I'm Back

This blog has been on hiatus for about a year... I considered making a post explaining why, but I get the impression that no-one reads this blog. This is mostly my fault, of course! I've never been one for branding and advertisement, so it stands to reason that this place would be pretty empty.

I'm thinking of continuing where I left off, and trying to get more eyes on my work. But first, let's talk about where I was and what I was up to.

 

The Blocky Elephant in the Room

If you have been following this blog, you can probably guess that Minetest was the source of my disappearance. As I became more familiar with the project, I got the impression that I would need to invest a lot of time into helping it along. As a result, instead of leaving it as a side thing I dropped my other projects and invested my time and effort into it.

I don't regret doing this, but I'm also not sure how productive it was. RPG16 got a lot of love from the community, something I'm quite proud of! On the other hand, attempts at game development were bogged down by annoyances and engine limitations. Looking at the engine itself, it became quickly apparent that a lot of important things were broken or missing. So, I dropped that project and started working on improving the engine, telling myself "It will take a while, but once the engine is good I'll be able to make something cool".

There were some problems with this line of thinking:

1. There's a ton of work to be done, and not enough people doing it
2. The pace of development is greatly slowed by the combination of strict standards and a small core team
3. The standards can't be loosened because there's a fairly large community expecting backwards compatible and bug-free updates
4. Joining the core team would effectively cut my own development time

This creates a cyclical problem, resolving the reasons that development is slow would slow development. Worse still, this was taking me even farther away from my original goal. Just resolving blockers was turning into a bit of a nightmare.

In the end, I decided to cut my losses and leave. I suspect that I could invest 5-10 years into Minetest work without seeing any "return", and I just can't justify that kind of thing. I don't hold anything against the developers and community though, and I sincerely hope they can prove me wrong. I'd like to come back to a better engine someday.

At the very least, my time in the Minetest community taught me one important thing: I have the skills to make work that appeals to others. What I'm really missing is visibility.

How About Art?

On a happier note, my art practice has been progressing very well! This year I've been able to accomplish one of my original dreams and branch into landscape art:

I'm still learning a lot, but seeing the strides I've made over time is very exciting. I intend to continue for the foreseeable future, with weekly art streams on Twitch and pieces posted on my Twitter. Follow me in either of these places if you'd like to see my work as I make it.

 

The New Plan

I think that mostly wraps up the last year or so. Now that I have more time to myself, I'd like to continue my old projects and revitalize this blog a little. One of the first things I plan to do is rebuild everything under a new blogging platform. The nature of what I make has shifted over time, and I need something that can better serve my needs.

In addition to programming projects, I'd like to be able to post art pieces, photos, development resources, etc. on this site to give people more reasons to visit it. And finally, I need to start sharing and advertising my work more. There's no point in rebuilding a site like this if there's no community to enjoy it.

Changing gears on Halberd

Right now, I'm in a bit of a difficult situation. My current game project has been taking much longer than I'd hoped, and I still haven't made a first release of Halberd. I don't make release dates anymore, but I'm still not happy with my current progress.

When I originally announced the game project, I acknowledged the risks and gave a few reasons why I felt the project was a good idea. Unfortunately, my arguments are still sound. The game has a reason to exist, and dropping it to speed up development doesn't strike me as a good option. So, I need to rethink my overall strategy.

What do I want?

When coming up with a new approach, figuring out I think it helps to consider what you want and why don't have it. The former helps you shape a goal, and the latter indicates the obstacles that you need to deal with to attain it.

In my case, there are a few things that I want:

• I want Halberd to become a useful, successful game engine - That much should be pretty obvious, most people don't set out to fail.
• I want to make good games - And, hopefully, have people play and enjoy them.
• I want to make tutorials - To give back to the internet, of course!

On the surface, these goals seem pretty simple. However, I think the biggest reason why I keep running into problems is that these goals are in conflict with each other. And where does the conflict stem from? That's right, it's time! All of these goals are achievable for me on their own, but they're time-consuming enough that juggling them all is difficult.

Fixing the problem

Like with any other resource, the only ways to resolve a lack of time is to make more, or to use less. Making time isn't an option for me (besides quitting my job, which would be a terrible idea), so instead I need to find ways to balance time and quality.

I can start by striking tutorials from the list. I don't spend time on them now, and it's unlikely that I'll suddenly start later. That leaves me with just my programming projects, which are currently the main problem.

