Category Archives: Life

So I’m Making a New Game

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Its been long enough…

I started development on Didgery in 2009…ages ago.

It failed to accomplish what I wished it to.

My spirits broke.

I played it safe.

I worked too much.

I followed other people’s dreams.

I lost balance.

I shoved the important things aside.

I became depressed.

It’s time I start following my dreams again, even if that means I must follow them with some compromise.

 

What’s the idea?

A long time ago I told myself I was going to take a hiatus before writing another puzzle game again, due to their surprisingly complex nature and somewhat lengthy development cycles. Well, it has been two years…that’s long enough aint it?

I’ve decided to work on a puzzle game whose goal is to help other’s learn how to program. I can’t really go into more detail at the moment (partly because I don’t know the detail and partly because I want to have a prototype completed before I do so) but I think the game will be entertaining, and hopefully build some real-life skills at the same time.

Unlike in the past in which there was this impending sense of financial doom cast over me as I developed games, this is the first time in many years in which I’ll write it simply for the fun of it. If it makes money, great. If it doesn’t, great. It doesn’t matter. I’m doing it because I want to, and that’s what really matters.

 

What platform?

For giggles I’ve decided to target Windows 8, partly because I know next to nothing about Windows RT (thus I get to learn new stuff) but also because the tools are there and it is the easiest and quickest way for me to get started. I’m developing a certain engine in tandem with the game that I hope will eventually be cross platform. If all goes well I can easily see this new game being released on ‘regular’ windows, and perhaps something like the OUYA as well. But we’ll worry about that when the time comes. For now, I’m just going to have a lot of fun.

DreamForever – A Biography Part 3

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The Shawnee Days

There are certain areas of a person’s life that are naturally very full. When a lot of good things happen, or equally, when a lot of bad things happen in a short span of time. When a lot of friends are made and a lot of emotions are experienced and a lot of ambitions are aroused. When friends, game engineering, big ideas, mushroom hunting in the spring rains with your dad and learning C++ in depth all align. My experiences at Shawnee left a lasting impression on my being. I find myself thinking back on my Shawnee Days quite often, and I even have the occasional dream that I am hanging out with my peeps there. I met some amazingly talented people, made great friends, and was able to truly dive headlong into my passion for game engineering in a way that put DeVry to shame. It is one of those few times in my life, that, when I look back on, I think, “Man, I wish that wasn’t over yet.”

Shawnee also helped me discover how nice it is to have a group of people you can talk to. I don’t really share anything in common with my standard posse of friends (the ones I have been hanging with since fifth grade middle school) so our conversations and activities tend to be rather dull (or non-existent.) ‘Hanging out’ usually consists of surfing NetFlix for an hour looking for something to watch while the pizza we bought turns into this nasty cold thing. It feels really great when the people you are around are actually interested in the same thing. When a group shares a common interest the air really does have an electric feel (though it may be difficult to notice at 8:00 in the morning.) Not to say I don’t like my std::vector<friend> or occasionally enjoy their company, it’s just that Shawnee filled a gap in my friendship circle that I didn’t know I was missing until that point.*Translation for those who don’t get the C++ joke: “Standard group of friends”

You Gotta Love Shawnee's Spirit

This was posted on the bulletin board one day in the Game Engineering building. Stuff like this just made my day.

So, here I was in college… again. Most people go to college so they can advance or start a career. My goal was neither of those things. As detailed in DreamForever – A Biography Part 2, my reasoning for going back to college was to buy myself more time so I could finish Didgery. The wishful thinking was that Didgery, when completed, would at least be a mild success and allow me to pay the monthly loan bills while I worked on the next greatest thing. But Didgery was suffering from the curse of game development*, my deferment from DeVry was up, and I owed a credit card company an ungodly amount of money (due to using it to fund my last trimester of DeVry.) I needed to buy myself more time. College would stave off these bills and hopefully give me enough extra to pay down the credit card. Plus there was a chance I could get a college degree. That would be an added bonus. *Curse of Game Development : It ALWAYS takes longer to complete than anticipated.

It turns out that I was able to get enough loans to both pay my first semester’s tuition and pay off the dreaded credit card debt. What a relief! But suddenly I realized I had used all my funds to pay down an old debt. I needed money to survive now. CONSTANT STRESS!

I started searching around campus for something to hold me over. Minimum wage would be good enough. As long as it didn’t involve flipping burgers or operating a cash register I could live with it. To my merriment, I discovered a job posting on Shawnee’s website that could potentially pay much better than minimum wage. It was a programming job, an iPhone game development gig to be more precise, at a place called the Cyber Center. I didn’t know anything about iPhone game development, and I had no idea what the Cyber Center was. I immediately wrote and handed in a resume at the designated coordinates. As I waited to hear back I hastily whipped together a video portfolio consisting of Nut Harvest 360, QuadTrix, and Didgery, you know, just in case the slim chance so happened that I got called in for the interview.

Somehow I did.

I vividly recall how awkward the entire interviewing process was. Now keep in mind, job interviews are always awkward. You go someplace you know little about to talk to a stranger sitting on the other side of a large expensive desk about stuff that you may or may not understand while they generally look board or disinterested and you squirm because you suddenly developed a sudden case of gastroenteritis. I assumed the Cyber Center was some special place at Shawnee. You know, like the gym or the library, except with a lot of fancy high-end workstations, flashing neon lights, and nonstop electronica music. I also assumed the interview would be a one-on-one in some sort of office. But my suspicious were aroused as I neared the location of the ‘Cyber Center.’ It was room 254…in the business building. I stood outside the door, took a few deep breaths, and went in.

I found myself at the front of a regular classroom with students. I quickly scanned the thousand of blank faces for a hint of an authority figure. Nothing. I awkwardly sat down near the front of the room as everyone stared at me in silence. Moments passed. “Are you here for the interview?” someone finally asked. “Yeah…” It turns out the interview was a sort of group interview thing and that the authority figure had ‘temporally stepped out.’ We made SmallTalk while we waited for the figurehead to reenter the room. After what felt like forever (I swear time physically slows down to a crawl in stressful situations) he came in and the group interview began. It basically consisted of them playing my demo on an iMac and asking me questions about the games. After they saw the portfolio I was asked what type of game I would make for them. I felt like a novice. I had not prepared or even thought about this question at all. In a nanosecond of incomprehensible mental clarity I devised a sprawling ingeniously unique idea and took great pains to verbally explore this idea to my interrogators: “Something like a top-down shooter.”

