Getting My Act Together

I haven't been as productive as I would have liked recently, due to my tendency to procrastinate and my recent obsession with Minecraft. I have, however, been working on art for the Virtual Joust project I'm working on for the Higgins Armory Museum, for which I've been working on a medieval knight model for the past few months. Unfortunately, I haven't been getting much else done...

Starting today I will be giving up Minecraft for a bit to start focusing on more important things, like getting a job. I knew I'd get addicted to Minecraft when I heard about it towards the end of last year, but didn't think it'd be this bad. For my final days I decided to build myself a big 'ole Egyptian pyramid and lock myself in it just like in the olden days, and maybe one day I'll be resurrected and a little less addicted.

One of the big things to happen in March was the release of Pokémon Black and White today. I got my copy of White as soon as the doors opened at Toys 'R' Us and have just began my new adventure. I've decided for this iteration of the series that I will not be using Serebii, Bulbapedia, or any other Pokémon database/site to aid my journey through the storyline. Since I had purchased the Japanese version while I was overseas this September and played through the main storyline I figured it would be refreshing to see the game through new eyes (an experience Game Freak was aiming to create). It'll also be great to see how the competitive community begins to evolve with a new generation of Pokémon, moves, abilities, and strategies.

The second big thing to happen this month is the second annual PAX East convention. Last year was great and I'm expecting this year to be even better. I have my badge and I'm ready for this weekend! Unlike last year, I'll try to be good with updating my blog each day of the convention, rather than after it's all over. Expect lots of pictures, Pokéwalker step counts, C-Gear totals, and more.

I'm also hoping to post more of my art, progress on my flixel game, links I've found useful, and other stuff. I feel as though I don't post enough about art and games and that's what this blog is supposed to be about! March shall be the month about getting back on my feet and being productive!

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!

Global Game Jam: Day 3 + Conclusion

With only about 6 hours left we put (almost) everything together and packaged it into a game. Like usual, scope was an issue with out limited time and resources. Despite lacking some of our desired features, we do have two levels with enemy dodo birds and collectable eggs along with the basic movement of a platformer. The psychology aspect we were hoping for is absent at the moment, but we'll hopefully be able to add it in later.

On the last day I created a few more assets as they were needed, such as a title screen, background image, and "to be continued" screen. Some of the time was more or less wasted because there was more art than tech due to having two artists and one programmer. I wish I could have helped code some of the game but I am still not that familiar with how to make games with flixel. This game jam has definitely sparked my desire to finally buckle down and learn it, though.

Although we submitted an incomplete game to the Global Game Jam site, we will be fixing it up and extending it in the hope to submit it to the Intell AppUp store to win $200. The deadline for submissions is February 28th, so we have a decent amount of time to finish and polish our game. I'll try to post some of my work on the game and our progress in the coming weeks.

And with that, go play our game! You can find it here. You can also play it in your web browser here but probably only for a limited time (as my only storage space may expire tomorrow D:).

Global Game Jam: Day 2

Saturday was our longest work day of the game jam, and we got a decent amount accomplished.

I finished up making tiles for our platformer and also created the player character and animations. Later, I worked on a base boss sprite and animation that we can recolor and decorate to make different bosses. So far we have one boss and four total design ideas. Josh came up with the idea to name them all after US presidents, so we have Dodoham Lincoln, George Washington (or Dodoington), George Bush, and The Dodo Formerly Known as Taft.

Jeff has been working on all the code himself using some platformer code that he has been working on before. I'm not sure the exact status of that, although I'm told we have basic platformer mechanics and jumping on enemies implemented. Hopefully we have a decent amount to show at the presentation at the end of the jam!

I'll be writing a Day 3 and wrap-up combination post later to recap what happens today and to hopefully show off our game!

Global Game Jam: Day 1

And we're off! I meant to write this last night but the beginning of today is good enough.

