Sometimes, I wonder why people have negative year end reflections every year that I have known them. It really makes me wonder what they are really trying to do with their lives. I’ve come to believe that you have to make the most of every moment in your life or else you are not living.

This has been a weird decade for the world overall. I can’t even describe it without writing an essay where I will most likely contradict myself often. However, I really hope the world changes in the next decade- and for the better. But it is going to be our responsibility to make that happen. I really think in this decade, too many people gave up on personal responsibility and depended far too much on people with authority to do things for them that they should have done themselves. And really, because of the lack of personal responsibility, we let our whole country fall apart.

Our economy would not be the way it is now if Americans didn’t become so lazy and health care wouldn’t be such a critical issue if everyone took better care of themselves. That is the basic truth that no politician will ever have the balls to tell the people. We are the only people who can make our lives good; nobody else can do that for us.

Enough of the negative; this has been a year for me that I will never forget. I’m going to now list every significant thing that happened that defined Kent Ward in 2009.

1. I started off the year right with the now legendary Down Right Fierce New Year’s Day Party. The main highlight was that I got so wasted that I Falcon Punched a friend in the chest because I thought he was raping a girl I liked at the time. He was actually trying to hug her goodbye and was on the ground hacking for six minutes for no good reason whatsoever. He helped me clean my house the next morning.
2. Four years ago, I had graduated Full Sail University with a Bachelor’s of Game Design and Development. There has been a lot of uncertainty – that I refused to show – about where it would take me. Sometime after I graduated, I was offered a chance to be a lab specialist at the school. I took it and over time, I became one of the best. I constantly challenged myself and it was a great opportunity to get better and meet lots of great people. I’m really glad for the experience because it did so much for me as a person as it did for my career.
3. I was also proud of myself for being able to take charge as head lab specialist for courses such as OpenGL and Real Time Animation this year. It was a lot of responsibility in addition to already being in charge of Engine Development I. It wore on me a lot and I still wonder how I was able to keep my sanity. Richard and Shawn provided me with many opportunities to advance myself and I am truly grateful for that.
4. The last one about my time at Full Sail: I created new lecture and lab material for RTA that would help students with getting animations working in their games sooner in their final Game Project course. It seemed like it took most groups two or three months to get that sort of thing working, but now they have a system in place that they can adapt right from the get-go.
5. I participated in the Global Game Jam in January, which is a 48-hour game making event. I really am proud I did that because it really lit a fire in my belly that I kept going for the rest of the year. I also got to work with badasses such as David Brown and Jay Baird.
6. Over the years, being exposed to epics such as Fist of the North Star, Berserk, The Alphabet of Manliness, 24, The Epic of Gilgamesh and every single Bruce Lee movie, I had started to develop ideas of what a man should be. My personal experiences were also a big factor in all of this. I noticed over the years that the manly spirit has died amongst many of my fellow brethren and that there was confusion on what makes a man manly. So I co-wrote the Twelve Laws of True Man, which I think does a good job for providing laws for true men to live by. When I first presented it, my audience was the local anime community, but I will write a revised version in the future where my audience will be all of humanity.
7. This year has been an awesome year for the Propeller Anime Club! We kicked ass at several conventions, organized a couple of fun game tournaments, did a lot of outings, got drunk together once or twice(the truth comes out!), and of course we watched lots of great anime – both old and new. I plan to write a reflection on the club blog, but I truly appreciate the amount of time I spent on the club. Hell, I’ll even go so far as to say that the Propeller Anime Club is what people should look towards as an example when one would want to describe an excellent anime club.
8. Speaking of anime conventions – ANIME FESTIVAL ORLANDO 10! Oh man, that was such a good life victory for me. AFO, every year, is the best damn anime convention in Florida and if you think otherwise then you must be retarded. Myself, and many others, worked our damn hardest to put on Swords of Orlandia III this year. The live action game has now become the premiere anime convention experience in the entire state, if not the country. I am really proud of how the game turned out and that many people enjoyed it. The icing on the cake was being made one AFO’s newest staff members because of my efforts(and those of the people who supported me helped with that too!).
9. I went to Disney World for the first time since I was twelve a little while ago. I went with one of my best friends, Fuzzy, and a couple of deceitful women. It was a double date that epically failed for both of us but the trip was still fun regardless of that. I loved Epcot the most out of the trip and I can’t wait to go back and drink around the world!
10. I played Beyond Good & Evil this year and I am really glad I did. What a fantastic game!
11. I really don’t think that this was the “Year of the Fighting Game” that I was hoping for, but I did get Street Fighter IV, BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger, The King of Fighters XII, and Tekken 6. I really feel like there was far more hype than delivery with the return of fighting games in mainstream gaming, but the games were still better than most of everything else that came out this year(which really isn’t saying much). I plan to write about Tekken 6, which I have determined to be this year’s best fighting game. Don’t worry; I am about as surprised as you are.
12. Since I was ten, I’ve always wanted to take martial arts. This past month, I finally did. I am still a beginner when it comes to Muay Thai and I have some interesting bruises on my body because of it. However! It was about damn time that I finally got to follow this path I dreamed of for so long. I look forward to getting better at it and becoming more of a complete person as a result.
13. My brother, my parents, and I had Thanksgiving together in Alabama this year. We haven’t had Thanksgiving together in six years so this was definitely an accomplishment! I also discovered Grey Goose vodka during this trip and I love it so~
14. I saw Dethklok and Mastodon with excellent friends Jacob and Jess last month. I wouldn’t exactly call the experience “Metal.” The show was at the Hardly Rock, where moshing and crowd surfing is forbidden. People tried to mosh anyways but it was pathetic. I really feel like half the people who showed up were just posers that were there because they watch Adult Swim. We showed up to the concert after the opening acts played and I somehow made it to the front. Actually, it was easy; just about everyone else there was a pussy so knocking them out of my way as I made it front and center at the concert wasn’t much of a challenge. I had my horns closer to Dethklok front man Brendon Small than anyone else, which automatically makes me the most metal person that went to the concert.
15. I left Full Sail to become a game developer simulation scientist.
16. I really think I became a legitimate adult this year. I am more proud of this than anything. I’ve accomplished a lot this year, but I also had to deal with some supreme bullshit along the way. Despite that, all the experiences I’ve had up to this point have made me who I am today and will help make me into a better person in the future. I have learned so much about life this year and I think from this point on, if I truly make the effort, then life will continue to be good.

