So, it’s really been a long while since I’ve posted here (what’s new, har har). So, I’ve made it finally. I got an internship at Subatomic Studios over here in Cambridge as a Software Engineering Intern. Their flagship game is Fieldrunners, one of the most successful iPhone games out there. The work is tough but it’s really challenging. I feel like 80% – 90% of what I’ve learned in college thus far is pretty much useless here. So I’ve officially achieved my childhood dream at age 21. And it’s been….hmmm about a year more or less since I started seriously using this blog. I think that’s pretty damn cool. Right now I’m also working at Draper Labs as a Database Application Programmer. Let’s hope I don’t die.

So I’ve learned a lot along the way here in this last year, but I feel like my actual game dev journeys only just started. So, LET’S DO THIS.

OH YEAH! Meanwhile, a week ago I participated in Immigration Jam at the GAMBIT Lab. Basically, make a game about immigration, in even LESS time then we had for Global. It was alot of fun, and the other programmer I worked with (Alec Thomson) was awesome as hell to work with. Besides the RIDICULOUS ton of music assets we had to deal with, it went pretty well.

You can play our game, Super Mega Immigration Office 2000 here:
http://web.mit.edu/alect/www/portfolio/immigration.htm

So, working 12hrs a week, I haven’t had much time to do anything lately so, if it’s another while till I’m back again, well maybe that’s not THAT unusual…

So life’s been pretty busy lately. In the span of a month I’ve had a phone interview with a game development company, been hired and unhired by another company, and assigned 8 labs and a research paper for a single class. Not to mention the need to find a new co-op.

A few weeks ago I had a phone interview with a local game development company (won’t mention who). It’s definitely the farthest I’ve ever gotten trying to get into the game development industry. It was pretty cool, difficult, and very enlightening. I submitted sample code from Block Legend and some school projects. Basically got drilled to hell and back on them too. In the end I was rejected though due to not having enough professional C++ experience. Well, I suppose it was granted, as I messed up a few questions as well. I’d also rather not be seen as a liability when taken onto a team either. The interviewer wasn’t even some super old guy either, but a younger-ish guy and someone I feel who had been in my shoes at one point as well. I felt pretty bad at first but he offered me a lot of sage advice that I’ll definitely take to heart in the future. Basically:

- Keep making demos
- Practice practice practice
- Keeping on going to local Game Dev events
- Cleaner coding style
And there’s a lot more, but I don’t feel like writing too much more on it right now.

With that I feel my chances of finding anymore opportunities in game dev around the area pretty slim. But as luck would have it, I was contacted on LinkedIn by a Business Process Management firm about a possible opportunity. Went in for an interview and did pretty well.

Interviewer: So, what do you know about Actionscript?
Me: Oh man, don’t even get me STARTED.

Thank you Global Game Jam, so so much. Also was able to answer some Algorithms questions that I couldn’t answer during my previous interview with the game dev company. What a difference a week or two makes in a curriculum. So I was offered the job! And I gladly took it. All was good in the hood (haha why am I using this expression) until a few days later the recruiter contacted me that they couldn’t take me anymore as it would eliminate their ability to hire a full time employee as well. So, that was out. And here I am as the job hunt continues.

Sadly, I haven’t been able to do much game dev work on personal projects due to working on school assignments and searching for a fall co-op.

- 10 Labs
- A project on networking a multithreaded ray tracing algorithmin Java
- A 8-10 page paper on said research project
- A presentation on said project and paper
- A presentation and poster board on A* Algorithm
- 2 Tests
- 2 Finals

All in the span of 3 weeks, WOO. Ended up missing my first Post Mortem in almost a year due to working on some of this stuff, feels bad man.

Anyway, bah, what is this Livejournal? This is about devving and programming and junk, so no whining.  I’ve decided to stop working on Block Legend and create a new project. I wanna make something Student IGF worthy for November. Sadly I feel like I’ve run out of ideas pretty much, not to mention not sure what engine/platform I’d like to use.