Another common option for reducing the time spent working is to collaborate with others. This is how most people cope with a lack of time, since dividing work isn't too difficult. However, freelancers are expensive (they need to live too, after all) and volunteers are typically less reliable. I don't want to shelve the idea entirely, but I think I'll at least need to save money or produce work that's more exciting before I can take advantage of this option.

Making Changes

In the end, I don't have any strong solutions to this problem. Working on one item to the exclusion of the other (as I have been recently) doesn't work well, so I need to find a way to reasonably balance out 'engine time' and 'game time' so that they can coexist. Here's my current plan:

1. Go back to my regular posting non-schedule. I was using this game project as an experiment, but I'm not impressed by the results. I don't think I produced much interesting content, and I ended up spending a ton of time writing posts.
2. Resume work on Halberd. I'm going to get started on the next release while this game project continues on the side, so that Halberd doesn't get bogged-down too much by side work.
3. If I finish the next release of Halberd before the game, then I'll try to devote more time to finishing the game with that release. Otherwise (more likely) I'll wrap up the engine when the game finishes and release both together.

Future releases of Halberd will probably work the same way, with one game on the side dictating the engine releases. This lets me make plenty of games, but doesn't stop the engine dead in its tracks if the process gets bogged-down. In the long run, I'll probably also see if I can split things up in a more decisive manner with scheduling. That seems like overkill for the time being, so I won't try anything like that yet.

What this means for you as a reader is that I've split up the Halberd roadmap into two pages, one for the game and one for the editor. The blog will be getting occasional updates about both, and hopefully things will work out nicely!

Update - Sorry Guys!

Hello everyone, I have some unfortunate news today:

For various political reasons, my shoulders have decided to let burn the fires of revolution, which would be entertaining if it wasn't so darn painful. It hurts in general, which makes it difficult to focus, and it also hurts extra-hard to type! As a result, I've decided to postpone everything by a full month to allow my body time to recover.

This means that dfgame is now slated to release at the end of September, the tutorial is likely to end in December, etc. I was planning on a little "looking back" post for this blog's 5th anniversary on the 20th, and I might still do that. It's a big date, and most of the work is reading, not writing. My right arm is ok, so I might also bust out my tablet and chance a few sketches. We'll see.

Ultimately, I'm extremely disappointed in myself. I took the first week off this month in an attempt to deal with the issue, but it's been over 2 weeks and I'm still out of commission. I apologize for the delays and such, and you'll probably hear from me again in 3-4 weeks or so.

Mosquitoes ate my update video

Man, don't you hate it when small, buzzing insects devour files off of your hard drive? It's the worst. It's also something that definitely happens all the time, and our modern society is powerless to stop them. Remember when your favorite thing was cancelled or delayed for no apparent reason? Mosquitoes. Yup. Definitely 100% not telling any sort of fib or white lie right now, and frankly I'm a little wounded that you'd suggest that I might ever not tell the truth in a vain attempt to cover up my own shortcomings.

So, because a swarm of mosquitoes ate the update video for this week that I definitely made and didn't put off for too long, I'm making a little life post instead. You can expect me to have it finally finished remade in time for next Sunday's post.

Let's talk about my weekend

I had a really busy weekend, which is why I was unable to complete my video powerless to stop the horde of ravenous arthropods from devouring my video files.

On Saturday, I went on a hike in the Laurentides with a group from the office. For those who don't know, the Laurentides is a region of Quebec that's packed full of beautiful lakes and mountains. Just imagine every photo of the Canadian wilderness that you've ever seen.

This pretty lake is the perfect environment for breeding the harbingers of your hard drive's doom

The hike was 5 1/2 km, and circled a small lake. It was a good length, long enough to be enjoyable without overstaying its welcome. The weather was warm and sunny, but not so hot as to be uncomfortable. In many ways the conditions for this hike were ideal. They also happened to be ideal for the terrifying force of mosquitoes that hounded us and our video files, especially the latter. For every person, I'd say there were 10-20 mosquitoes buzzing around them. They didn't manage to ruin the experience though, and I'd definitely do it all over again. Oh, and uh....some of them, err, hid inside my backpack? Yeah, sure, we'll go with that. Then they emerged to feast upon my defenseless PC or something. It was awful.