After watching the keynote and getting our theme, we started discussing game designs. Our theme this year is "extinction," which leads to several obvious routes. Two obvious ones are "everyone is [going] extinct and you have to prevent/solve it" and "make [insert species here] extinct." There's also the psychological definition which is to make a certain behavior extinct by gradually removing positive reinforcement to a stimulus or giving negative feedback to a stimulus that was once positive. Our group decided to do a combination of both the biological and psychological definitions in one; a sort of double-extinction.

The basis of our game is that the player is told that they are to make a species extinct while our game design [hopefully] makes a certain behavior of theirs (collecting coins, for example) extinct at the same time without them noticing. After throwing ideas back and forth we decided that our game would be a platformer that consists of a vengeful man in a dinosaur suit (dino-Batman, as he is currently being called) who travels back in time to kill all the dodo birds, one of which who traveled forward in time and killed his parents. The player will be told to kill all the dodo birds and presented the option to collect dodo bird eggs, which make tasty omlettes. Ultimately, the player will be killing dodo birds and forgetting/subconsciously choosing not to collect eggs.

Our current plan is to do a little research into the psychology behind extinction so that we can successfully implement it in our game. The platformer "game" part that the player sees and comprehends as the full game is fairly straightforward. It's a basic platformer with movement and jumping, enemies, and hopefully bosses. The player can jump on dodo birds to kill them and can only progress when all the dodos in an area are killed. Levels will be broken up by highly-characterized bosses that will be entertaining and fun. Dodo eggs will be placed in easily accessible areas but not right in the player's path. There will be environmental hazards like death pits and potentially one other that the player should avoid. The game will keep track of score as an aesthetic classic game feature, but lives will be infinite. The art style will be happy and colorful, and also somewhat comic. Our hope is that the game will be silly and fun enough that the player will keep playing until the end, where we reveal the psychological extinction that has hopefully occurred.

I think that's it for now. I'll try to get another post up tonight or tomorrow morning to summarize Saturday's work.

Global Game Jam 2011 Begins

I'm going to be on top of the ball this time and actually update my blog as stuff happens! This time, I'll be blogging about my experience at this year's Global Game Jam. The Global Game Jam is an event that takes place worldwide, where sites around the world host a game jam at roughly the same time as everyone else who's participating. Jammers have about 48 hours to complete a game and submit it online for the world to see. Last year there was a theme and some constraints, as well as some fun achievements for jammers to shoot for. As far as I know, there aren't any constraints this year, just a theme and optional achievements.

Anyways, the WPI Global Game Jam site will be in the IMGD Lab and we will begin at 5:00PM tonight. I've already talked to someone about a game jam idea (one that sort of fell through last term) so hopefully we'll be able to crank it out and put it online by Sunday! I'll be writing a new blog post each day of the game jam to detail what we got accomplished and hopefully have a playable game on my portfolio by the last post.

Japan 2010 Final Thoughts

Since our last couple of weeks in Japan consisted of us focusing on finishing our project, I didn't take many photos towards the end of our trip. Our final trips consisted of souvenir shopping at places we'd already visited, so nothing really new happened. The end of our stay approached pretty quickly and I don't think we fully anticipated it. As such, I felt it was necessary to write a final "wrap-up" post to sort of summarize and look back on the trip a little bit. For this post, I will be organizing my thoughts into categories of lists in a sort of "postmortem" fashion.

Things I Did

Visited many historic sites, like temples and castles

Visited other interesting places, like arcades, SEGA Joypolis, a dinosaur museum, and a zoo

Tried to go somewhere almost every weekend

Ate many new Japanese foods

Learned a little bit about the Japanese language

Took over 3,800 pictures

Climbed Mt. Fuji in one 13 hour attempt

Went to Tokyo Game Show to see some cool upcoming games

Survived the trip without eating any fish (intentionally, I probably had bits of some somewhere)

Learned Adobe Illustrator and Flash for our projects

Learned about working in a team with people of varying skills

Things I Wish I Did

Planned our Mt. Fuji hike a little better (rather than the night before)

Thought about souvenirs earlier, so I wouldn't have to scramble to find things at the last minute

Took more pictures towards the end of the trip, like in the airport(s) on the way home

Wrote my blog posts shortly after the events happened instead of months later...