Reasons I’ve Decided Not to Work on Block Legend Anymore:
- Importing to Visual Studio 2008 to 2010 to 2008 again screwed it up pretty bad and it only compiles half the time now
- Still a bunch of memory leaks EVERYWHERE and dangling pointers all over the place
- Utilizes no garbage collection, hence the many many memory leaks
- This project was more of a learning experience and indeed I learned alot. I hadn’t touched C++ that seriously since Freshman year which was about more than 2 years ago and used a lot of things I hadn’t learned in those classes and just learned myself.
- I used roguelikelib, which I feel was kinda cheating, but it did help a lot and I learned the ins and outs of procedural map generation and pathfinding, and tile based movement, and so on and so forth (or so I thought, as stuff still ended up spawning inside of walls and what not despite all the checks I made upon optimizing the map generator)\
- The code, it’s a MESS! I honestly haven’t worked on it in about a month and I’ve gone back and well, I can hardly make sense of it anymore! I remember I tried really hard to get it working for the PAX East Made in MA Party and did a few things here and there to make it at least look good, and well, haha that was a bad idea (I got textures randomly instantiated within functions that are called over and over in order, that was retarded)
- In principle, it’s not a very practical game, you may as well be playing tetris really. There’s just way too much going on, people forget you’re fighting stuff and you have skills with mana and what not. It’s just, not very smooth. The reason why Puzzle Quest works is that it’s turn based and people have time to evaluate their skills and current status while contemplating over their next move. The only reason I could play it so fast was because I’ve played the hell out of it for 100+ hours and know the ins and outs of it.

In the end, I came really far with it and I’m pretty happy with what I learned. It was also cool that I came that far working only by myself on it. A lot of the ideas I’ve had are pretty derivative and/or combinations of current games so, yeah, time to do that Indie thing and try and make something original for a change. But what?!

Rough Schedule? If I’d realistically want to enter this thing
So it’s July 18th now, I’ll give myself maybe another week of brainstorming for a concept..
July 18th to 24th: Concept brainstorming
July 25th to 31st: Design brainstorming
August 1st to 15th: Technical brainstorming, planning, design tweaking
August 16th to October 31st: After after 5:00pm code like hell?
November 1st: Student IGF Deadline

Or maybe try and get a team together as well? If only most people I know weren’t so unmotivated and lazy…But who can blame em? Summer, schoolwork, life. Who wouldn’t wanna just go to the local bar and throw back a few beers right now, I sure wouldn’t mind.

This game, Continuity by Chalmers University of Technology won last years Student IGF. It’s a FLASH GAME and implementation doesn’t look terribly hard to do, but the design is cool and interesting. There were other games such as Devils Turning Fork which had big teams from actual game dev schools and look like they took a lot of work to do (pseudo visual sound waves? I think yes). So, maybe I got a shot?

So I went to the Boston Unity Groups first meeting yesterday, which was Unity Day. They had a speaker come in from Unity and talked about the new features of 3.0. Gave a few tutorials, had some food. Good times were had by all.

With that, I really wanted to make something in it so heres my halfway crappy attempt at a GeometryWars/Zelda/3Ddotgameheroes mashup that I did in half a day. The models actually took up most of my time…

You can play this game HERE! On this site! Yay exporting to web player. It’s a bit hard, collisions are kinda terrible, camera needs work and sword controls don’t swing very well. But hey, half a day while still mucking around with it? Not bad.

So it’s been awhile, again. This seems to be some kind of trend. Anyway, after moving into a new apartment and dealing with all this other stuff I’ve finally gotten settled back. Crazy what can happen over just one semester. I’ll be updating again and working on stuff much more now that I’m done with work (last Friday was my last official full day). Fall I also do another Co-op. Let’s see where I can go with getting an actual internship at a game development company this time.
Still working on Block Legend. I finally have a real artist now, so let’s do this!