Artist's rendition of the event

Unlike most activities that I engage in, I brought my camera with me and took a few photos. Several shots came out quite nicely, so I might do this more often:

(Click any image to view at full size)

On Sunday, my family came in for a visit. They brought my bike over, so once I buy a new helmet I should be able to travel much farther in the city! After that, we went out for pizza and ice cream, then took a little stroll around Parc La Fontaine. I'm not fond of spending lots of time with family, but I really enjoyed this little outing quite a bit! They seemed pretty happy too, so it was a good day all in all. Oh, and they were...yeah, they were totally devastated at the carnage caused by those darn mosquitoes. Yup!

So that was my eventful weekend! As you can see, I was quite busy and didn't find time to make this month's update video set up adequate anti-mosquito defenses. Anyhow, this week is mostly still May so I'm still keeping to the schedule to some degree. Expect the monthly dfgame update next Sunday at the regular time.

EDIT: According to Blogger, this is post #256, so if we were counting with one byte I'd have to stop here. Thankfully, that's no longer the case!

A post-graduation reflection

Last May, I got my Bachelor's Degree at Champlain College. Now that May has come again, I thought I'd give a quick recap on my first year out of school.

Getting a job

I started hunting for jobs on and off several months before graduation. Unlike many of my peers, I was in the interesting position of not wanting any sort of game development job at all. For years, I'd read stories about the horrors of game development and how it churns through the annual supply of bright-eyed college grads. So, I applied to software development gigs and got ignored a whole lot!
 
I suppose it's natural. Game Programming doesn't sound like the most reliable major to pick, even with the work I've done on my own. Ultimately, I got my current job through a mix luck and networking: My friend Vince (lead programmer on The Last Light) recommended me to a recruiter from Ubisoft Montreal during the end-of-year showcase of our game, and that led to an offer. (Seriously, networking is really good and you should do it) I wanted to stay close to my home in Vermont, so I decided to take the offer rather than keep looking.

Canada!

With the offer accepted and some necessary summer prep work complete, I found myself on the other side of the border just in time for Fall. Due to a scheduling mishap, I ended up arriving a month and a half before my start date, giving me plenty of time to settle in and explore the city. In order to best take advantage of this, I spent the majority of the time sitting in my room with a tiny specter of legal and financial uncertainty drifting lazily over my head.

Now that the weather is warm and I no longer fear for my checking account, I've been spending more time going out and looking around. Overall, I'm super happy to be here! Being half-French, I'm enjoying the mix of languages especially, even if I now have an irrational fear of peanuts.

Yup definitely not made of spiders no siree

...Moving briskly on, Montreal is a really nice spot to live. I've got a nice inexpensive apartment on the Plateau, and some streets are lined with enough trees to almost give the feeling of being in the woods! As someone who grew up in a reasonably small town village, the neighborhood makes me feel at home while still providing all of the bustle and convenience of a city close by. (And of course, there are some standard socialist benefits like free healthcare and unified public transportation systems)

Work life

Unfortunately, I won't be discussing too many details of my work. I'm not 100% sure what is/isn't covered under my NDA, so for now I'm playing it safe and speaking in very general terms. If I get that cleared up I might discuss some juicy details in a future post. So far, Ubisoft has been an incredibly pleasant surprise. Being a big publisher, I was expecting them to screw me over at every opportunity, but I have absolutely no complaints about them.

I've only truly been "on the job" for a scant few months (I was in a long-term training up until mid-January), but I feel like I'm trusted and relied upon regardless. I usually get handed a bunch of requests and long-term goals, and then I'm left to my own devices until they're finished. Not only have I not done any overtime, the senior devs that I work under have made a point of reminding me to take it easy on the hours and stay fresh. Some of this can be chalked up to the fact that the production I'm on is still at a very early stage, but even so I was expecting much more pressure.

Another fear that I had was about whether or not I'd be allowed to continue my personal work unrestricted. Ubisoft requires you to send in a 'request' for side-projects, but:

1. The restrictions that come attached are mostly just obvious things that most sane people wouldn't do in the first place
2. The responses get back to you in a reasonably timely manner
3. I have pushed no fewer than 19 personal projects through the official channels, and to this date not one of them has been refused.

Point is, they're pretty nice about these sorts of things. It would be even better if they didn't ask for requests at all, but at least the process is simple and painless.