Learned more Japanese while I was immersed in the culture

Things I'll Do Next Time

Visit during the spring to see the sakura trees (cherry blossoms)

Bring Melissa to see and eat some of the things I saw and ate

Learn how to cook more Japanese food with Japanese ingredients, instead of using American ingredients with online recipes

Well, that's it. The trip is over and I've summarized almost all of it. Although it's great to be home I feel a little reverse-homesick every now and then. I had a great time in Japan and I can't wait to to back!

(I've compiled 200 of the best photos I took while in Japan. You can check them out here!)

Tokyo 2: This Time, More Games (9/16/10 - 9/21/10)

On our second trip to Tokyo, we indulged ourselves with lots of video game-related activities. The main attraction this time was the annual Tokyo Game Show. We bought tickets for both public days, with a special access ticket on the second day to get us in early. Besides TGS, we also checked out some arcades in Shinjuku, walked around Akihabara, ate at a McDonald's decorated for the new Pokémon games, and found our way back to SEGA Joypolis. All in all it was a great time, especially since we could explore on our own schedule without having to go to a virtual reality conference.

September 17th, 2010: Like last time, we took an overnight bus to get to Tokyo. It was just as uncomfortable as before, and it dropped us off really early on Friday. We were able to leave our stuff at the hotel and explore until check-in time (which was 2:00PM), so we went exploring in Shinjuku. There, we found various arcades and played a bunch of games, like a giant robot fighting simulator game, some rhythm games (DDR, Pop'n Music), and electronic darts. We got back to the hotel in time to check in and relaxed on our comfy hotel beds for the rest of the night.

* * *

September 18th, 2010: Saturday was the first day of TGS, so we got up early (well, somewhat early) and got to the convention hall area at a decent time. The train station was packed, and the walk to the convention hall was a mass exodus of Japanese and tourists. We waited in line for a couple hours just to get into the hall, and it was even more packed inside! At one point, it was so

crowded that I was moving by being pushed, and I almost fell down (and onto other people) more than once.

Despite the crowds, there was a lot of good stuff to see. Many big companies had booths, like SEGA, Konami, Sony, and Microsoft, and there were some smaller companies, too. As with every convention the big companies were showing off their new products to hype up attendees into buying their products: Sony had a bunch of PlayStation Moves; Microsoft had women playing the Kinect; Konami, SEGA, and others had demos of their new games. Unfortunately, Nintendo doesn't usually attend TGS, so there wasn't a booth with Nintendo games. There was, however, some merchants selling products like Nintendo plushies, so they did have a small presence.

Another big part of TGS is the cosplay area. Many men and women (but mostly women) dress up as their favorite game characters and pose for photographs for the many attendees. Japanese cosplaying is serious business, so the costumes are all professional-level stuff. The convention hall even had a dressing room and designated backdrops for cosplayers. Japanese men, who know the routine, stand in line at the person they want to photograph and take turns snapping pictures. Cosplaying is just one of those things that are a strange part of the Japanese culture.

Since our special ticket was for Sunday, this first day was mostly scouting out games we wanted to play tomorrow. I did play a few games today, but the majority of the things I tried were played on Sunday. We managed to get to the Pokémon Center in Tokyo after the convention, however, to pick up a copy of the new Pokémon games, Black and White. Saturday night was therefore committed to starting this new game.

* * *

September 19th, 2010: Using our special pass, we got a new bag of goodies (including a t-shirt and pin) and early access to the convention hall. We got to avoid the large line of people that we were stuck in yesterday, and we had about a full hour to scourge the hall before the mass of people came in. In the allotted time we had before doors opened for regular guests, we played double the number of games we had played the day before over the course of the whole day. Needless to say, the $30 ticket for Sunday was definitely worth more than the $10 one we purchased for Saturday. The rest of Sunday was mostly walking around the convention hall like the day before. Having played a bunch of games and got a bunch of free stuff earlier we were satisfied with the event. I definitely took home a couple pounds of swag over two days of convention...