Also working on another project in Unity. Seem’s like a good engine to go more into considering it can now export to every system and platform.

Brief I know, but I’m writing this in the school library. Much to come. Very much more to come.

Woooooah. Got a table for the PAX East Made in MA Party tonight at the Microsoft Building. I, John Larkin, and Andrew Derosier will be there with demos (and this cool poster I made). I’ll be showing off a really rough prototype of Block Legend for the first time to people other than myself. Time to gauge the project so far….

Boy I hope I take home that blue ribbon at the high school science fair tonight! Haven’t made a three sided poster board in so long….

Went to a programming roundtable based on Issues Making Technical Tools. The talk really interesting. Wish I had gone to more roundtables honestly. A lot on good interfacing and datamining for usability.

Went to a career fair panel called A Contrarian on Getting into the Game Industry. This was the guy who balanced Street Fighter 2 HD Remix. Man, I’m terrible with names. I loved his style though. Basically a no bullshit kind of talk that a lot of people who want to get into the game industry need. Boiled down to three points: Go to Things, Do Stuff, Get Better. There’s an article called Unskilled and Unaware that he brought to our attention.

Next panel I went to was Publishing as a Student by the Portal Girl, the PB Winterbottom guys, and thatgamecompany. It really motivated me hearing this talk though. It all seems so feasible with digital distribution and what not. Doing what they did is all just a matter of working hard, and how much you want it. Goes back to the last panel, Go to Things, Do Stuff, Get Better. I have a year and a half left, let’s see what I can do.

Went to a roundtable on Why C++ is a Bad Language for Game Development. People were heated up. Most of the people there were there to defend C++ actually. There really is no perfect language, nor will there ever be, in a few peoples opinions. Who knows.

And that was the last panel I went to, thanks GDC. It cost me an arm and a leg to come out here, time off work, and a ton of exhaustion, but it was worth it. So worth it.

Haha yes, I am quite aware this is a small post, but much work to do right now. Not to mention, PAX is pretty soon….ah jeez.

Late nights, early mornings. That’s GDC for ya. Had Jack in the Box for the first time the night before too, interesting stuff. Don’t have em in Boston.

Started off my day by checking out the panel on Real Time Cutscenes in Final Fantasy 13. This team is so talented. Everyone’s been talking crap about FF13, but they put a lot of care and detail into the game, gotta give em credit for that, I sure will. The speaker talked about these 3 teams.

Basically, anywhere where you can’t move freely, is a cutscene, that was acted out by someone. All of them.

The cutscene is then crappy rendered on screen using the motion captures from the actors.

Some props they used.

Some resource documents used for MoCAP prep. Scripts, and etc.

Afterwards they overlay the real models, textures, and use a Phoneme Analyzer to sync up the lips to the voices. It was pretty impressive. I had just played through an hour of Final Fantasy 13 before I left to go to GDC. Seeing how they made that exact scene from ground up made my day.

Went to the keynote talk given by Sid Meier on the Psychology of Game Design. A lot of things on balancing and bitchy playtesters. That was pretty funny.

And apparently, now I know everything. Thank you Sid Meier.

Went to the IGDA general meeting. We’ve come a long way. Congrats to Darius on getting on the board. You’ve done a lot for n00bs like me really.

And then, I went to the Final Fantasy 13 Panel, oh jeez…where do I begin. So the director comes out, and says, HEY, BUY FINAL FANTASY 13. I’m like, haha, ah that’s funny. HEY, YOU GUYS ON LAPTOPS, BUY FINAL FANTASY 13 ON AMAZON RIGHT NOW. Oh, haha, ohhhh kay, that’s enough. I’M GONNA SHOW YOU A COMMERCIAL NOW. Huh…? OH THERES AMERICANS IN THE AUDIENCE, I’LL SHOW THE AMERICAN ONE TOO! Hey, what about, the game? Wait, huh? Were game devs here, we were interested enough to come to your panel, course were gonna buy the game, thanks…I guess?