The work itself has been really fulfilling and exciting for me. I've been doing tools work since it's the closest I can get to normal software development, and it's been a lot of fun! It makes me a little disappointed that Champlain doesn't cover tools programming in their curriculum at all, given how crucial good tools are to large-scale production teams. I'm mostly working in C# and WPF, but my experience with Vala and GTK are still coming in handy regardless. Indeed, it feels like both my personal and professional work are fueling each others growth.

To sum it up, I've managed to land a fun and not-too-stressful job in a city where I feel at home right out of college. I can't help but feel lucky where I am right now, and I hope my current streak of good luck lasts quite some time to come!

Getting Organized - 2 - Looking at Options

Last week, I wrote about my plan to try and help myself get organized. After that, I spent the week trying out tools and planning.

What's available?

The taskwarrior site has a tools page, where a number of tools and scripts are listed. There weren't many that looked useful, but I was able to find a handful of relevant tools and tried them out.

Tasky

Doesn't work. It's a few years old, so I suppose that's to be expected.

Taskswamp

Taskswamp is a python script that creates a tmux session with predefined taskwarrior filters. Basically, it lets you create a window with several tabs, each displaying different views of your tasks.

Some thoughts

1. Taskswamp doesn't update its view without user intervention. This means that you have to press a button to refresh whenever the window is resized or your tasks change.
2. It also fails to start up properly unless you open another tmux session first. I could use a script to do that automatically, but it's still a little bit of extra effort.
3. Lastly, it puts the new session inside of Xterm. It doesn't offer a choice of terminals, or check environment variables for your default terminal. That's unfortunate, although I could probably live with it.

Tasknc

(note: text redacted)

Tasknc is an interactive curses-based client for taskwarrior. It theoretically supports all of the basic features of taskwarrior, such as creating, editing, and deleting tasks.

Some thoughts

1. Tasknc doesn't seem to be actively developed. This is unfortunate, because it has a few bugs.
2. Unlike Taskswamp, the view will automatically refresh when the window is resized. You still have to refresh it when your tasks change, but that's ok because it supports all the basic editing actions from within its UI.
3. Deleting a task seems to make the application hang indefinitely. In addition, the add task command seems to display the wrong information. Both of these issues seem to have a workaround, but basic features being broken without extra configuration isn't a good sign going forward.

Taskwiki

So taskwiki is actually pretty great! It acts as an extension to the 'vimwiki' vim plugin. Basically, vimwiki lets you make...wait for it...wikis in vim. Taskwiki takes the concept a step further, by adding the ability to just throw a little checklist into any wiki page which automagically becomes a set of tasks managed by taskwarrior. Basically, it gives you a text-based method of managing your tasks.

You might be wondering why I like taskwiki so much, despite the fact that it fulfills none of my stated goals. It took me some thinking to figure out why I was so attracted to it, but I think I've figured out the reason: It gives your tasks a greater context. Sure, you can add tags and projects in taskwarrior, but this lets you organize and annotate those tasks however you want. You can make a new page in your wiki, write down some general description of something you want to do, then add a checklist of actionable goals to it. Those goals can then show up in checklists elsewhere, where you can check on their status or update them, and in the main wiki page you can add notes and other details as you make progress. Personally, I find that very exciting.

Some thoughts

1. Taskwiki is actively developed/maintained. This is good.
2. Resizes nicely, but you have to manually refresh your tasks.
3. It was a huge pain to set up (about an hour of work). This is no longer important, but I figured it was good to mention.

Constructing a plan

I didn't find anything that really fills the niche that I'm looking for. I think I can adopt taskwiki to handle some of my needs, but I'll also need to make something to fill some of the gaps. So, here's the plan:

1. Try to use taskwiki seriously for a while. I want to see how well using a wiki for organization actually works in practice, and there's only one way to do that. Next week, I'm going to write up a more detailed overview of vimwiki and taskwiki.
2. After that, I'm going to start building some scripts to cover the features that I want. While I can't precisely say what I'll need yet, I'm expecting that I'll want some way to be directly notified of upcoming tasks, and I'll probably also want a way to quickly pull up the wiki when I log in.

Ad before you get worried about dfgame, don't! I've been working on it behind the scenes, and you'll hear more about my progress in a few weeks.

Getting Organized - 1 - Selection

One problem that I've been dealing with these past few months is organization. As the past 4 1/2 years of blogging should have made clear, I am not very good at managing my time and priorities. Now that I'm working 40 hours a week, the problem has gotten bad enough to seriously annoy me. So, I've decided to try and solve this problem the only way I know how: With software.