“How much money do you want,” the head-honcho asked.

“I don’t know, two grand?”

“That’s too low. I’ll give you three.”

“Ok”

I now had a job.

Now I had to make an iPhone game over a period of four months using Unity 3D. I didn’t own an iPhone and I knew nothing about the Unity 3D game engine. So I bought an iPhone3GS from WalMart, locked myself into an overpriced two-year service contract, and ordered a Unity how-to book from Amazon. Before long I was hard at work. Life was pretty smooth at this point. I was making a little over $400 every two weeks. I was able to buy gas, and pay my bills. Oh, and I could eat lunch every once in a while too.

But I soon learned that the Cyber Center was…sort of a joke. I guess a better way of phrasing is that it was falling apart by the time I got there. From what I can gather, the cyber center really wasn’t much of a center. The ‘Cyber Center’ was really just an introductory networking class that hired students to work on small scale projects so the students could gain experience. All this ‘special project stuff’ happened between regular networking classes. This is great idea, but the whole thing felt enormously disorganized. I pretty much had no idea what I was doing or who I was working for the whole time I was there. I mean, was I making the game for the Cyber Center, for the school, or was I just paid to make a game for myself? I still don’t know the answer to this question.

Chips On Floor

A couple of Pentium Pro chips I found lying on the floor one day in the Cyber Center.

The Cyber Center operated on some sort of grant supplied by the government (the WIRED grant I believe) and some situation or the other caused funding to abruptly cease. I was constantly lead to believe that my pro iPhone edition of Unity was on the way (it takes the pro version of Unity in order to publish to the iPhone.) I never received the iPhone version. This meant one big big thing to me: I paid a ton of money for a phone I didn’t need and locked myself into an $80 monthly payment for naught. $80 may not seem like a lot of money if you have a solid job, but $80 is a massive burden if you are a college student with an unstable job and the best you are likely to make per hour is minimum wage.

A couple of good things did come out of those first four months at the Cyber Center though. Firstly, I learned how to use Unity and was able to build a simple top-down shooter called Project NERD.

Project NERD is a pretty simple game. The premise is that you are a disgruntled IT employee at a large firm. Everyone around you is an idiot and constantly asks of you stupid rudimentary things. The protagonist, Jim, eventually snaps and builds a deadly CD launcher to slay the idiots of the corporation before his IQ depletes to 0. Each level is an increasingly complex randomly generated maze of cubicles. You play until you die, or get bored, whichever comes first.

Project NERD isn’t my best project. Something about the Unity Editor took away from the enjoyment of building a game, and it reflects in the game itself. Perhaps it was because the Unity editor is not meant for 2D Game Development, so I was somewhat shoehorning my game design into the editor. But I think it was something else. Something about the design of Unity makes it difficult for me to use effectively. This caused me to consider the possibility that I am, at heart, much more of an engineer than a designer. I love building systems and seeing games built on those systems. That’s what I find intensely satisfying.  Using drag and drop to make a game? Not so much. But I would LOVE to build the underlying system by which a person could use drag and drop to make a game. Some interesting ideas were a brewin’.

The second good thing to come from those first four months at the Cyber Center was that I was offered a min-wage job as a ‘network manager’ and assistant to the professor who headed the Cyber Center. So, while I would not be making near the money, as least I would be making some money for the foreseeable future.

Pirate Party

Oh Cyber Center, you silly place!

 

CJ

CJ commented on my first Biography post and said he wanted to read the bit where our friendship started. Well, it isn’t all that grandiose, but here it is. We were on the top floor of the Game Engineering building taking a class on C programming. One day the computer I was using broke, so I moved to a new computer. That computer was sitting beside this talkative hyperactive kid. I soon learned that kid’s name was CJ. He immediately starting chatting to me, and, thanks to CJ’s social nature, we became fast friends. CJ and I work together almost alarmingly well, and we would soon go on to create some “pretty flipping cool” stuff.

 

Platforming Block and the Ragnarok Game Engine

PBTitle

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One of the best ways for me to learn any new concept is to dive head deep. One of the first things we had to do at Shawnee was learn Python and PyGame. So I did the most natural thing for me: I set out to devise a Game Engine / Framework on top of PyGame that would allow me the ability to more easily build games. I called this framework the Ragnarok Game Engine.

One of the first games I wrote using Ragnarok is a game called Platforming Block. It was really more of a test than a game or assignment, but I found the frustratingly difficult level design rather enjoyable. There was also this bug I later discovered in which if you jumped off a ledge you could do a ‘late jump.’ Basically I forgot to set a variable when the player is falling to prevent him from jumping. I became fond of the idea, however, and decided to write some levels around this mechanic.

I really can’t recall perfectly how all of this played out, but I asked Greg ( and old friend of mine ) if he would be interested in helping me flesh out the idea. During spring break we took some time and built a full-fledged demo. I remember how great it all was, crafting tilemaps using nothing but a text editor and our raw wits.

Hard at work on Platforming Block

Greg and I hard at work on Platforming Block. Greg built the levels and handled the graphics. I did the programming.

We released Platforming Block and the Ragnarok Game Engine onto the pygame website to much fanfair. OK  not really, but some people did like the game quite a bit. Some dude enjoyed the game enough to make a multi-part let’s play video. I love watching through it and observing how he is gradually driven mad by the increasingly impossible levels. Gnarly stuff.

To date, Platforming Block as been downloaded 573 times, and the Ragnarok Game Engine (released under the GNU LESSER GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE v3.0) has been downloaded 1675 times. I find it interesting that the engine, which is somewhat malformed and buggy, is a great deal more popular than the game. It just goes to show how many creators are out there. I would like, perhaps in the short future, to springboard off the ideals contained in this engine to allow people to more easily create games. More on that bit when the time is right.