And then he starts, he goes over some of the history of final fantasy and his own history. And then he went on to Final Fantasy 13. The whole thing was more of a Post Mortem on Final Fantasy 13 than an explanation of the Crystal Mythos and how it relates to all the games, is what I had expected.

The whole reduced emphasis on towns.

And this slide, it hurt me pretty bad to see this. Me and the people sitting around me, just kinda, looked at each other in disbelief. Was he making a joke? Huh? Then again, they own Eidos now and such, maybe those are the only “western” games they seem to know about now. My heart sank.

Anyway, then he played that Leona Lewis song and closed up for questions. The first guy, this crazy nerdy asian guy (no, I’m not talking about me), RAN up to the mic saying, “I spent  120$ US on the Japanese version because I hate the voices and that stupid Leona Lewis Song. Why did you make the game so linear, blah blah”, and so on and so forth. Forgot what the response was, but it wasn’t a really cohesive answer. Add that to the crappy translation, and well, I walked out because I couldn’t watch anymore.

My friend Rich said I should have asked “Hey, I’ve been making comparisons as well with JRPGs like say, Street Fighter 4 to WRPGs like Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age”. Maybe that would have tipped him off. Honestly, probably stupid but I really wanted to work for Square Enix someday, but not like this. They have such an amazing development team too, it’s a bit of a shame. Bitter but, these are all just my opinions. From my point of view, he kind of went against everything Sid Meier said in his talk about Game Design.

I went to the Game Design Challenge 2010. The theme this year? A game involving Real World Perma Death. I was wondering if one of them was going to kill someone. I probably wasn’t alone. Among the challengers were Jenova Chen of Flower and Kim Swift of Portal. Jenova Chen won with his game Heaven(Death)ville. A stock market facebook game based on buying your dead friends. Hilarity ensued.

Went to the GANG (Game Audio Network Guild) awards afterwards. The Audio community is so tight with each other, nice guys they are. Again, Uncharted 2 kicked some more ass.

Then I saw Palm Trees for what might have been the first time in my life.

The whole time difference thing threw me off a bit, but honestly I felt pretty good about having a few extra hours. No wonder west coast people are so “chill”.

Anyway, the Programmers Track keynote was given by Dominic Fillion, the Senior Graphics Engineer for Blizzard. The talk was one of the coolest programming lectures I had ever heard.

Basically I got to see how Blizzard is able to keep such a strong level of quality control among all of their games. The key lies in the debugging tools they use that they spend months working on. They’re efficient, visual, and look very easy to use.

The first picture is a picture of the Blizzard real-time performance testing software they implemented into Starcraft 2. Wish I had gotten a better picture. It takes note of all the draw function calls and everything like that and displays the resources on the screen visually. The layout is also damn intuitive. The second picture is tool for profiling how many resources are needed  to render certain parts of the map. The problem with profiling tools is that they tend to slow down the game while you’re testing and it’s hard to get a good account of how things are really running. But, Blizzard made it work, naturally.

Then the show floor opened, and then things just got ridiculous. So many companies. All your big contenders, Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft, etc.  All showing off their latest stuff.

745 Studios was showing off their game that uses a new guitar controller that they developed. But they wouldn’t let us see the actual gameplay though. Very sketchy indeed, but cool.

Went over the career pavilion. Talked to everyone I could. Sure glad I made those business cards. Wish I had brushed up on my Japanese a bit better. Didn’t think they’d be a big presence for some reason. But lo and behold, there was Konami, asking if I ever thought about working in Japan (yes). They asked me to introduce myself in Japanese, which I was able to do, but then I started talking about my job, and ohhhh hey, Robot-o no Programming-u…? Yeahhhhhh. Well, they’re not hiring entry level programmers right now anyway. But all in all, I got some great experience talking with recruiters, what they expect, and etc. I’m not necessarily looking for a job right now, so I didn’t feel too bad about it. Next year I’ll be prepped.