Looking back

I've tried a few pieces of software for keeping track of important dates and tasks. None of them have really stuck so far, so my first instinct was to write my own solution. However, I'm not going to do that. After seriously considering the idea for a minute, I've reached the obvious conclusion that creating a new project to try and improve my time situation is only going to make things worse. Instead, I decided to try and look at the problems with previous approaches and solve them.

Something???

In the months before and just after starting this blog, I was using some kind of todo list software. I remember almost nothing about it, including the name, and I can't find it anymore.

Google Calendar

During my college career, I used Google Calendar to keep track of classes and events. Beyond that, I never really bothered with it. My main issue with Google Calendar is the fact that it's an online service. I prefer to keep most of my applications off the web, mostly because webapps:

1. Take up a disproportionately large amount of system resources to run.
2. Won't work without an internet connection (duh).
3. Take up an extra tab in my web browser.
4. Usually collect personal information to sell/profit from.

 I see the appeal for most "normal people", but I can't stand webapps. This disqualifies Google Calendar right off the bat.

Calcurse

 For a while, I used a terminal application called Calcurse. Calcurse is an interesting program, because it gives you a nice curses-based calendar UI in the terminal. However, I had a couple of big complaints:

1. The way that Calcurse handles todo lists leaves a lot to be desired. Unlike regular appointments, the program doesn't let you add items to your todo list with any sort of time attached. If you want to do something by next week, you need to make an appointment, rendering the todo list useless. Worse still, Calcurse won't try to warn you about the appointment ahead of time besides tossing you a notification a few hours or minutes before.
2. In practice, Calcurse is incredibly aggravating to use. When you start it up, you have to hit enter to pass a message saying that it has loaded up. You have to do the same thing when you exit, but then it also prompts you just to be sure you want to quit after that. So, you have to hit 3 different buttons in turn to exit, for no good reason. It might not seem too bad at first, but it's super annoying and I don't know of any method to disable it. On top of that, it splits everything into 3 different panes, and you have to cycle between them with the tab key. They couldn't give you a "go back" or "go next", or just 3 buttons to select the specific mode that you want. Nope, they decided that you'd have to press tab until you got where you wanted.

 This program is a usability nightmare. I'd like to avoid using it.

Taskwarrior

...This brings me to the last option, going by things that I've used previously. Taskwarrior is a task management program that works really well for keeping todo lists and does a good job of prioritizing tasks.

I really like Taskwarrior, but I can't ever seem to make it stick. The main reason for this is probably because it's a basic command-line tool. There's no interface, only commands. This makes using it pretty inconvenient, as you can't just keep a view open to glance at or see notifications when time-sensitive tasks are coming up. Taskwarrior is more of an interface than a user-friendly application, which makes using it without any extra tools pretty annoying.

Of the options I've looked at, I think Taskwarrior is a pretty clear choice. While I still have to do some work to get it working, most of the heavy lifting will be already done for me. Hopefully, this will keep the time investment for this solution low. Hopefully, I'll be posting updates on this soon after I make more progress. Stay tuned!

Quick Life Update Post

Update:  I'm more or less all set, and I'll be back to posting regularly soon enough, but I'm leaving the rest of the post intact for those curious what I've been up to lately. I might make a proper update post about this later, at which point this will be deleted.

"Hugues, you haven't updated in nearly 2 months! Where's my fix?!"

No-one has said this, but I feel an inexplicable urge to explain regardless. You see, I'm employed. Not only that, I'm videogames employed.

If you're not too sure what that actually means, what I'm getting at is that I have a lot of red tape to deal with now. As of mid-October, I'm working as a professional game programmer. Now, while I can probably do some kind of work (the company I work for seems to be pretty cool about these sorts of things), the sheer quantity and scale of my side projects means that I don't really want to touch them or this blog without proper permission.

I still have every intent to continue this blog and hopefully get a more regular schedule going again. With any luck, I'll be able to fully resolve things within the next few weeks and then I can go back to normal development, but in the mean time just sit tight and know that I'm not dead or anything. pleasedon'tunsubscribe

Cheers!

Update: Graduation, and a new approach

Let's get the big news out of the way: On May 14th, I graduated from Champlain College with a Bachelor's Degree in Game Programming!

