So this week is Summer Break at Full Sail, and I am in the office at Matty-Matt’s desk. Matty-Matt is the course director for one of the classes here at Full Sail but he’s on vacation this week so I am borrowing his cubicle to try to get as much work done as possible. The break is more for students as we have to spend the week updating course curriculum and assignments. We do have Friday off to fully enjoy Independence Day weekend, but man do I have much work to do!
Re-write the Camera, Frustum, and Scene Management lab assignments of Engine Development 1 to be glut-free and in one project that the students will add to throughout the course.
Add Bounding Volume Generation task to Scene Management part of assignment to generate volumes for geometry rendered away from origin, to improve sorting.
Make sure said project and it’s base code is adaptable for ED1 course director to implement Bounding Volume Hierarchies with terrain as part of the project.
Finish Real Time Animation’s animation viewer for exported animations from the Animation Exporter lab assignment.
Finish RTA’s Animation State Machine lab assignment.
Unify math libraries for student use in RTA and ED1.
Create new standard lab assignment manuals for OpenGL and Real Time Animation.
Start RTA Animation blending?
Annual review with boss
Shoot self in face because there’s no way I’ll get all of this done during the break.
Wish me luck!
On a separate note, I recieved a specially made pin to celebrate my employment at Full Sail University for five years. It even has my name on it! Go me!
I am so freaking sick of reading “No Mai, No Buy” when I read about The King of Fighters XII on Kotaku. Seriously? Really? Granted, she has a massive popularity amongst otaku and, who along with her Street Fighter counterpart Chun-Li, where the first legitimate sex symbols of videogames - beating Lara Croft to the punch by years(suck on that, bitch). She started off as the love interest of Fatal Fury’s Andy Bogard and pretty much stalked him in every game they were both in, but then moved on to be one of the most jiggly 2D sprites of any commercial fighting game. She’s also a ninja who attacks with fans, fire, and sometimes nudity which is pretty much the depth of her character.
I won’t lie; I do find her very attractive for a fictional character, but not as much as Bonne Jenet, Vanessa, or Blue Mary - none of which along with Mai have been revealed(har, har) for KOF XII. But here’s what pisses me off: nobody is complaining about Mai’s absence from the game because she is a very useful character to have on their team. They want her for the same(and only) reason that the Dead or Alive series is popular: those sweet, voluptuous breasts.
I’m not crying out against hyper-sexualization in games. That’s just absurd. What does enrage me in this matter is that a bunch of people are threatening to not buy the game if a mediocre character does not appear in it, and make the rest of the fanbase look stupid, shallow, and pathetic by having to post publicly that they won’t buy the game for that very reason. There are way more awesome characters in the KOF universe that have yet to be announced for the latest installment. I’d rather have K’, Kula Diamond, Oswald, Yuri and Takuma Sakazaki, Rugal Bernstein, Yamazaki, Bonne Jenet, Heavy D!, and Vanessa before I would want to play as Mai. They are all better characters than Mai and far more interesting. Okay, maybe not Heavy D! but I wouldn’t mind the comeback of the sports team!
If people are going to complain about a lack of Mai, The King of Fighters ‘98: Ultimate Match is out on PS2 and that along with The King of Fighters 2002: Unlimited Match will be out on XBLA in the not too distant future. Or you could just play DOA and stay the fuck out of my fandom.
I went to Tampa with Biceps Dave on Sunday to see some awesome friends and hang out at the beach. It took a while to get there but it was worth the adventure. Along the way, we went to Tijuana Flats to eat not-Mexican food. Jess challenged me to drinking hot sauce shots, and being a manly man, I accepted. Hot Sauce is an important ingredient to being a man; it’s even in Maddox’s Alphabet of Manliness, one of the greatest books written by modern man. If you disagree with drinking hot sauce as a means of proving one’s manhood, then you clearly are lacking.
So we went over to the sauce table and she picked one of the sweeter sauces and I decide to get something hotter and she points out that those sauces are on the right side of the table. I saw a sign with spice labels and saw a black face of someone dying and it said “Death Wish” under it. I got pretty excited and asked which one that was. She pointed out the bottle of Endorphin Rush that had that same dying black face on it and I filled the hot sauce cup with a bunch of it.