* * *

September 20th, 2010: The last thing we wanted to make sure we did in Tokyo was visit Akihabara. We definitely found it, but I don't think we saw most of it. It seemed like it was much smaller than Den Den Town even though Den Den Town is supposed to be a smaller version of Akihabara. Regardless, we found lots of arcades with UFO crane games in them and other familiar games. The only other thing we did in Akihabara was visit a maid cafe. It was quite the experience, just because it was so much different than anything you would find in the States. The food was a little expensive, but I guess you pay for the whole visit. I shared a plate of ice cream and pancakes with Jared I, who had the maid write "Dry Bones" on our plate. Overall, it was a unique tourist activity that is one of Akihabara's specialities.

* * *

September 21st, 2010: On our final day in Tokyo, we travelled back to the mall area we found last time we were there. During the previous night, we had ventured back here to find the Pokémon McDonald's and today we spent some time eating and playing our new games there. We walked around the mall briefly once more and then ended up back at Joypolis. We decided to buy the first-level discount ticket which gives you about six hours of time before they close (last time we only had four hours, which wasn't enough time). We got to go on many more of the rides, as well as some that we went on last time. It definitely made up for what we missed the first time we went.

* * *

I would say that our second time in Tokyo was more enjoyable than the first. We were there for fun this time and we had more time to see what we wanted to. (We also weren't dying from a 13 hour volcano-climbing hiking trip.) I know we definitely didn't get to experience everything that Tokyo had to offer, but we were satisfied nonetheless.

(Whew, that was a big one. One more Japan blog post to go! Check out all the photos here and here!)

Himeji Under Construction, Come Back in 2014 (9/12/10)

(I'm finally getting around to finishing my Japan blog posts! I have three planned: this one about Himeji Castle, one about our second trip into Tokyo for the Tokyo Game Show, and a final "wrap-up" post. Stay tuned!)

September 12th, 2010: On our final impromptu weekend trip we took a train out to Himeji Castle in the Hyōgo Prefecture. We stopped in Kobe on the way to the castle, but didn't spend too much time there; we only ate lunch in Kobe on the ride back.

Himeji Castle is probably the most famous castle in Japan, so we figured we should go see it. Unfortunately, it was under construction when we were there and the scaffolding wouldn't be gone until Spring 2014. Regardless, we walked around the castle grounds and took lots of pictures (including lots I can use for game textures). We also overheard that the castle grounds are stunning in the spring when the cherry blossoms are in bloom, so I'll have to go back some day to check that out.

After perusing the castle grounds, we headed over to the Himeji City Zoo, which is literally attached to the castle area. It costs 200 Yen admission, and there are a decent amount to see inside. There were some pretty nice animals, like polar bears, a giraffe, an elephant, lots of birds, and red pandas. Sadly, most of these animals looked awfully depressed, especially the polar bears who seemed to be tortured by the 90 degree weather. Surprisingly, the penguins seemed to be enjoying themselves and the piglets were squealing cutely. It was nice to see a bunch of animals that weren't pigeons or deer, even if some of them didn't want to be there.

We left the zoo and headed back to Osaka via train. We stopped in Kobe briefly but decided not to venture towards the harbor. Instead, we decided to eat at a restaurant in the station that was advertising beef and onions on rice for pretty cheap. I almost gave in and bought a McGriddle from McDonald's across the way, but I'm happy I decided to go with the beef bowl.

(Check out all the Himeji photos here and here!)

Next time I'll recap our second and last Tokyo trip, including Tokyo Game Show, arcades, another trip to SEGA Joypolis, and lots of new Pokémon. Hopefully it won't take me as long to write it as this one did!