That's right. This blog was started just before the start of my Freshman year, with the goal of documenting my work throughout my studies. Its purpose is now fulfilled, but I have no plans on stopping anytime soon. I'm going to keep posting as long as I can, so don't worry about me disappearing.

Now that I have my degree, I also have to start considering how to divvy up my time for working on projects. I doubt it'll be very long before I'm working 40 hours a week, so I need to come up with a solution that will last beyond my current 'vacation'.

The Plan

Right now, I'm planning to adopt an Agile-like method of working on my projects. Every week, I'll figure out which tasks from various projects to work on, and then try to get them done that week. For now though, that seems like a bit of a leap from my current carefree work-on-whatever schedule, so I'm going to be taking this transition in steps.

For now, I'll be trying to make a list of several projects every week, and focus on one or two every day. This should give me enough content to make at least one post per week. (No promises, though)

It's likely that you'll also see more non-programming content. I've been meaning to do more with art and audio for a while, but school got in the way time and time again. I'm hoping to practice those skills a bit, and maybe that practice will turn into posts once in a while!

Update: 1 month of college edition

If you've been reading this blog, you may have noticed that I haven't made very much posts apart for the capstone ones. To be honest, I haven't made too much headway on most of my projects recently. This is caused by several factors:

1. Capstone - This one's obvious. Capstone, being the final piece of my college career, has to take priority over my other projects. There's always plenty of work to be done, so I don't have as much time for personal projects as I'd like. Thankfully, this generates plenty of posts
2. Sickness - If you're a student right now, this might also make some sense. Going back to school tends to result in the entire student body catching a cold, so it's no wonder. I've been taking it unnaturally well, but it still makes me a bit slower on the work front
3. Too Many Projects - I started this semester with 2 major projects: Halberd and DFEngine (Eventually AMAZE and Space Douchebag too). I'm currently sitting on.......9 projects. Brainstorming for capstone and a general creative mood has led to a bit of an explosion. This particular deluge of ideas seems to be over now, but I still have to split my work more now. None of these newcomers are ready just yet for a post, but they will be soon.
4.  Work - In addition to all of this, I have a part-time job. That's going to be over(ish) pretty soon, but that currently eats close to 15 hours a week, when factoring in travel times.

Those 4 factors are the main reason that the posts have dried up a bit. With that said, let me give you some quick updates on some of the things that I'm working on.

1. Halberd - I've fixed all of the bugs that I pointed out in my last post! My next goal is to figure out how to set up a decent GUI for the editor. I'm leaning towards using an established library such as Gtk, but I'm not entirely certain yet. That decision is the main delay in the project, and once I've made a decision I'll probably post about it.
2. DFEngine - I'm occasionally working on this on and off, mostly trying to set up a better logging system. I'm also working on a post about that as I go.
3. Tutorials - I'm finally back to my ncurses game tutorial, with one opf my new game projects. I've started writing the post for that, and hopefully you'll see it soon.
4. Software - I'm currently cleaning up one of my personal projects, and once that's done I'll be releasing it on Github. I'm pretty excited to get another piece of normal software out for use, and hopefully that'll also be ready soon.

Last but not least, I'm teaming up once again with my good friend Peter Orzell. For the unacquainted, Peter is a bit of a mad scientist and the composer who's made most of the music in my games. (A Wheelie Good Time, Diamond Rush, Space Douchebag, and Doomsday Darren Goes Fishing)
Two years ago, we made a little 'gem' called Duke Spookem 3D for Game Architecture class. It was a big hit with the people we showed it to, and now we're back together working on it again! I'm currently working on getting the game to run on Linux machines, and then we'll start swapping out the assets and fixing up the engine. With any luck, you'll be seeing some more posts about that in time.

Update: Assorted Bad News

I've never really been great about keeping to posting schedules. The most recent one has been active for quite a while, and has probably met with the most success out of all of them, but recently I've been finding myself regularly posting late, or missing posts altogether. The biggest source of posting frustration, I think, is Games I Play. I like the concept, and it feels good when I'm done, but these posts take a lot of time and effort on my part to make. Oftentimes I'll play a game, then never make a post because I'm busy or just don't feel like it.
It is for this reason that I am demoting Games I Play to Optional status, like my ever-elusive art posts. To be honest, it makes me a bit sad. I never seem to make optional posts nowadays, and this almost feels like a death sentence for the series. However, It's just been too much, and this is better than leaving it up and not doing it anyway.

