Categories
Game Development Games Geek / Technical General Marketing/Business

Miss Out on GDC Again?

Last year, I had to enjoy the Game Developers Conference remotely, reading the coverage of the event by other indie bloggers.

Yesterday was the last day that I could get a discount to register for the March event. Even discounted, the prices are a bit steep, and I really would have liked to go to attend the keynotes and the tutorials. Since I am not a VIP or giga in any way, I had to settle for the Indie Expo pass. I could manage that price, even without the discount.

Before I registered, I checked to see how much airfare and a hotel room would cost for the week. Ouch.

I don’t want to miss out on GDC again, so I am trying to figure out how I can afford to go. I think if I can find someone to share a hotel room with, it won’t be so bad. Failing that, perhaps I may not be able to stay for the entire week. Maybe I’ll just stay for a few days, timing it so I can attend the Independent Games Festival.

No matter what, I don’t want to miss GDC again.

EDIT: Ok, apparently the pass I was going to purchase is now sold out, which means that the only way I could go is if I use the Expo pass. I don’t think it will be worth the cost for a hotel and the hassle involved if I can’t even go to the Indie Games Summit.

Categories
Game Development Personal Development

Thousander Club Update: January 29th

For this week’s Thousander Club update:

Game Hours: 262.25 (previous year) + 13.25 (current year) = 275.5 / 1000
Game Ideas: 616 (previous year) + 0 (current year) = 616 / 1000

This past week I managed to add a few more features to my Space Invaders clone. One feature is an explosion effect that occurs whenever the bullets in the game hit some object. The animation is simple as it is just a white ball that gets bigger before shrinking down again. I used a combination of the GIMP and ImageMagick to create the image.

Originally I spent some time trying to generalize an effect system. I was going to try to create an effect processor, as well as an Effect class that all effects would inherit from. It didn’t take me long to realize that I was going about this problem the wrong way. I knew I wanted an explosion effect, and I also knew that I will likely have other kinds of effects that would be handled the same way. Of course, I didn’t have a current NEED for handling generic effects, and to try to write code for a hypothetical need is what I am trying to avoid with this project.

When I attempted to write the component-based game engine, the entire project was an exercise in trying to guess future needs. I just didn’t know what was needed or how I would address it, and the entire project stagnated.

With this Space Invaders project, I am making actual progress by only implementing what I need when I need it. Maybe it is hacked together, and maybe it has things hardcoded that might be better off in a data file. I can always fix it later if it becomes an actual problem.

The other feature I added was a time delay for restoring the player’s ship. Previously if you lost a ship and the game wasn’t over, a new ship would appear instantly. In fact, it was so quick that if your ship was anywhere near the middle, it might not look like you lost it at all. As I don’t currently have anything to indicate the number of ships in reserve, you can easily get confused if the game was over and you thought your ship only got shot once. Now there is a timer that waits about three seconds before restoring the ship, and I think it makes it much easier to know that your ship was lost.

Neither one of these features actually changes the gameplay significantly, but they both go a long way towards a completed, professional quality project. It is almost as if the game without the explosion effect and the game with the explosion effect are completely different in quality. Now if I add sound effects, it will probably make a world of difference. B-)

Categories
Geek / Technical General

POTM for January: GnuCash

This month’s Project of the Month is GnuCash, the personal and small-business financial-accounting software.

I use GnuCash to keep track of my finances. Even before I started my business, GnuCash helped me to organize my income, expenses, and bills. I have stopped using my checkbook’s registry just because it is easier to use GnuCash to update my savings and checking accounts.

What appealed to me was the familiarity I already had with this system. I took a couple of years of accounting in high school (thanks, Mr. Mullin!), and so I was quite familiar with ledgers, journals, debits, and credits. Don’t think that you need to know accounting to use GnuCash. It’s just that knowledge of the principles of accounting help, regardless of the application or tools you use to balance your books. I haven’t used anything like Quicken or Money, so I can’t comment on them. I do know that when trying to setup either of those programs on someone else’s machine, I had a tough time figuring out how to enter transactions. It just wasn’t worth the effort to figure out how those applications tried to make it “easier” for me.