 It’s been real good, 2009! I couldn’t have asked for a better year or a better way to end the decade! Here’s to the future!

Wait, what!?

Yeah, I know it’s crazy. It’s completely different from what I was going for. As a matter of fact, I never even thought about the position of “scientist” as a viable life option, yet here I am getting ready to start my new job tomorrow! I will do games professionally at some point in my life, but for now, I will have more time than ever for my own projects. Hell, I just finished the first of many prototyping sessions with another alumni for the next AFO game.

I will still live around Orlando. I said a while back that I wanted to leave, and I will eventually. In the last month, I did a lot of fun things in the event that I would, in order to get the most out of this dying city. While doing so, I found out that there actually is more for myself to discover and more fun to have with my real friends. You know, the people who have been loyal and have supported me throughout the years.

With a future that is brighter and a paycheck that is bigger, the possility exists to do more with my life. I’ve always wanted to formally learn martial arts, and I want to travel the country more in the next year. I also owe my parents a lot for eveything they ever done for me. Maybe I will finally be able to send them on that trip to Italy…

So to my loyal friends, my family, and the awesome staff at Full Sail University and anyone whom I have had the pleasure of working with, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart. I would not have gotten this far in life without your support. I plan to make you all proud!

After revealing that to us, she had spent the majority of her lecture talking about the idea of games touching difficult subjects, as opposed to games solely being played for fun. She cited some examples, and one in particular caught my interest. She told us a story regarding a day when her daughter came home from school. She had asked what her daughter had done at school and her daughter told her that she learned about Middle Passage. That’s a pretty important thing to learn in history so Brenda had asked her what she thought about. Brenda told us they was she described it sounded like people from Africa went on a cruise to America to work and they weren’t happy about that. And then she asked Brenda if she could play a game.

That was pretty surprising to many of us because Middle Passage is not a trivial event. So Brenda decided that it was time to prototype a game(from her lecture, I gather that she often does this and maybe I should too)  with her daughter. The game was modeled after the event. She had her daughter gather her prototype figures up to resemble families. Some of the those family members went onto boats(represented by index cards) and some stayed, to resemble the families being broken up. They had ten turns to get a ship packed with the slaves across the ocean. They have 30 amounts of food for the whole trip. Each turn, they roll a die for the ship and the number that comes up is how much food is consumed. When they ran out of food, people on the boat had to die. It was then that her daughter finally got the seriousness of the matter. And there were apparently many tears to go around.