We sat down and downed our shots. The first ten seconds were okay for me. Then my lungs felt like someone grabbed them and kept violently squeezing and shaking them and I felt the whole inside of my body begin to be destroyed with intense searing heat. There were parts where I felt like the inside of my stomach was bubbling up like a volcano ready to erupt. MANLY TEARS WERE SHED! It was quite an experience and it took me almost an hour or so to begin recovering from the ordeal. I could go into more detail on what drinking hot sauce like that can really do, but I’ll leave it to your imagination. That place wasn’t lying when they labeled that sauce as a death wish. Anyways, I proved that I was the manliest man in the restaurant that day and that is what counts. I probably could have gone just one higher than she did and that probably would have been acceptable. But not me, I have to go for the overkill… and almost got killed because of that!
I’ve been wanting to talk about this game on the site for a very long time! Anyone who’s in my circle of friends knows that I have love The King of Fighters franchise and that I have been pretty pumped about The King of Fighters XII for the past couple years. It’s coming out in America in just less than a month on both the XBox360 and the Playstation 3 and it looks poised to take on Street Fighter IV and BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger for prestige of being the best fighting game of this year. All of the character and tournament videos have been looking great thus far, so I have a very optimistic feeling about this game. I am trying to avoid being over zealous this time because that ended up with me being somewhat disappointed with Street Fighter IV after I played it for a few months, though I’ve always expected KOF XII to be the better game in the first place. Read the rest of this entry »
God damn I love The Adventures of Duane and BrandO! This has to be their best song yet, beating out their rendition Mega Man 2. There’s also an 8-bit remix of their Punch-Out! song. There are some hilarious lyrics in all of their songs and they pretty much rap about almost every videogame I loved as a kid. I hope they do some River City Ransom soon!
So I’ve been in this town for almost a good six years and I have made many friends and acquaintances along the way. There have been some fun times, as well as moments that were sad or just plain disappointing. People have the capability to either be wonderful or downright disgusting at a moment’s notice. It really is seriously interesting to see someone show their true colors when an unexpected event happens.
I’ll try to avoid anything personal. What I am trying to say, using a vague example, is let’s say that you have been friends with someone for years, and you have supported them whenever they have desired to succeed at something. You do whatever you can to help them achieve their goal, even if it changes to something completely different every year. Maybe it’s because they gave up on their previous goal or lost interest. Anyways, you support them and they trust you as one of your close friends and they let you know that you are very important to them as a friend.
Then one day, you are put in a position where you have to make some tough decisions. The choices you make may not be the most popular ones but you feel they are the best decisions that you can make under the circumstances. Even if your friend doesn’t agree with your decision, you wouldn’t expect them to throw years of friendship out the window over something that didn’t actually hurt anybody, right? Wrong. The person cuts you off from their life and goes about living it as if you never existed. You never had a problem with this person ever — or so they have claimed — but then the second it happens, the last few years of your life with this person no longer mattered to them. All the fun times, heartfelt moments, the tragedies, the hardships, and everything else that goes along with friendship - it’s gone to this person. Can you imagine that? Read the rest of this entry »
The revival of A Boy and His Blob is looking amazing! I can’t believe this game is not being covered as much as it is. Spend less time on Kratos and more on this, gaming press! The new A Boy and His Blob takes some really great ideas from the original and adds a some great ways to use old and new blob abilities. I am greatly amused by the hole punch as a means to avoid conflict. I also can’t get over how wonderful the art looks. The animation is so fluid, colorful, and innocent; its like watching a Disney animated movies from the 80s. The only thing about this game that is off-putting is that kids voice. “BLOB!” “BLOB!” “HEY!” “BLOB!” Well, I was able to tolerate Navi in Ocarina of Time, so this should not be too bad.
I’m wondering right now how beans that will change the blob’s ability will be acquired or if they will be in infinite supply. The former could challenge players but at the same time make them stingy with using their blob’s abilities. The best course of action is to encourage the players to use their abilities as much as they want because there seems to be a lot of good uses and chances for players to experiment. Hopefully, there will be infinite amount of each bean or at least a plentiful amount that a player won’t feel like they would waste beans by experimenting with blob abilities. It looks like experimentation will be part of the way players are going to find all of the hidden treasure in this game.
There’s definitely plenty of reason to be excited about playing A Boy and his Blob and it’s starting look like the Nintendo Wii will be more of a worthwhile console for myself to own. This fall is going to be nice.
I don’t see it happen often; nonetheless, I do get a little excited when 2D gameplay gets mixed in a 3D world. I’m not really talking about when 3D models are only moving exclusively on two axes, like in Street Fighter IV, but rather when 2D flat sprites on a billboard or plane are moving around in a 3D world. One of the biggest games to use this kind of design and technology would be Super Paper Mario on the Nintendo Wii. It was an alright game but felt like it didn’t have an impact. I beat it over a year ago and I don’t remember much from the game so it clearly didn’t leave much of a lasting impression on me.