Anyway, the idea was that we were going to make an Xbox Live Indie Game out of it in the ‘near’ future and maybe make a few bucks. That…didn’t happen. We started (about a year later) and actually got a number of levels built using an XNA game engine I created called PixelBurst. We got quite a bit of the core stuff finished. I built a custom Content Importer in XNA to read in the Tiled .xml format, I added in pixel-perfect collision detection, and I added in a bunch of dynamic objects that make the game ever so cool. Even in its half-finished state I find the game fairly interesting. Over time, though, Greg seemingly lost interest and developed a differing vision for the game than what we originally started with… so naturally things sort of fell apart.

We occasionally go through small spurts where we both talk about it, but nothing ever gets done. Perhaps it is a combination of lack of free time, or the fact that we don’t work well together. I would work on it and finish it myself, but there is this odd drudgery feeling that I ‘share’ the idea with someone else and I should wait until he really wants to work on it. Perhaps one day soon I’ll just stop giving a care and finish it myself.

One of the fun things about Ragnarok is that it prompted CJ to develop a rival game engine in PyGame. I can’t remember what the thing was called, but it sounded cool, and I love competition (to be precise, I love crushing it.) We had a friendly battle where we would boast the amazing features of each of our engines in an attempt to belittle the other one. It was a lot of good fun. He later created this fun game using his engine that I still remember as “Chicken Run.” It was a top-down car game where you try and run over as many chickens as possible. It was some good material. It would be nice to see an HTML5 version of this game so that I can play it all day, every day.

 

Finishing Didgery

So summer break finally arrived. I opened up Didgery’s 2008 Visual Studio solution and stared blankly at all the unfamiliar code in front of me. I figured this would happen. I’m not sure how many people reading this have worked on a large project, stopped temporally for some reason, and then resumed, but it’s pretty terrible. When a lot of time passes (or even a few weeks) the mind somehow depersonalizes itself away from the thing that was once so personal. When you go back to it you are like, “Nope.avi”

The Terrible Experience of Returning to an Old Project

Wut?

I took a few days to remarry the project. It was all confusing and didn’t make sense for a while, but gradually it came to me, and I was, after a week or two, finally back in the groove somewhat. I worked my butt off that summer break. I discovered that adding polish to a game is the most challenging and tiring part of the development cycle. You go over this area over and over and over, tweaking shaders, adding in spring physics, and adjusting sound volume and texture color. In the end everything looks and feels great, except for the guy who put all the work into it. The amount of time it takes to get one thing looking great is unimaginably draining. But hey, I thought, it will always be worth it in the end.

So here I was a couple weeks before school resumed, and Didgery still wasn’t finished. Most of it was there, but it felt to be missing some bits and pieces. The tutorial code was an absolute nightmarish swap of spaghetti code, and the game felt to be lacking something.

There is some sort of divine, mystical, and equally malign rule in the universe, and that rule is this: The closer you get to achieving something, the harder it becomes to achieve. This can be seen in the physical universe as well. Take the speed of light for instance. For every bit closer to get, that bit more is exerted against you to prevent you from reaching that magical speed. So keep this in mind friends, though you may get very very close to your vision and goals, you will never actually meet them.

I somehow was able to do a total rewrite of the tutorial code and create something elegant and easy to use. I also added in the Didgery Summon and parchments. Yes, this was during the last couple weeks of development. How I did it I honestly don’t know. I think good stress (you know, the type where it’s like “I have to get this done or I am f*cked”) really creates a sort of pressure cooker on the mind, and all the good stuff comes out at once.

By the time school was resuming I was just finishing up. Now all I had to do was show it to a couple old friends to get their opinion, push it to the indie channel for review, and write a mass amount of review requests to indie game review sites. Then I could use all the money that would hopefully flow from it to quite college and begin developing my next game.

So I invited Greg (the fellow that helped me create the Platforming Block Demo) over to get his opinion.

It's Kinda Boring

It’s Kinda Boring

He played it in silence for a long time. Finally I asked, “So…what do you think.” There was a moment of silence before the truth came. “It’s kinda boring.” I’m not going to water things down here, hearing that made me feel like shit. I put every ounce of my being and intellect into this game and its boring!? As hard as it was to take, I appreciated his honesty. It’s not often that someone will actually tell the truth to your face. This fellow did. I just hoped to dear god that other people failed to share his opinion.

I invited my ‘old’ friend Brian over to give it a shot, and he enjoyed it greatly. “Oh no,” I thought, “it’s going to be one of those niche games.”

 

Failure

It took about a month to get the game through review. But on 9/22/2010 Didgery was released onto the indie games channel. I skipped classes that day and starting sending out review requests to various indie outlets.

Didgery on Indie Games Channel

Didgery on Xbox Live Indie Games

The next day I wrote Didgery’s website on the whiteboard of my (I think) DirectX class to hopefully garner some attention to the game. CJ, like the jerk he can be, went to erase it. I naturally attempted to prevent him from doing so. I can’t really remember how things worked out, but It eventually led to him yelling at the room and telling them all to go to my website. That was honestly the most effective thing that could have happened. The class immediately went to the website. They were all starting intently at their computer screens and commenting/jiving on the card explosions. It was fun.

But I wouldn’t be feeling good for very long…

I remember the absolute dismay that overcame me when I saw Didgery’s miserable sale figures several days later. Didgery was supposed to be my ticket to future game development. I was hoping for at least a couple grand, but what I got was ten times lower than that. Chump change. Maybe gas money for a month or a car payment. My parents had been pulling my car payment for several months at this point as the Cyber Center job simply wasn’t cutting enough revenue. I gave the money to them. I was supposed to make enough to keep me afloat for a few months while I developed other games. But no, that wasn’t going to happen.

Keep in mind that launch sales are typically the most money you will make at once from a game, especially on the Xbox Indie Channel. If $300 was my launch sales, then I would be lucky to make $10 a month a couple months from launch.

It had all failed. My goals and dreams had been shoved in the gutter. I felt terrible. In absolute despair I drove to subway, bought a veggie sub with what few dollars I had at the time, and drove to Jackson Lake. I sat under an old shelter house and ate my sub in the cold November wind as I broke down mentally. What was I going to do now?

 

Shawnee 8.0 Conference

Somehow or the other I learned that Shawnee hosted a local video gaming conference in October of every year. You can tell by the number of followers that the twitter account has that this conference is rather small scale, but it would be a useful learning experience and I thought that it might even raise awareness for Didgery. It would be my first ever video game conference, and the first time ever that I would be on the ‘Otherside’ of the table.