Waded around the expo floor a bit more. There’s just so much to take in, so many people, so much technology, so little time. Not to mention all the swag. I wasn’t even necessarily out there to get swag, but, oh hey, free stuff.

Afterwards I went to the audio keynote panel by the sound designer at Grasshopper Studios (No More Heroes) with a few of my Berklee friends. The talk was really interesting. So much you can do with sound to mess with someone psychologically. Besides that, you can mask effects and all this crazy stuff like that too. Not to mention fake people out…

All of the Japanese guests spoke in Japanese and we had to use a separate headset with a translator. Again, wish I had brushed up on my Japanese. Comprehending complex gameplay design mechanics wasn’t exactly something I learned in school. The translator definitely degraded from the experience due to the inevitable speech lost in translation. It was also weird to hear all that stuff from the voice of an old Japanese lady…

Next I went to a panel on Particle Physics in PixeJunk Shooter given by one of the programmers from Q Games. I think I saw this guy before posting on the Global Game Jam website. He was complaining about the long programming hours and what not. But the guys got skill though. It was half like my engineering physics course, and a programming course taught by Durga Suresh (professor at my College). Honestly, I’ve only played Shooter for a little bit, but it has so much depth and detail to the gameplay. Each particle actually contains it’s own thermal data, and all these other properties and what not to keep the whole thing going. It’s nuts.

Nvidias Nsight. They created a Programmable GPU Development Environment. It’s ridiculous. Basically you can debug/profile GPU functions and calls as if they were CPU functions, visually. The guy took a single pixel from a screen and was able to get all of the drawcalls made to it, the time, the memory it took, etc. etc. Tools are getting crazy.

Next was the IGF Awards and Game Developers Choice awards. Really wish Dejobaan won the award for best Gameplay design, but Monaco also deserves it I’d say. Penny Arcade, Mega64, Will Wright, Gabe Newell, John Carmack, so many ridiculous people were there, and probably more I didn’t get to see. It was the first big awards show thing I’d ever been to. The whole thing felt like the MTV awards, or the Oscars, or something (minus the girls).

Uncharted 2 basically won, everything.

Went to the GDC Speakeasy party afterwards with some friends. That was damn fun. Got some use out of being 21 I suppose. There’s an article on Kotaku detailing that the parties are more relevant than the actual panels. I wouldn’t say MORE, but, it does bid true. Met a bunch of Full Sail kids for the first time there. Interesting bunch they are.

Live Band.

Cabaret Dancers.

Game Devs really do know how to party.

I’m so glad I went into this field.

Hadn’t flown since I was 11 until today. Pretty nuts. Actually was with a lot of people who were also going to GDC as well. Actually sat next to Dave, the career guy from WPI going to rep at the career pavilion. Not to mention a few other n00bs and Post Mortem familiar faces as well.

So thousands of miles later, I get to San Francisco. The whole thing was a crazy shock of, woah I’m in San Francisco, and woah I’m actually going to GDC. First time being on the west coast. I don’t have too many words about it except that, San Francisco is beautiful.

Thanks for the encouragement Wario.

It was a bit intimidating really. So many talented ridiculous people. I had done some prep and read up on Darius’s blog on Effective Networking in the Game Industryt. I highly recommend it.

There was a good practiced he detailed on writing about how you met the person and what they look like on the back of their business card. Course, that kind ended after the first 15-20 or so with how many I was getting. But overall, I think I did ok for a first time there.

Met up with my music buddy Nazer from Berklee and a few other of the VGMC crew as well. Kind of wish I had a programming buddy here my age/skill level to talk to and compare observations/notes with, but hey, I’m here.

AAAAAA by Dejobaan from my very own hometown of Boston was there for the IGF, hope they win. Actually ended up going for Indian Food with a few of the guys and some kids from WPI after a New England Games SIG meetup.

Not bad for a first day, that’s technically not a first day.