Becoming a Professional

It's about that time now: time to prepare myself for finding post-college employment! To get myself presentable for game companies, I have some main goals:

• Overhaul my résumé
• Tweak and fix up my portfolio site
• Purchase a domain name
• Find and obtain web hosting
• Design and print business cards

Other smaller goals are to make more art and games to present on my portfolio and creating a definitive style that is consistent throughout my portfolio, résumé, business cards, etc. Oh, and I'd like to have all of this done by PAX East 2011. I think I've gone long enough feeling like I'm not prepared to get a job and I want to start networking for real! I'll be home for about a week right before PAX, which is good. Then again, Pokémon Black & White come out at the beginning of that week, which might be bad. :D

I've been reading around Darius Kazemi's blog to get hints about writing a résumé for game companies, effective networking, and more. I suggest checking it out! Which reminds me, I've been meaning to put together a post of helpful links for fellow game development students that I've been hoarding in my bookmarks folder. Look for that soon!

Learning flixel (Again!)

It seems like the past few times I've tried to learn flixel I have stumbled across a seemingly simple obstacle and put it down to finally figure out later. The first time I tried to pick it up I was following a simple platformer tutorial as it was going out of date and the discrepancy between the tutorial and the newest release of flixel made it too hard for me to follow along. The second time I tried to pick it up again was when I was in Japan, and I don't actually remember what prevented me from getting the hang of it then...

Anyway, I've started again and I think I've got it this time! There's a quote about persistance beating talent or something like that and I wholeheartedly believe [in] it! This time I started from scratch like usual, but I followed a series of tutorials by a classmate written for the introductory Interactive Media and Game Development course here at WPI. I think my past experience with flixel, although limited, combined with these tutorials has given me the basic understanding of flixel that I've been looking for. Hopefully I'll get to know as much about flixel as I learned about Game Maker back in high school.

To begin familiarizing myself with the flixel library, I'm going to be implementing an idea I came up with while in Japan. The player controls a traveler trying to reach his bullet train in a Japanese train station and the only thing in his way is millions of businessmen. The gameplay is similar to that of a bullet hell game except the player is pushed around rather than killed. Score is based on how quickly the player reaches the train and a time limit determines how long the traveler has to catch his train. The game itself if fairly simple and easy to expand upon. I have ideas for different types of obstacles, such as faster moving businessmen and a foreigner that follows the player around, as well as some desired features, like posting scores to Facebook/Twitter and some others.

I plan to record my progress and update my blog fairly frequently while creating this game. Although I won't post everything, I'll try to write about big milestones and have demos of my progress. Stay tuned!