My friend Brian went with me as a support. It was nice to have someone to talk to and sit beside that I was familiar with.

I really wanted to buy a banner to help pull the few attendees that were there towards our table, but I didn’t have enough money. I actually had go into the negative on my bank account just to buy a cheap Altec Lansing speakers set so people could play Didgery with sound (bringing my 5.1 surround sound system from home would have been impractical.) Plus I was planning on running Didgery from the Xbox, and the 5.1 speakers don’t connect to it. So yeah, I didn’t really have the necessary hardware or funds to make things work as well as they could have, but hey, sometimes you just have to use what you got.

The morning held in it that sort of pervasive autumn chill. I picked up my buddy and drove down to Portsmouth. I wanted to run the game on the Xbox 360 as it was the most/only stable build, but when we got down there we found out that they didn’t have any Ethernet ports for us to plug into. Running indie games from the Xbox requires an internet connection for authorization purposes. I was nervous about using my PC, but I didn’t have much of a choice.

So I sat the thing up and hoped nothing massively terrible happened. Besides a few bugs/crashes things went pretty well.

I recall some EA guy (proper business suite and all) coming over to our table and checking out Didgery. He seemed interested. He looked at it while Brian put on a demo for him. “So tell me about your game,” he said. I did my best to explain what was happening without sounding like a self-conceited idiot. “Do you think it could be profitable?” he asked after some time. I shrugged my shoulders. “I have it on the Xbox Live Indie channel right now. It’s not doing all that well, but I think the market is more on the PC side of things. I think it could do pretty well on the PC.” He looked at it for another minute or so and walked off. I never saw him again.

My favorite part was when some dude sat down and played Didgery for over an hour. He was seriously into it. There was this one moment when he got a column chain. In Didgery if you get a full column or row in a chain it will perform this special type of explosion on the entire column. He was going about his business making chains when he got one of these column chains. I could tell that he wasn’t expecting anything special. But suddenly there was this explosion. He shot his head back, his eyes widened, and a smile that said, “Oh my god that was cool” appeared on his face. I’m not going to lie here, seeing that reaction made me feel awesome.

He got really far to. I think he made it to level 38 or something impressive like that. He also discovered a bug just as he was about to stop playing.

Didgery Error At Shawnee Conference

Didgery Error At Shawnee Conference

We talked for short bit about the game. He said that it reminded him of chess, which made me feel good. There are at least a few people out there that ‘get’ Didgery. As I feared, Didgery turned out to be a niche game. Better than a total failure though.

I had a lot of fun at that small conference. To be honest though, it feels somewhat unreal and dreamy. I may not have made much money from Didgery, but I was doing what I really wanted to be doing. I was truly pursing my goals. I get a fond feeling when I recall that time of my life. It’s the feeling of staying up late working on a project you love while the fan in your window pulls in the chilly night air. The burdens of society have since stymied the privilege I once had to dream forever. After Didgery it was all playing it safe: working for other people to make a living. Didgery was my ticket to follow my dreams, but that ticket lead to the wrong train.

I think I have written enough for part three. Until next time.

The Mona Lisa

 

 

 

 

DreamForever – A Biography Part 2

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It was a decade ago this day.

I find it utterly paradoxical how one can be so far removed from a point in time physically, yet the memories in ones mind always feel startlingly recent. It is as if the mind is a natural paradise free from the swift river of time.

Part 1 of the DreamForever Biography (which was somehow written over a year ago) describes my first ever experience with game development in the form of a simple game engine called RPG Toolkit. I loved that engine. It was fun. It was easy. It was stress relieving. I began using it exactly ten years ago this day.

The Log of My Life, a nearly 400 page day-by-day self-documentary  experiment that I began writing a little over a decade ago has only this to say:

Praise the Lord, my dad got home today. I got RPG Toolkit yesterday, thanks to Brian’s dad. Brian also came out. -11/17/02

My dad had been in the hospital with serious, very life-threatening, health issues. It was nice to have something to sink my mind into, to help me forget all the spiritual/financial/health/marital troubles my family was going through at the time. I recall rushing home from the school bus just so I could spend the remainder of the evening absorbed in game development. Game Development was a solace in my very tumultuous life.

Part 1 of the DreamForever Biography left off at NutHarvest 360. I think it is time for part 2.

Didgery

“Life is a series of weighty obligations.” – William D. Trooper

If there is one thing that is fairly certain about college, it is debt; lots of it. You may not graduate much smarter or with a useful portfolio, but you will likely leave with mountains and mountains of debt.

True fact: debt creates an enormous amount of stress. I know this from a very first-hand perspective.

I needed money, and I needed it badly. I had dropped out of college twice already: once from Devry in Columbus and again from Devry Online. The grace periods on my loans were quickly running out. My parents themselves were encumbered with debt, and I would have been damned to add twenty some thousand more on their shoulders. QuadTrix was developed simply for practice, and I didn’t have the time to build proper tools to finish Nut Harvest 360. I needed to build something that didn’t require development of a complicated toolset. I needed quick money.

In a cool panic I sat on my hardwood floor with a pencil, an ancient notebook, and an equally ancient deck of cards. Didgery, or as I named it at the time, “Card Game”, was born.

The Beginning of Didgery

 

Didgery’s Unique and Perhaps Questionable Game Mechanic at Top Margin. “Idea: The longer you play, the tighter the rules become.” This would later evolve into the progressive struggle for elemental balance.

 

I wrote a lot of ideas that night and in the days following it. This old high school era notebook, which is sitting before me now, must have at least thirty pages of detailed notes. I was serious about making this work. I had to make it work.

One of the Earliest Builds of Didgery

I always develop the menu interface before I start work on a game. It helps me discover the game’s style.

Even though I had the game mechanics fairly well-grounded, I was quarreling with myself over Didgery’s visual style. Didgery actually had nothing to do with harmony or elements whatsoever until very very late in the development cycle. In fact, I was preparing to release Didgery without this harmony element at all. So…what was Didgery about?

