that I won from John Hattan arrived almost a month ago now, and while I'm only about halfway through it, hey I don't have as much time to read as I'd like these days :P , I have to say I'm enjoying it quite a bit. It's helping me think about structuring the business aspects of my endeavors and it has some good advice in it. I plan to write a review to post on my website at some point, a long with some other reviews that I wrote last year for some other programming books.
At any rate, I'm pretty optimistic about things. I have roughly four years left in my current time line for planning to get things off the ground and so far I'd have to say I'm on track for the most part. I think taking the time off from working on the engine will pay off in the long run, especially having worked mainly on it for the last two years. The breather has been pretty nice, but now I'm ready to get back on the road, hit it running and hit it hard.
The time off has given me time to re-establish a base line of quality for my work as well. There have been areas in the engine where I've been meaning to go in and change a certain feature, but have repeatedly put it off instead to work on adding more features. Not that the features being ignored were ungodly beasts gumming up the works by any means, but they were things that I wanted to do differently. Once I start revamping to port the windowing, serialization, and other components over to Qt, I realize that it's the perfect time to re-asses the things that I want to redo and go a head and do them.
The GoG project and porting the code over to the Qt frame work is going to delay the first beta release of the engine, but in moving a few more steps closer to my ultimate design goals, it'll be worth it. I was doing a weekly indie game review over on the GoG for a few weeks last year. I think it's something that I'm going to shoot for doing once again.
So, as I continue working on learning various web languages and working on continuing to learn Qt, I begin to notice a continuing trend of getting away from game development. This is something that I have to keep in mind in the future, but for now, current paths must be continued until the current journeys come to an end.
So, Ajax, Mysql, and php are the newest members to the arsenal of development tools in my tool box. I'm having quite a bit of fun getting to know them, working on the decipherone website. I'm also getting to know web standards in the process, which has been interesting. Although I've been using websites, I never really noticed how much the development process has changed for them over the last decade. It just goes to show my lack of education in the area prior to the last few months that I've been preparing to tackle the GoG tournament connection tool and building the community website to promote Troglodyte and indie games in general.
While it's interesting and practical , and I could see myself doing it for a living, I just don't have the time to continue to do web development, work on a game engine, design games, make games, work a full time job, and fit the other hats in my life on my head. As stated currently, I've had to set aside the game development aspect, and it's something that I really want to get back to. So as I finally come to the forks in the road, I need to get back to the initial cause.
It looks like April will be the month where I actually get time to port the current code base of the engine over to using Qt. As I do that I'm thinking that I am going to need to finish the game state management that still isn't complete at this time, before starting to build the next edition of Scribe, the editor. By that time the official release of Qt creator should be out as well, which should be awesome. Qt will also be releasing version 4.5 in march, which will add a LGPL license, which should help with marketability for Troglodyte.
At this point in time I'd like to say this. The main reason of this game engine and editing suite is to provide a tool for myself and fellow companions to make games, do it well , and fast. I'm choosing to release it to the public after an agreed upon time in between myself and the guys of Phyersoft. In doing so, my hope is not to become rich from the endeavor, although if that happens it would be welcomed. Instead, it's my hope to provide a very affordable tool that is easy enough for a complete newb to use, while still having enough power to entice seasoned developers.
By having it be open source as well, I'm hoping that it give those who are interested in coding a good place to begin to learn about programming games. That is also the purpose of the website. Also, I hope to grow as a programmer because for the most part I'm self taught and I'd love for those who would be interested in looking at the code base to be able to offer and make suggestions.
In addition, I'd love to see people become passionate about the project and for it to grow into a robust development tool owned by the global community. Only time will tell if these hopes and dreams will be attained, but it should be an interesting journey to get to cultivation of the ideas.
[warning : This post may contain some deep symbolic and reflective content]
Like most people, I sometimes struggle with the meaning in day to day life. With everything that is going on in the world, as it has been since the dawn of space time, it is very easy to be caught into a web of disillusionment. To become over whelmed with fear and anxiety about ones place in the world and in the universe. These feelings can start to get in the way of our dreams, hopes, goals, and day to day activity. It can even send people down roads of self destruction and cause us to question our motives and even behave in ways that a person wouldn't normally behave. This is no new quandary for the human condition, keeping that in mind is a small reassurance in and of it self, but it doesn't allow for calmness and clarity to begin to come through. The calmness comes with a realization and understanding of who and what one truly is in the context of the universe. I am not the one to suggest directly a path for ascertaining this awareness, but rather urge everyone to pursue a path of self knowledge.