By the way, if you already use Quicken or Money, it can import your data, so if accounting software is the only thing preventing you from moving to a different operating system, you don’t have to feel that your data is stuck.

GnuCash provides a way to see your financial data in customizable reports, complete with graphs and charts. You can use multiple currencies, track your stock portfolio, manage your small business, reconcile your statements, and schedule transactions. I personally haven’t used all of these features, but I am starting to do more and more. I recently decided to transfer a set amount each month to my ING Direct account, and instead of requiring me to remember to manually enter the amount each month, GnuCash does it for me.

The only feature I am waiting for is the ability to close balances. Supposedly, the code is actually written for this feature, but it is disabled since it has not been tested thoroughly enough. For now, each December 31st, I manually transfer all of my expenses and revenues into a temporary account, then I transfer the balance to my equity account.

To donate to this project, please visit http://sourceforge.net/donate/index.php?group_id=192 or learn about other ways to help.

Categories
Geek / Technical General

Project of the Month

Larry Garfield has announced the Open Source Project of the Month.

While there are some major, ubiquitous pieces of open source such as the Linux kernel, OpenOffice.org, Mozilla, and Apache, there is plenty of great pieces of open source out there that doesn’t get funding from companies such as Red Hat, IBM, or hardware manufacturers.

While many would argue that fame is more important than money to open source volunteers, I’ve yet to meet one that didn’t like money as well as fame. Really, who wouldn’t? The goal of Project of the Month is to provide a little of each to open source developers, whether they’re already getting revenue from their work or not. The vast majority of open source code is also free-as-in-beer, and while I won’t say that anything is “owed” to those developers (they do, after all, release their code free-as-in-beer by choice), it’s still polite to acknowledge their work.

POTM has two steps each month:

  • Donate $25 USD to an open source project of your choice.
  • Blog about the project.

The idea is to promote and show appreciation for the lesser-known open source projects out there. For more details on how to participate, check Larry’s POTM blog post.

Categories
Game Development Personal Development

Thousander Club Update: January 22nd

For this week’s Thousander Club update:

Game Hours: 262.25 (previous year) + 7.75 (current year) = 270 / 1000
Game Ideas: 616 (previous year) + 0 (current year) = 616 / 1000

I am coming up on 300 total hours, but I am not pleased at the rate I am getting there. My routine has been disrupted this past week, but I believe I did prove that I can dedicate myself to some task for many hours. If I can just focus on doing the things a game developer would do, I could make some real progress.

I’m still optimistic about this year. I just haven’t been putting forth the effort I need.

Categories
Geek / Technical

MythTV and Me

I finished writing an article about My MythTV Install Experience.

MythTV is an open source project to allow you to use your PC as a custom-made digital video recorder. It has even more functionality than anything the media companies would allow, and it is actively developed.

Unfortunately, it is also still maturing, which means that there were quite a few nights spent trying to get it to work. MythTV is at v0.20, though, so I suppose expecting it to “just work” was too much to ask.

If you want to make your own MythTV box, I would strongly suggest researching your motherboard and your capture cards. I had the most trouble with the nForce 410 chipset which prevented me from using onboard audio. I also had trouble with two non-hardware encoding capture cards, but once I replaced them with well-supported hardware encoders, my problems seem to go away.

It took way more time than I would have liked, but it is pretty much finished now…just in time for Battlestar Galactica and other shows to start.

Categories
General

AI Programming Competition Announced

Thousand Parsec announced an AI competition.

One major prize and one minor prize will be awarded in each of the two categories:

* “Battle Points” – The AI which gains the most “battle points” via beating other AI into a bloody pulp.
* “Good Code” – The AI with the code judged to be the “best”.

