Tag Archives: games

GDC 2013

This year I came more prepared by printing out some business cards and planning out my day (since I still could only afford the $75 dollar student pass). I spent most of my day sitting in on talks and taking notes about various topics. Long story short, a few speakers mentioned how important it was that developers (that were applying for their companies) wrote about their thoughts and talked about things they work on. I’ve actually been meaning trying to do this for awhile but I never found myself to be that great of a writer nor been able to make time to write. However, you don’t get better at something be avoiding it so I’m going to try and write more here about my work and general thoughts about things happening in the industry.

I’d also like to mention that I haven’t put much work into Caved In 2 since the last post, mostly just been on and off work on the medal system. However I’m planning on getting at a good solid chunk of work done tomorrow. My current plan is to work on the game during my spring break, which happens to fall during the last week of April.

I’ve also been thinking about the rogue-like that I was planning on doing next, but I don’t think I’m going to go through with it. Such a big project is likely to keep me hung up for quite a long time and I’d much rather work on smaller, more manageable projects. I’m currently working on a space-dog-fighting-arcade game for one of my classes that I think I’ll continue with after Caved In.

 

Happy Holidays!

I was just thinking about how I hardly post here anymore and that I should at least give updates to my current projects.

About two months ago I landed a contract gig with BulletProofArcade and I’ve been happily coding away. Coupled with school work, I’ve been quite busy especially since I’m now reaching the final year. However with the holidays here, I’ve been finding more and more free time (yay!) so I’ve picked up on my own projects once again.

I had been working on a Borderlands-inspired hunting game, but I put the project on hold to work on something smaller since I couldn’t find much time. So I’m currently working on a sequel to Caved In as I had been wanting to revisit the game for quite awhile now and it fit the bill in terms of my time budget. I don’t have anything worth screen shotting just yet, but hopefully I’ll get something ready for this #ScreenShotSaturday! I’m in the process of wrapping up world generation, so I should have something cool by then.

I’m also trying to get around to making some mods for the various games I own as well as some more open-source libraries. As a matter of fact, I have a few potentially useful libraries should be committed to github after some house keeping…

GDC 2012

After spending last year’s GDC watching from the outside wishing I was there, I decided to go this year! However I was totally unprepared for all of the awesomeness – it was quite overwhelming. Nonetheless, I got to meet a bunch of developers and hear what advice they had. I even sat in on a talk with Kim Swift, Andy Schatz, and other developers which talked about breaking into the industry. There was a lot of useful topics covered during the talk, but I felt the most important advice they gave was how important a portfolio of  games, open source projects, and even game mods are when applying to studios. So once I finish up Gridnet, I’ve going to be moving to games with much smaller scopes that I can turn them around a lot faster. I’m also going to focus on making a few mods for Skyrim as well as some mobile apps/games.

Hopefully by next year, I’ll have a nice portfolio that I can flaunt at next year’s GDC and get myself an internship! =D

Weekend Jam

So after bailing on Ludum Dare #22, I’ve decided to start my own little game jam. This will serve several purposes: (1) it will keep me busy over the coming weeks, (2) keep my game design juices flowing, (3) break up the work on primary projects, (4) create a library of game ideas and experiments, and (4) learn new techniques and concepts. As long as other plans don’t get in the way, I intend on doing this every weekend. Here’s are a few rules that I’m laying down for myself, which I may add to over the time I spend doing this:

  1. Games do not need to be complete/finished (can lack sounds, audio, or graphics)
  2. Games can be an experiment of a central game mechanic
  3. Games must be within a weekend scope (no big projects here!)
  4. No theme requirements
  5. I cannot make similar games two consecutive weekends in a row

There you have it! I will edit this most when I add/remove/change rules. Source code of projects will be available on request for anyone interested.

I am now going to get started on this week’s Weekend Jam!