So what does all this have to do with games? Well, for me, I have been finding myself over whelmed with the world around me lately. This has left me asking myself if I have been wasting my time pursuing creating tools for making games, and with wanting to make games in general. It seems that I was so overwhelmed, that I begin to forget why I wanted to make games in the first place. Games are cool, fun, and interactive, this is all true, but the main power behind games is the ability to share ideas, to use them as a communicative medium. To be able to share perspectives with one another, and to be able to display concepts, ideas, and share virtual spaces with one another across vast distances in real time. Games as they are in their infancy, are very limited in these areas, as today they are mainly used for pure entertainment purposes. There are a few games that have attempted to use the potential of the medium, to be expressive as art, and some of these have even hit the mainstream. Even hidden nuggets of truth make there way through in commercial titles from time to time, but for the most part, games have been put into a mold that caters to what mass production companies have given us and we have come to expect. This will change in the coming years, and while I don't expect things to happen over night, I think it will become more common place to use games as the potential medium to express ideas will happen. It will become more synonymous to movies, as we can already see happening with many major motion pictures having games produced, and even Kiefer Sutherland expressed the same thought of the two industries merging at this years Spike Tv VGAs. This post kind of turned into something that it wasn't initially meant to be, but sometimes in life, you have to follow the natural flow of things and this article is how it turned out. In closing, I'll continue to strive to make games, in the hopes of inspiring future generations to form a better world. In the hopes of inspiring those around us to better understand our connection with who and what we are, and in the hopes of bringing joy into peoples lives, providing them a space where they can interact with their loved ones, and can make new lasting relationships. The horizon before us is only the beginning. It's the bits and pieces that we connect that end up connecting us.
So, I've been a little under the weather once again the last couple of days. I'm not sure if I ate something bad or what, but my stomach just hasn't been quite right. It's gotten in the way of getting somethings done and zapped a bit of motivation from my bones. Yet, I press on, like the determined predator who has extinguished their food supply in a certain area, but who must continue to devour small furry creatures, and who is filled with an ever increasing hunger and blood lust. I am feeling some what better today.
As I'm working a lot on development of the GoG Tournament Connection and on the decipherone website, I'm finding myself having to deal with small syntax related issues with php that are causing me some headaches. I just have to remember to not get a head of myself and to not try and do something that I think should work, when I've seen nothing that has really told me that it should. Primarily I'm talking about things with string formatting and passing data around using variables. Coming from a heavy C++ background, I think I'm finding myself stuck in a certain mindset, or it could have just been the sickness causing me to make stupid errors as when I tried to code yesterday I couldn't really get anything done.
I've got to get back to working my through the Qt book today as well. I had put off working in that area for the last week or so to get caught back up on the other projects, but I should be back on track.
Well, I've certainly done an excellent job of focusing on blogging :P At any rate, I am hard at work on things as per usual. I'm working to learn Qt still, attempting to work through the C++ GUI Programming with Qt 4 book that I purchased at the beginning of the month. I want to get through the entire thing before moving forward with porting the engine code over to making use of Qt. I figure it could be March before that process is completed.
It would be faster, but I'm also working to development a tournament tool for GatheringofGamers.com . This is going to be taking a lot of time up as it's turning into a rather large project as time goes on. It's been fun to design though and I can't wait to start developing it. I'm currently in full fledged R&D mode still, but as I work with the other site developers to polish the design, work on building it should pick up within the next couple of weeks.
In the mean time as I do research for this project, I'm moving forward with adding some functionality to the decipherone.com website. I added some basic news submission to the site and will be adding some more stuff in the coming weeks.
In other news, after my rant about Microsoft last post, I'm now the proud owner of an XBox 360. I spent quite a bit of time gaming the first few days I got it and have managed to put in an hour or so every couple of days, which is more gaming then I've done in a long time. I have to say I'm fairly pleased with it so far and with the exception of the payment system, am fairly impressed with Xbox Live as well. Dead Space is also an excellent game.
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