Brenda is clearly a creative and intelligent woman; the way she got her daughter to finally understand what happened during Middle Passage from an abstract level was truly inspiring. By actually doing something that affected the recreation of a historical event, her daughter was able to learn about the subject more effectively than what school had attempted to do earlier that day. Hearing this story and others during her lecture was truly inspiring and I can definitely see why Brenda is one of the most revered designers in the game industry. I was reading Raph Koster’s A Theory of Fun for Game Design again yesterday and he stresses the idea that what makes games fun is that we learn something from them; we may not know it all the time, but we do. It was something I was thinking about for the next game I want to work on.

Play is an important part of learning because there’s no pressure involved. The goal of Brenda’s lecture seemed to focus on designing games that covered challenging subjects like history’s atrocities that may invoke sadness as opposed to joy that games are known to bring about in us instead. However, every game she discussed as an example had a strong educational aspect to it. People would actually gain something from playing her games. I’ve been thinking lately about wanting to create a game where players work together to accomplish something and possibly even learn from the experience. I am still not sure yet what that will be, but Brenda’s talk presented some possibilities and for that, I am thankful.

Brawl Tourney on July 19th, 2009 at Full Sail University

2 Liter Bottle, creators of the upcoming Full Sail University Game Project game The Depths, will be holding a Super Smash Bros: Brawl tournament on Sunday, July 19th. I shall be assisting them in the tournament operations. The game will be played on the Nintendo Wii and players may bring their own controller.

There will be a singles and doubles tournament competition and the entry fee is $5 per player per tournament. Tournaments will be either single or double elimination brackets based on the number of competitors.

Matches will be 3 stocks and 8 minutes long.

Legal stages in the tournament include the following: Final Destination, Battlefield, Delphino Plaza, Frigate Orpheon, Yoshi’s Island, Halberd, Lylat Cruise, Castle Siege, Smashville, Jungle Japes, Pokemon Stadium I, and Rainbow Cruise.

Portions of the entry fee will go to the team budget of 2 Liter Bottle.

The event will be held at 2:30pm on Sunday, July 19th in the Dieselbean Cafe lobby in building FS4E. Sign-ups begin at 1:00pm. See you guys there!

Facebook Event Page

• 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!

The 24 hour Playmine is an extra-curricular activity at Fullsail University where students in the Game Development program, coming from different parts of the curriculum, get together and work on a game from concept to completion in the span of 24 hours. The idea was that of Keyvan Acosta’s, Associate Course Director for Structure of Game Production at Fullsail.

Playmine’s Mr. Apple Head

This will be the second time this project will be happening. The first time this event was held was over this past summer where eleven students — sophmores, juniors, and seniors — of the Game Development program were broken up into teams of production, gameplay, quality assurance, and tools for this game. The students brainstormed a game where a toy golem, looking like an apple, had to piece together it’s parts and wreak havoc on a playground. The idea was simple in scope and the students accomplished most of what they set out to do.

The next Playmine will start this Saturday, September 27th at noon and conclude the next day, on Sunday, at noon. This time, students can pitch ideas ahead of time if they are to work on the project and I will be one of many Game Development faculty members to help guide and motivate students to completion. Fullsail also has a food and beverage budget, which I know hungry students will appreciate. You guys may want to bring a pillow, jacket, deodorant and of course your development laptop. Most importantly, take a shower before you come! 24 hours is a long time without bathing.

If some of my current student will work, I will totally bake my super-awesome strawberry cupcakes for the team to enjoy! It is important that students take advantage of opportunities like this where they can boost their student portfolio with more projects. It will certainly help to make such student more noticeable by potential employers. We hope to see as many of you there as possible!

Below are specifics on how you can be a part of the development team for this weekend’s Playmine:

The sign-up list is capped at 24 entrants, with any above that number not working in an ”official” capacity; though who knows if we need more people. From today till Friday, we’ll expect all communication related to the event (game proposal submissions, sign-up info, questions, etc) to be sent to kacosta_at_fullsail_dot_com with the subject of [24hrs]. And although the “tickets” issued are first come, first served, you must fill-in the following information before Friday Noon (12pm) in order to be allowed to participate:

Name :

GPA :

Current class :

Cell phone # :

Email :

You must have a minimum GPA of 2.00, a laptop, and a smile. The list will be sorted by seniority, in other words, those closer to Final Project get first dibs… Oh, you will receive confirmation by Friday evening. Bring a pillow, comfortable clothing, and a jacket in case the typical Full Sail frostbite Monster shows up.

DETAILS

Where Game Development Offices, building 130 (second floor) closest to Taco Bell.

Date 9/27/08

Starts Saturday, 12pm

Ends Sunday, 12pm

Food Dinner and Breakfast

Drinks Soda, Monster

… Punch and Pie…

We WILL be there rain or sunshine, will you?