I always kind of took for granted the incredible easiness of making games with Game Maker before I went to DigiPen to make games the 'Real Way'. I mean, you can drag and drop your way to a potentially fun game within a day and call yourself an awesome game developer, right? Having been a naive teenager at some point (hell, I probably still am) I sure felt overwhelming confidence after my first game. Then after coding for a while in GM, I naturally assumed that programming wasn't that hard (you must be laughing right now.)

Well, after getting a thorough ass-kicking with follow-up face smashing at DP, I can never appreciate enough just how easy it is to make games with GM. Building a game engine from scratch, working with the annoyance that is DirectX9 (openGL has its faults too), figuring out how to implement and use good architecture, coding a physics engine, and pretty much like everything else ever - it's actually really hard!

Just to throw the icing on the cake, it's either C or C++ for our games. Memory management, how I took that for granted as well.

I'm just kind of glad we're not obligated to create our own 3D graphics pipeline to use for our games. Performance issues would be clearly seen here, since everything would be software based. But we'll actually have to code one for a class in the junior year. So all that fun stuff with reflective 3D objects and soft shadows and other crazy things that I don't know anything about yet. At DP we're expected to re-invent the wheel before we can use it. So it'll be like making my own directx, which sounds quite scary. Also sounds very math-intensive.

Speaking of math, doing everything from scratch also requires a good understanding of a variety of maths and physics, which I was never really good at. Fortunately, the threat of doing horribly on exams and not being able to make a game engine because I don't understand something keeps me going.

So, I think back to Game Maker and I'm like, damn, this thing made it really easy for me. I guess the positive side is that I can just make my own GM at this point, but still... damn.


      

So, tomorrow I'll be moving all the way across the US. From Pennsylvania to Washington, to go to Digipen and major in Real-Time Interactive Simulation. I'd have to say I've been looking forward to this moment for a while, but leaving my old lifestyle behind is going to be tough, since there are no dormitories (what) and I'll be rooming with 3 other people in an apartment. But hey, gotta get used to the new stuff.

I haven't been making many games recently, and you can expect the number per year to drop to zero soon enough  :P
I'm not sure how much free time I'll have, but from the looks of it, it won't be much to make anything big. So we'll see.

On the positive side, I'll finally enjoy going to school, since I'll be programming and working on game projects with people. Not sure about the math and physics but I'll get through it all somehow!

I've been busy with school lately, and although I've been working on my game, I had to stop for now, since the workload was simply overwhelming. However, I managed to get it into the student competition in IGF, which looks pretty intimidating this year, actually.

In life related news, senioritis is really getting to me, and I've spent a ton of money on college apps and graduation stuff. I've been accepted at DigiPen Institute of Technology though, so I'll most likely attend that college next fall. The only downside is that it's off-campus, but I guess I'll have to deal with that in return for the education.   

As for the game, here's a description:

As the strange Nodes are discovered in deep space, what appears to be a perpetual energy source is uncovered. As various factions struggle for control and the political war threatens to break down into a shooting war, take the helm of Earth United's finest officer Johassen in a new era of warfare. Unlock additional ships and abilities through the course of the campaign. Strive for the highest score during each mission, and spend awarded Mission Points on upgrades for your ships.

Avirnei is a real time strategy game that emphasizes squad-based combat. With up to 7 unit slots and 12 available units, a player has an incredible amount of customization at their fingertips. Each unit can also have 3 equally tactical ability configurations, ensuring that you will rarely fight the same enemy fleet twice. Both LAN and internet multiplayer are fully supported. In addition, a player is fully capable of modding in their own missions using external scenario scripts.

A screenshot:



A video demonstrating some gameplay in a 2 player online game:

Video Link

A public release will probably be sometime next year.

Until next time!

So, after getting some relief from finishing Varia, it's back to coping with school again. High school junior year is an important year, so I don't think I'll be getting much done for a while. There is always a test waiting for me in 2 days or something... I don't like it, but hey, I won't get anywhere if I slack off or don't study.

I noticed that the UT3 demo came out not too long ago. Having played the UT2004 demo, I thought the game was pretty fun, so I decided to try this one out. Unfortunately, it runs pretty badly on my computer. I have a 4 year old computer that sucks, and I don't think I'll be able to get a new one until college or something. The install time took half an hour and the game takes 2 minutes to load. Even at the lowest settings, I still get some starting lag, and it looks too "pixely". Oh well, at least it seemed pretty fun, if not a bit more fast paced than the the previous games.

And I already have a new project to work on. Currently I am messing with multiplayer and I'm planning to make an RTS with multiplayer functionality. The multiplayer aspect uses a dll and understanding what to send and how to use it is just a little over my head right now, but I have the engine down, pretty much. The genre is RTS because I haven't seen many RTS games in GM and I'm planning on writing a design document on the gameplay and balance, packaged along with the game for a portfolio. I won't be getting too far until summer arrives, though. It'll be an RTS set in space or similar to relieve me of pathfinding and other stuff :P

So yea, it's going to be boring for a while. Perhaps I'll manage to get a Wii and Brawl next year if my parents let me.

First blog. What shall I write? Nothing much, actually. Just watch.