It seems that the competition will involve a Thousand Parsec game server, and each competitor will face all other competitors in two separate types of battles. The “Good Code” competition will use the expected criteria: how easy is it to maintain, and how easy it is to use.

You can use any language, so long as it has an open source implementation that runs on Ubuntu Dapper. Get your entry in by March 1st, 2007!

Categories
Game Design Game Development Games

First Ever Carnival of Game Production Has Started

Juuso at GameProducer.net has posted the first edition of the Carnival of Game Production. One of my posts is featured, and many of the other authors provided practical tips.

The featured articles:

  • How one man made an MMO: an interview with Gene Endrody
  • Interview with Georgina Bensley, Creator of Cute Knight
  • Automating Build and Test Systems < ---- I liked it. B-)
  • How many polygons in a piece of string?
  • Multithreaded Game Scripting with Stackless Python
  • Learn to love your level designers!
  • Wii design elements: Wii’ve Been Played!
  • The 10 reasons you will never finish your game
  • A Great Time to Be an Independent Developer
Categories
Game Development Personal Development

Thousander Club Update: January 15th

For this week’s Thousander Club update:

Game Hours: 262.25 (previous year) + 4.5 (current year) = 266.75 / 1000
Game Ideas: 616 (previous year) + 0 (current year) = 616 / 1000

Another slow week of development. I spent the little time I did work on figuring out how to handle the explosion effects. I studied a few bits of source code, and I am now rolling my own set of effect classes. It’s not as complicated as I may make it sound, but it isn’t trivial either.

The main reason why I am not working so hard on game development is because I am spending way too much time trying to get MythTV installed using Knoppmyth. So far, I have narrowed it down to a weird-hardware-configuration problem when booting after the install. Basically, it could be anything that a newbie MythTV installer like me would think should just work.

Categories
Game Development Personal Development

Becoming a Game Developer

Steve Pavlina recently wrote about becoming a millionaire by thinking like one. One of the things he mentions is the identity shift needed, which ties into the topic of his recent podcast on faster goal achievement.

When I first heard the podcast, I realized that I am not going to finish making games so long as I continue on the poor results I’ve been posting. I need to change how I act. I need to act more like an actual game developer and less like someone who is hoping to make games in the spare time I can squeeze. I need to be a game developer if I am going to do game development.

In the Thousander Club, I have managed to pull together over 250 hours of spare-time game development. If I was actually acting like a game developer in the past year, though, I imagine that I would have put up stronger results. I shouldn’t be satisfied with only 25% of my goal for the year, and practically speaking, I shouldn’t be satisfied with not having an actual, complete, professional-quality game in all that time. And if I am honest with myself, I know that I am not satisfied.

Maybe a year or two ago, 250 hours working on an ambitious-yet-unfinished component-based game engine, a poorly designed-and-unfinished puzzle game, and a mostly-finished Pong clone would have been fine, but I can’t be satisfied with similar results at the end of this year. It’s not like I don’t appreciate the real-life experience that the past year has given me. I just want to be serious about being a game developer, and I realized that I was being half-hearted about my efforts.

Bottom line: if I want to change anything, I have to change how I identify myself.

It’s going to be hard changing my habits. Even though I’ve identified this problem before, I am still treating game development as a lower priority task, and it is usually the first thing I put on the back-burner when my schedule gets disrupted. How can I expect to make games for a living if I can’t even consider them important enough to make in the first place?
When people ask me what I do, I tell them about my day job, and I sometimes mention that I started my own shareware video game business. I mention my blog, I mention that I reviewed games for Game Tunnel, and I might say that I am slowly programming some simple games. How can I expect to make GBGames into a success when I won’t even acknowledge what I want to do? Did DaVinci say, “Oh, by the way, I also sort of paint”? Did Einstein say, “I work at a patent office. Oh, and sometimes I like to think about physics”?

I am a game developer. Once I can think like one, I can act like one.