A Month Or Two Of Development

 

Exactly One Month Later

 

Didgery, in the state presented here, was centered around the concept of Debt/Credit. Each card held a monetary value. The bigger the chain, the more money you earned. Due to interest (presumably from some debt you owed), however, you were always losing money, forcing the player to constantly create chains to avoid bankruptcy. This interest rate grew as the game progressed, which caused the game to become increasingly fast-paced and difficult. Didgery always ends with the player losing. It was meant, and still is meant, to be a deeply pessimistic game; a reflection of my emotions at that time.

The Main Menu During the “Dizzy Style” Era

The style seemed to be at odds with itself. On one end there was a disembodied hand on the menu screen with deep choir vocals, while on the other hand there was a floating money-bag that you tossed cards into to escape the ever encroaching interest rates. None of it made sense. I knew there was a problem, and I knew there was an underlying theme trying to rise to perfection, but I just couldn’t think of the ‘word’ of the theme. It felt like my mind was actively trying to hide the ‘name’ of this theme when I tried to search it out.

And I was going to release it this way. At this point in my life I was receiving notices that the grace period on my loans were ending ‘for realz.’ Add to this the fact that I had a collection agency breathing down my neck because I paid my last semester of Devry Online using a Credit Card (due to my inability to receive enough funding in the form of loans), and you might be able to understand how dreadful everything felt. It was like my spirit was knotted up and dying.

And then it happened. One of the reviewers over at the XNA Forums mentioned that Didgery felt very Zen like. Suddenly, it clicked, and I saw Didgery for what it could be. I couldn’t bring myself to release Didgery in its currently confused infancy, not now. In only a couple of weeks I removed the money bag and replaced it with something that made much more sense.

The Elements of Harmony

Didgery shifted its concept from debit/credit to balance. Interest rates were replaced with a villain, a mysterious dark presence that gradually consumed the elemental energies. The goal was now to feed the elements with energy from the cards and keep the world from descending into hell for as long as possible. There is still no win state. No matter how long you stave off the evil, it will eventually overcome your efforts. This is one of the most questionable parts of the game, and it is my favorite.

Thanks to the playtesters on the XNA forum, I was able to really pull the style of Didgery together in about a months time, and I think it really paid off. Unfortunately, it didn’t pay off my loans… You see, these changes and additional polish were pushing the release date back further and further.

The quickie project that I decided to work on to make some “seriously necessary cash” was quickly turning into a many-month serious project. I got my first loan bill in the mail, and I had no money. I had to do something. A friend of mine (Mr. Frazier) informed me that a college nearby (Shawnee State University) offered game programming classes. Why had I never heard of this? I considered the possibility and the alternatives. I could either attempt to get a well-paying job with no portfolio within a couple weeks, or I could literally buy myself more time by going deeper into debt. The latter option was the only one that seemed feasible, but attending college again presented a real threat to Didgery: how could I finish the game if all my time was spent in school?

I think that is a pretty good place for me to stop at for tonight. Keep an eye out for Part 3!

 

The Modern Aristocratic System

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It is with a heavy heart I observe a truth of modern society, of how we have returned ourselves to an age-old caste system, as a dog returns to its vomit. It is not immediately obvious that we have enslaved ourselves once again to this system, but if one is to peel back the skin of convenience that plagues us, we will readily notice that the corporation is nothing more than an abstracted aristocratic family, and the consumer no more than that of a slave, cursed with working their days for a parsley wage, only to throw down their earnings at the feet of their masters for a product, or a service, all hidden behind a façade of immeasurable convenience.  At the heart of this system is the incorporated bank, an entity whose goal, above all other, is to churn a profit at whatever the humanitary expense.

It is as if our world is filled with a collection of warring city-states, all vying for control over the hapless slaves of consumers. The vast monument of power corporations hold in the modern society is a testament of their blue blood, one that is never to be dethroned by a general assembly of citizens. It takes the entire body of the nation (a revolution if you will) to overcome the whims of a corporation. The power of the modern aristocrat is so great that they are enabled to craft laws against the will of the people, an allotment that would seem a very hypocritical concept to the first democratic society of Athens, Greece. An excellent example of this display of power is SOPA, which came into existence thanks to the lobbying might and monetary influence of several corporations. The citizens of the country itself would have never willed such a thing into existence. The law is simply not an act of democracy, but an act of aristocracy. I suppose the golden rule still yet persists.

I would rather it be that the citizens have direct control over the very creation of law, rather than being forced to protect themselves against it, but alas, the American democracy is unlike Athenian democracy in several key aspects. Where the Athenians had a true democracy that was literally ruled entirely by the people through a simple system of voting, the US government, and many modern democracy’s, employ a number of abstractions that remove the people from direct control of their government, forcing us instead to act vicariously through representatives and senators. This gives the average citizen lesser active involvement and power. The aristocratic powers that be, then, are enabled to suggest laws into existence through sheer monitory strength, such as the use of bribes (as can be assumed from the congressional staffers who received high level positions in the media industry after penning SOPA), and a strong voice through lobbying. This places the citizenship into a defensive position, for since we have a lesser, or perhaps nonexistent, role (we are often not the ones suggesting the laws, and thus we have no guarantee the laws are for our greater good) we must continually acquire information about these laws, and then vote for or against these laws, or contact our ‘representative’ or ‘senators’ with our opinion. The issue is that if the citizenship fail to hear of an important law, then it will likely pass and become law unnoticed to the later chagrin of the citizens. This is possible when corporations (such as media) manipulate the population by willingly withholding from them vital information. Viacom, as an exemplar, could ban its subsidiaries from speaking about SOPA, leaving a vast majority of Americans who rely on media outlets for all news information completely in the dark.

Further proof of the aristocratic nature of corporations lie in what I call the Law of Preservation, which states that once in the position of power, that position of power must be maintained, and, preferably, reinforced. A recent example of this law in action is the updated Terms of Service for the Xbox Live and Playstation Network services. By agreeing to their terms of use, one waives their right to pursue them in court. If the citizen, or yey, entire citizenship were to be wronged, it would be, from the point of contractual obligation, illegal to pursue the wrongdoers. These aristocrats are attempting, and often succeeding, the removal from us all powers that we hold dear, so that they may be enabled to do what they please without worry of consequence. In simpler wording, they are endeavoring to remove any competition and rule with an iron fist.