That isn't all of the bad news I have in store, though. I've decided to temporarily stop producing AMAZE demos for Windows. During more inclusive tests of AMAZE for demo 2, I've found that the computers that won't run AMAZE seem to be much more common than I originally thought. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that the majority of Windows machines don't run it correctly. Of course, I care very much about fixing this issue. However, I will be presenting the game in just about a month, and I need to get as much done as I can. Following that, I will be taking a break from hardcore AMAZE development in order to relax and work on a few smaller personal projects a bit.
During that time, I'll also spend some time taking the engine apart and trying to figure out what's breaking it on Windows. If I can fix this, then I'll resume the Windows builds then and get back to work. If not..... I'm not sure where I'll go from there. I may have to put off Windows builds until the next game, and I'd hate to do something like that. Only time will tell on this one.

Let's end with some good news, now. I plan to release the next(Linux) demo of AMAZE either tomorrow or Friday! This will mostly depend on workload, since my Thursdays can be a bit hectic.

Sorry about this!

There will be no post today, and there may be no Friday post either. I've become sick again, and frankly, I feel like s&#%. I've been in no mood for playing games, and I've been making very little progress on AMAZE. I will post the next development post when Zone 1 is complete, and link the new demo then. It might have to be next week if I don't start feeling better soon. If I do, I only have to make 8 more levels, and a few assets.
We'll see how it goes.....

Semester 4, Day 2

Today I only had a single class, so I decided to reinstall my OS in hopes of making things a tad more stable. So far, so good. The only real downside is that I've lost a couple days worth of development time, which is a real shame.

Anyways, I had 1 new class today:

Democracies

As if it wasn't obvious enough, this class is about democracies! The course seems to be a general at the inner working of democracies, the pros and cons of the system, and so on. We haven't done much at this point, so I can't really say if it'll be good or bad. The teacher seems pretty cool, and I enjoyed the first class, so I think it'll be pretty fun.


P.s: I'm a bit behind schedule on AMAZE work. I've added a bit more, and I'm now aware of some of the issues with the current demo. With any luck, though, I'll manage to finish things up before Friday.

Semester 4, Day 1

In the stead of my usual Monday post, I'm going to write a few posts about life. As of yesterday, I'm back at Champlain with a brand new set of classes, so I think it'll be nice just to write about them instead of the usual stuff. In addition, I'm planning on making a fresh install of my current OS, just to make things a bit cleaner. This makes it a bit of a pain to write a normal game post when I'm busy making backups and figuring out exactly what to reinstall once the dust settles.

Back to the topic at hand, today was the first day of classes. I had the pleasure of acquainting myself with 3 new classes:

Game Architecture

I'd really been looking forward to this one. The general point of the class is to build your own game engine, and it focuses on using C++ and Allegro. Sound familiar? In other words, this class is right up my alley. So far, it seems to be living up to expectations. The only thing I'm not too excited about is needing to include a Visual Studio project file for assignments. However, we're allowed to just create this at the end, as long as the code still works. Sounds like a decent answer.

Heroines and Heroes

This seems like an interesting class. The class centers on various works of fiction, particularly those involving heroic characters, and how they are shaped by the context of the society that creates them and human nature. One of the required books is by Neil Gaiman, an author that I like quite a bit, so that's another nice bonus.

Game Production I

This class is pretty similar to 1st year's Game History and Development. Basically, the point is to work with your peers to develop games as a team, rather than as individuals. I was initially put off by the fact that we're more or less required to use Flash for our games, but it doesn't seem like it'll be too bad. Overall, the class seems to give quite a bit of freedom and the experience is important, so it may not be as bad as expected. In addition, my teammates should be fairly experienced by now so I won't be stuck making everything like last time. I'm giving it the benefit of the doubt, although I can't say for sure if I'll enjoy it yet.

Back to College!

As you may know, I just spent last weekend moving back into college. Yup, Summer's over in my book. I took a few pictures yesterday of my dorm room:

This is my new living/working space. As you can see, I haven't yet brought over a decent chair, but that will change soon enough. Overall, I was pleasantly surprised by how much more spacious it was than I expected. Hopefully this trend will continue for the rest of my time in college. Also included is a tiny view of my current setup on my laptop. The top-left block of grey and white is a simple little system monitor setup that I put together via conky. Nothing fancy, but it functions rather well.