Last year at the Independent Games Festival, Fez won the Design Innovation award and the Excellence in Visual Art award and showed off how switching 2.5D perspectives could be ingeniously used for puzzle-solving. It wasn’t as polished as Super Paper Mario, but it did show a promise of depth in its gameplay. The game has since then been handled by Polytron Corporation and is slated to come out in 2009. I really hope that happens but that is not why I posted.
I was looking through Capcom Unity’s website because I wanted more Capcom-specific information from E3 this week and found a couple of gems I wanted to show:
Now that is some pretty good stuff to get my classic Mega Man fanboy blood pumping! It doesn’t really show off too much other than a remixed Metal Man’s stage and have given Mega Man more directions to travel in. I do like the affect they have on the background music when Mega Man uses Flash Man’s time-freezing weapon. This next video shows even greater potential:
The first part of the video begins to show the potential of what classic Mega Man can play like in 2.5D with little things like the perspective changes of his battle with Mecha Dragon showing off some interesting attack patterns from the boss of the ladder scene where the camera looks up to show that lasers are coming down and ready to obliterate Mega Man, letting the player know that it’s time to move!
But then a new mode for this fan game is shown when Proto Man teams up with Mega Man to travel through stages designed for cooperative play. There’s quite a few interesting things here. Protoman has to step on a switch that will lower deadly spikes so that Mega Man can get an extra life, and then later they take turns doing this so that they can advance through the level. I also like it when the view zooms in and out based on the distance between Mega Man and Proto Man, making it easy to go off in their own areas to fight enemies or solve puzzles and then return to work together when they need to. None of this is new in cooperative games; however, this combined with the elements that the 2.5D perspective brings could add something fresh to Mega Man, a franchise that has spent a good part of it’s existence being milked by Capcom.
This was a really interesting prototype that Peter Sjostrand has been working on. I really think Capcom should pick this up(and him as well) and make this into a complete game that could be downloaded various consoles and other gameplaying devices by players around the world. It was an excellent idea for Mega Man 9 and this could work really well. Whether the robot masters and stages they use are original or based on fan favorites, it can potentially be a very fun and interesting game to play with other people. Nintendo is doing somthing similar New Super Mario Bros. on the Wii, but that game is going to lack the challenege that the Mega Man series is known for.
This past week, I was in Georgia on a very amazing vacation. Part of that trip including attending the Game Developers eXchange in beautiful Savannah, Georgia. It was hosted by the Savannah College of Art and Design, a school that has a very interesting Game Design program. The conference had mostly SCAD students with at least a couple dozen developers in attendance. The theme of many of the talks centered around the idea that games need to have more thoughtful content and meaning. To be more specific, the game industry is not young anymore and the message that games deliver has to be stronger and deeper than armored space marines killing aliens. Many speakers had great points in their lectures and some were even inspiring, reminding many of the students at GDX that they are the future of the game industry.
Hey everyone, I have not posted here in a while, yet again. There’s a lot things I do want to talk about but I never make the time to do it. Life has been busy and I have been working on a new game in Abobe Flash that I hope gets done in a couple of weeks. I think it could be fun when its finished but even if it doesn’t I’m having a blast work in Flash and Actionscript.
This weekend is when Full Sail University’s Spring Break starts. I haven’t been this excited for a break in a very long time! It’s definitely going to be a good chance to get some rest, work on my game, and reflect on my life as of late. It will also give me a chance to think about my future. I will be in the Tampa area this weekend to see some friends and possibly go to the beach. I’ll be there Saturday and Sunday and will be leaving Monday to my parents who live south of Atlanta. They have a cabin in the mountains that I will take advantage of thoroughly. I will also plan on using this time to pay respects to my grandmother and aunt, who have both passed away in the last year. My parents also decided to get pet goats on their land and I can’t wait to meet them.
After a few days with my folks, I’ll be heading east to Savannah for the Game Developers eXchange, held at the Savannah College of Art and Design. I wasn’t able to go to GDC this past year so this should sort of make up for it. There are a few talks I want to attend and I hope to meet many fellow game makers as well. It’s next Thursday and Friday and I plan to stay in town on Saturday to hang out with a friend who actually attends SCAD.
Overall, I’m looking forward to a fun vacation — with lots of driving — and I hope to have some great news to share in a couple weeks!