But it is often that we fail to notice such atrocities to the law and to our rights. It is truly a remarkable and dreaded thing, for how willing we are to allow our freedom slip insomuch that we have convenience. So embroiled are we with modern convenience that we demand it no matter the cost to our health, our morals, or our freedom. I fear that convenience is, to many, equal in importance to that of food and drink. But convenience is far from free; indeed, it is brought into existence at a very weighty cost.

Humanity, or perhaps it is the deceitful eloquence of society, employs a functional but malign equation, stating brusquely that the sum of all masses, all love tendered, all suffering endured, must equal some natural golden mean. But it is worthy and furthermore wise to take note that this structure, and indeed, fundamental rule, cares not on the distribution of these sums, insomuch as the properties fulfill their end role. It is then, that while one end of the world profits, the other falls into despair. And it is by ones despair that another gains profit. It is by this equation that consumerism is powered.

An excellent employer of this Fundamental Rule of Consumerism is that of Apple, and nearly all major mass distributers of technological goods, or perhaps even, any mass-marketed good. These immensely profitable corporations outsource their work to countries outside their homeland to build their products at the cheapest of prices. It is hidden and abstracted away from us, but thousands are working low-paying jobs in sweatshop-like conditions, performing mundane, repetitive tasks all the day long. Some may think that because we are providing these workers with the necessities of physical life that we are doing them some form of service. It is of truth that these workers are given food to eat and a place to sleep, but were not even the slaves of ancient days (and even of more recent times) given such basic needs? Indeed, this is nothing more than a form of slavery, hidden under the vise of convenience of food and shelter. The human mind was never built to do such menial tasks, and to suggest that one do so, continually and with no hope of improvement, can lead nowhere but to the death of the spirit.

Even corporations that do not outsource their workforce exhibit the same sort of tyrannical behavior. Any job that necessitates long hours and pays minimum wage for menial work is damning their employee (their slave) to a life of serfdom, working to supply their master with remarkable profit. Consumerism eventually cumulates into generating the most product for the least effort and price. As a race, it is interesting how concerned we are with pleasing ourselves. We often view the Earth and creatures within, including our fellow human, as resources rather than companions on the journey of life. Were we to appreciate, contemplate, and live life together through social contact and rule with our fellow citizen, then such a great revolution would take place, and perhaps even, an eternal escape from serfdom would be devised.

The Angel

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The Angel

By: Clinton Myers

Written July 19, 2008

I must devalue what I think I am, for that I am not what I think I am, but of a truth only flesh and bones, ligaments and tissue, sinew of an unperfected work.

But yet I do feel, and think I am what I am!

“Alas, such a character you are predisposed to be!”

That I am! For I am a unique creation, fashioned by greater powers!

“Do you so enjoy life?

Ah, life is sometimes good, mostly pity and distress. But that is of no matter, I have my wife. For even now she must await my return at the doorstep of our shed. And I say, after this labor is done, this sweeping of the isles, I shall go home to my love! Such a night of pleasure we will have. My hunger will be filled, and all the troubles washed away!

“But how void, such a stygian pit love is!”

Not so. Many a wondrous night my love and I have weaved together. And once again tonight! It rings my heart with joy!

“Do you not at once ponder at your actions?”

Ah yes, ponder on the fulfillment of it all! Now my soul aches, is empty, but soon I shall be whole once more! I need to cause my body to rejoice!

“Yes. You need to cause your body to rejoice, but you need not her!”

What? Offence is easily taken! Of no doubt I meant her, and her only! I must submit to the natural laws and pleasures of life! I must entangle with another fleshly body! The joy we will share!

“Christian you are?”

Such a deviation, but Yes, and how wonderful God’s grace and salvation is!

“But yet you think not at once on your actions.”

I told you how I do! The pleasure is considered.

“Embellishment! Allow me to remove the scales of lies from your eyes and reveal to you the truth of the matter. You think not on the life you form, you think not on the pain and suffering and confusion that you will cause this creature to who will soon be fashioned deep within that female’s vile bowels – you wish only to blindly fulfill your desire, not for the child’s sake, but to satisfy your senseless urges! And How then is this not the greatest sin, the greatest shame, to bring into this destitute world a lost soul that, under the most highest probability, will live through a life of inescapable pain and turmoil? And you yourself, after admitting to life’s harshness, will freely and uncaringly go yet again into your mate, chancing the creation from your combined sick substances a creature of your own species? So then how can it further be wrong, if this life, created and fashioned out of his will by you and your wife’s mere sexual and self-conceited urges, urges you mindlessly follow to satisfy your devilish lust, and not for you partner even, but only to experience the faux pleasure of sex yourself, decides it fit to end his or her own life?”

Please stop now! Enough of such foolish notions!

“Angry you have become, for the truth it is I speak. But allow me to go further, allow me to inform you that by which the feelings and wispy emotions you now experience is nothing greater than some cleverly devised (and how by chance does it work!) chemical: Nothing more than an animal you are my child, unless you fancy animals as some sort of eternal being too. No, I say a better exemplar. You are no more, and yes! perhaps less than and inanimate object.”

What a Lie that is! See how I think and feel! Watch, and I will show you my minds creations!

“There is no need to observe!  Done before it has all been by those like yourself; fools and self-conceited individuals, thus humanity, who think creativity is some honest creation of their own will, for all an interconnection of pathways in that grey matter it is, only but randomized activity. You must not mistake these sudden impulses from your brain for some sort of sign that heralds your purpose, for purpose you have none.”

I will do the best I can to restrain my anger, for I am a church member. And you say I have no purpose! Why, I have such an important role, yes indeed, one vital to God’s plan – I bring the lost to salvation.

“And you deceive yourself! By what purpose do you these things? Maybe you hold the belief in a loving God? Nay my friend, allow me to dismiss from your poisoned being such a foolish notion.”

I have been taught it my whole life….there is nothing else to cling onto. But I have been taught, and thus know, yes, how I strongly believe! in a loving God above, the one who gave me life, the one who gave me my wife.

“And so you deceive yourself further! How would you presume that God set into action and motion the fall and damnation of all creation? Why? Think of the concept, explore the deeper meanings and you will discover its fallacy, or hate, whichever on your mind comes to rest.