The Sega Genesis to the right isn't mine, unfortunately. My roommate brought it with him. Speaking of which, this roommate is Peter, friend of mine, specifically the one who composes all of the music for my games. Right now he's trying to figure out how to write to a cartridge so that we can make our own physical Genesis games.

He also left this on the mirror before I arrived.

Considering the subject matter, I should probably be terrified.

Finally, because I spent most of my time this weekend preparing/moving in I'm going to delay today's Games I Play post to tomorrow. I'll be sure not to make this a habit.

New Stuff

Earlier this week, I sorta had a mini-vacation thrust on me. It was a rather welcome surprise, but it's been slowing my development speed a bit. Anyways, because my family is staying by a lake, my sister and I went for a swim together, and had a rather long talk. Normally, our talks are either shouting matches or long, rambling, one-sided conversations about things that only one of us cares about. This time, however, our chat was rather productive. She produced a couple ideas for my blog and youtube channel that I want to try out. 

The first idea came from a ridiculous problem that I have, which is that I've got way too many games, and cool new ones keep coming out. My Steam library is rapidly approaching 1 hundred games, and I haven't played most of them. The solution is to work my way through my game library, and spend a while with each one(I'm thinking a week, but we'll see). Then, I take some screenshots and write about the game on here. One of the big upsides of this is that it'll provide me with a ton of non time-based content that I can keep around for those weeks when I've got nothing to report. It'll also let me diversify this blog's content, which I've wanted to do for a while. After all, this is DF's Odd Blog of Everything, not DF's Odd Blog of Development Status Reports. It's also a great way for me to actually play my games rather than letting them gather dust, so to speak.

The last one might make sense, but this next one's pretty weird. I guess it's a type of strange pseudo-Let's Play. The method is simple, though:

1. I record myself playing video games.
2. My sister commentates the videos in post, having never played the game nor viewed the video. 

In other words, it's a blind commentary...of someone else's gameplay. I kinda want to try this. I have no idea how it'll work out, though. I'm sticking with the first idea, but I'm not promising anything on the second one.

I'll try to get the first post of Idea #1 up next Friday. I'll also keep trying to make one unrelated post every week, just as usual.

Meddling Kids! Get Off My Lawn!

I imagine most of you know I'm 18(although that's about to change), or wouldn't have much trouble finding out. Thanks to the power of social networking, it's pretty easy now to get at all kinds of info on someone. At the time of posting, however, only a select few people know that I own a cane. It's certainly not something that you might expect for someone of my age. Today, I will explain why I own such a thing, and how that relates to last week's lack of work.

Updates: Singularity is DONE! Sorta.

It's been a bit too long since my last post, but I have some great news. As if you hadn't guessed from the title, Singularity v1.5 is now complete enough to that it'll do for the moment. I can now move on to AMAZE, and spend the next couple of weeks testing it out and looking for bugs. There are several features that I wanted to add, but they aren't too urgent.

53

In just about 3 weeks, this blog will hit a nice little milestone: a whole year of updates. Why I'm posting today, however, is for a slightly different matter. With my last post, the update count on this blog hit #53. This means that I officially posted, on average, more than once per week during this first year. This is pretty great news. My original goal was to try to get one post per week, so I'm quite happy to see that I succeeded nicely.

There's something else, too. After a tiny internal celebration at finally creating and maintaining a blog without it suddenly disappearing forever, I turned to Youtube to relax a bit, which I do just about every day. It was then that it struck me that my Youtube channel is in the same state of unuse and general disrepair that I had rescued this blog from, and that it was quite a shame. Since I've already begun to unravel my summer plans, I figured that I might as well try to start making content for my channel. I finally figured out how to properly capture internal audio, and found a decent bit of Linux recording software. As you've probably guessed, I intend to start uploading gameplay videos and progress updates of my games to Youtube. This doesn't mean that I'll post any less here(In fact, I'll probably post even more as a result), and that way, I can show off my games in a more engaging manner than screenshots. As my first new video, I plan on uploading a few minutes of Doomsday Darren Goes Fishing tonight, so that non-Linux users can see it while they wait for a port.

Finally, Some Progress!

So, it seems that I've missed another date. I was going to post early this week with a fun little sprite I made, but then I actually started getting work done on my map editor. Thus, I figured it was best to wait until the end of the week and post everything together.