Listen! And I will tell you the truth. If God, who you so humbly insist is indeed loving, did in fact fashion this world from his own hand, then how can you maintain your mindset, when, as you believe, he set in motion and cause of everything that makes us but a damned race?

But I know what you will say, as I’ve heard it countless times before. You will surely say ‘But God’s fault it was not, on man and Satan the blame must be placed.’ Ahh, but adhere to my words. Did not God himself create Satan? And did not he also form temptation in the vice of a tree? And, furthermore, as your belief holds it, is not God the keeper of eternal knowledge of all things Past, and all things Future? And even in your Holy book it says, and how craftily it does say it, that all was planned before naught existed! If this is in truth the case, which you strongly believe is so, than you must come to a conclusion. If God knew the future, and the countless souls to be sent for an eternity in hell, which he did create, then surely must he not be loving! In fact, this must be a very grim and hate-filled creator, one of no mercy or care, one who wrote the predestined creation with an angry hand. Or, else you refuse to believe this, you must come to believe in his limited knowledge of future events. Only then, oblivious and guiltless he would have been. You must choose one or the other! Else you choose a logical fallacy! Either way proves the text you cradle in your palms a lie. But mayhaps you want to believe a lie and be damned!”

Those are good points indeed. But God’s ways are not our ways, his thought’s not our own. And besides, he sent his own Son for our salvation, he died even, and arose from the earth on the third glorious day!

“Deceit it all is! Think deeper, to the core logic of the matter friend. Does not God say, in that book, that it is not his will for any to perish and go to hell? But yet think, he is the one who created the fall, the creator and originator of sin. So, is it not even a lie? He says he wishes none to hell go, but he is the very one who opened the pathways to it! And concerning his Son, may I ask, he provided Redemption from whom? His own self? For was not God the cause of the very thing he despises? Could he not have also saved his own Son such torture, or was he powerless?”

Hmm, true that is, I have never before considered strongly.

“But this matter is beginning to feel blasphemous, and you shouldn’t speak of it anymore.”

But should I stop? It is blasphemous from what? Is not God blasphemous to his own name?

“No, that is not the case, you felt his salvation!”

And I did accept, then, even after all he has done with humanity! But still, why accept an answer to such a faulty plan?

“It doesn’t make sense, yet you know he is real.”

I feel that he is real. That tells me nothing more than that my mind is fashioning chemicals. Much like those released to love?

“No, no you know he is real!”

I think.

“You… think.”

“Yes, you think.”

I know the truth now. It is within, somewhere, not hidden in something else. Search is required for this task, search for the meaning. For yet, may I ask, is there even one?

The Passing

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My grandma passed away today. It is to my bewilderment that I feel no sort of depression within my spirit. What depression I assumed I would experience is instead replaced with an encroaching loneliness as I contemplate that my last living grandparent is no more. It is impossible for my mind to understand that G’ma will not be at her home when mom, dad, and I take a walk down the street on a warm summer day. To no more see her in her swing or waving at us from the porch invokes within me the most unwelcome sensation. Indeed, it was just a couple of weeks ago when she called mom and I over from her porch to give us a bag of honey buns and marshmallow treats. We stood there and talked for a good twenty minutes. It is with grief that I now understand that to be the last time I would see her living. G’ma was one of the most unique women I have ever been blessed with being around. She isn’t what I would call feminine; rather, she had remarkable resolve and was not at all afraid to speak her mind directly to a person. She lived a hard, rugged life, but she kept her head up and moved on. Of her features I recall the most striking were her deep dark eyes, which always seemed to bear a smile, and her wrinkly ruddy complexion. Memories; oh how painful they become when the object of which they are attached forever ceases the capability to yield more.  A phrase that my dad spoke just a couple of nights ago plays back in my mind, “I know that she has to go, but I just can’t understand it.” I find myself thinking the same thing. She’s gone, but it cannot be accepted by the spirit it seems. It is as if the concept of death is most foreign in nature to that entity, and to think of death is to think a fairy tale. But the grief of which some part of me feels validates the truth of her absence, and chastises my spirit for its inability to comprehend the most surest and basic guarantee of life: death. This continual conflict wears both entities down, and all we are left with is solemn silence and tears. It is with this death that I have learned of a dreadful curse that, by fault or ignorance, we must all face: To have something is to take it for granted, and we take it for granted until it is gone. It is then that we realize that what had been taken for granted was actually a blessing all along, and how foolish we were for not more appreciating that fleeting blessing. Life is truly ironic.

DreamForever – A Biography

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Sometimes it is good to step back and take an inventory of ones life. To stop and appreciate where they have been, where they are now, and where they may be in the future. It’s important to remember, so that we do not forget.

I have a deep inner attachment to the Dream Forever moniker. Dream Forever was the name I choose for myself back in eighth or ninth grade of High School, the same years I worked on and completed my first ever video game, Simple Simon. Based on the name, one may think the game a simpler version of the classic game Simon (is a simpler version of that possible?) That assumption is far from the truth, as Simple Simon was a 2 hour RPG adventure centered around a mentally confused obese young boy who accidentally saves the world from an inter-dimensional portal situated under his bed. It also had something to do with my dog, Squeezel, being some sort of divine entity whose powers could be harvested by my then current English teacher, who, if I recall correctly, was a jar of Mayonnaise that transformed into Reptar from Rugrats. Simple Simon featured additional crazy boss battles such as Power Ranger Hitler, Santa Clause, my pet dog’s head photoshopped onto the body of an Englishman, and more. It was a surreal game to play, but it was also surreal to create. I remember coming home from school, eagerly firing up RPG Toolkit 2.0, and grinding away the remainder of the day. Many weeks went by in which I pretty much spent my life photoshopping with Adobe Photoshop Elements, learning the Toolkit’s scripting language (my first ever programming experience), and designing Simple Simon. All of this occurred around 2003.

When finished, I took the game over to a friend’s house and watched him play it. He laughed hysterically for two hours. The experience exhilarated me, and solidified my love for building games.I should mention that this friend’s name is Brian, and he is solely responsible for getting me started into game development. I didn’t have the internet at this time, and the only source of internet I could access was at this friend’s house and the library. The library was great for reading tutorials on how to use RPGToolkit, but they had a policy in place that disallowed certain files from being downloaded. Even if I could have downloaded it the thing would have been too large to fit on a floppy disk, and since USB drives didn’t exist at that point in time my only alternative was to burn it on a CD, which these old library computers did not have. So I asked Brian if he could download RPGToolkit using his smoking fast 56K Modem and burn it on a CD for me. It somehow ended up with his dad doing this, and I vividly remember him pulling into my driveway with the CD. I was crazy excited and immediately shoved the disk in my computer and began experimenting.

Brian, if you are reading this, thank you. You were one of the early paradigm shifts in my life.

Soon after finishing Simple Simon I started work on a sequel (Simple Simon XP), but I planned the scope too huge and never completed it despite working on it on and off for years. SSXP did provide me with my first real engineering experience, however, for I attempted to build my own custom battle system for the game, which is largely the reason the game failed. The battle system only supported one active player, but you could use the Switch command to switch to another player in your roster. I thought this would give much deeper, personal battle sequences. I also had the idea of storing all player actions in a database that the enemy AI could query, statistically analyze, and attempt to anticipate, and counter, your next move. Sadly, it never came together :(

Screenshot of the never completed Simple Simon XP

 

I didn’t do much for a long time after Simple Simon. I got into skateboarding for several years, and thus spent most of my free time hurting myself and constantly realizing how much I suck at extreme sports. Still yet, that spark I had experienced with Simple Simon stayed with me. In May 2006 I graduated High School and attended DeVry University the month afterwards. I really wanted to take some sort of Game Engineering course, but nothing of the sort was offered, so I was guided to take (CIS) Computer Information Systems instead, which sounded nothing near as cool as Game Engineering. In hindsite, I wish I would have not attended DeVry University. I choose the college only because they were the only one I could find that offered some sort of computer programming degree. I now know there are nearby colleges that offer these types of classes, but the courses must have been named something bizarre, because I never saw the term “Computer Programming Course” in the course catalogs I so desperately searched through. Other nearby colleges, like Shawnee State University, did offer Game Engineering degrees, but I never knew they existed until sometime in 2009.

I studied the CIS degree for about a year and a half at DeVry University in Columbus Ohio. It was here that I experienced my first real (and likely forever favorite) programming language: the miraculous C#. I actually enjoyed DeVry quite a bit, but I started losing muster as I got further into the curriculum and realized that there was a 99.8% chance I would wind up building boring applications for large banks. About this time I also began experiencing certain questions and doubts in my Christian faith. These two factors coalesced into severe depression, and I requested transfer to the GSP (Game and Simulation Programming) degree offered by DeVry Online without much forethought. During the four-month period between DeVry Columbus and DeVry Online I wrote roughly125 pages of a book in an alternating depressed/elated stupor. As my financial and societal debts grew due to college (and currently remain), this book went on hiatus, and will remain so until some undetermined point in the future. Weary from four months of solid writing, I looked forward to my time at DeVry Online. I soon learned, however, that the online classes were a serious joke, and I dropped out after about a year of  having more than one incompetent ‘professor.’ Even though the online classes sucked for the greater part, I was at least able to follow my passion and study game engineering, and in 2008 I developed Nut Harvest using Game Maker 7. I developed Nut Harvestunder the nickname Lotus, which I received as a ‘hacker’ nickname from some older friends at a church I attended at that time. They joked that I could hack into their Playstation 3 using just the controller and thought I should have a cool nickname to go along with these supposed skills. DreamForever went on hiatus at this point, and Lotus Games was born.

 

 

Around this time I started religiously playing a PC-based dance game called Mungyodance 2.  (Aside: Mungyodance 2 was created by an independent video game / electronica artist  named Renard, and is based on the Stepmania engine. Sadly, Renard no longer supports Mungyodance, so the only way to download it is to find a torrent somewhere. Renard makes awesome music though, so you should head to his site and buy everything you see.) Playing that game instilled within me a deep desire to make a similar game with automatically generated stepcharts. I chose XNA to build this game with and got to work. Problem was,I had no clue how to use this thing called XNA (aside from a couple basic tutorials I had read long prior to this moment), and I had never programmed a game from the ‘ground-up’ before. Thus I immediately failed at making my Mungyodance clone. I decided to continue learning how XNA works just for the giggles, however, and I started work on a Tetris/word-matching puzzle game called MindBog. I wanted to actually make something out of the game, but despite months of attempts I simply didn’t understand graphic engineering fundamentals well enough to build something practical. One day as I worked in a semi-depressed daze I realized that I wasn’t going to go anywhere with Mindbog, and decided to force myself to make an incredibly simple puzzle game and release it onto XBLIG in one week. This game was QuadTrix. I learned a lot in that very busy week. One of my clearest memories is figuring out how the stencil buffer worked. Something ‘clicked’ at this moment, and XNA and graphics programming started making more sense. The concept of shaders still eluded me however.

 

 

QuadTrix never really made any money on the marketplace. I admit that this disappointed me rather much, but it didn’t keep me down for long. I soon started work on remaking Nut Harvest for the Xbox. This game was to be called Nut Harvest 360.

 

 

Nut Harvest 360 was my revelation. The basis of all game engineering I know today is more or less thanks to the experience I obtained from working on this game. I learned HLSL, gained a solid understanding of graphics programming fundamentals, and reworked MindBog and QuadTrix’s codebase into a graphics engine I named PixelBurst 2.0. I put considerable animation effort into Nut Harvest as well (there are at least 80 hand drawn frames of animation), and, though the game is far from complete, it still feels polished to me somehow. Sadly, this project too failed to conceptualize. The problem this time was that I was in serious need of tools to reach the level of polish I so badly desired. I had spent a fair amount of time developing a cut-out based animation system (similar to Flash or ToonBoom) but I had no visual tools in which to actually build the animations with. This meant I had to do the animations within code, which is a nightmarish process. I started working on an editor, but at this time I was having it rough financially (I was not getting enough loans/grants to fully pay for my college tuition) and I really needed to start making money fast. I decided to drop the project and make another really simple puzzle game, similar to what I did with QuadTrix.

 

And here I think I should place a break in my life. My fingers are livid at me for typing this much and your eyes are probably sore if you read all the way down to here. If you’re interested in what happens next in the life of this independent developer, then please follow this blog. I’ll catch you all later.