My World

So we had our Feature Fragment 2 turn in and presentation yesterday. It went amazing, our presentation is pretty solid we just have some asthetics to fix with our slides. The game is looking great as well,  one of our teachers said he is really happy with where we are at as far as gameplay goes. One of the big things I think our team really needs to focus on from here until Beta next month is on alot of polish. We have alot of features implemented in the game but they’re not extremely polished. We need to add alot more player feedback to the game as of right now.

But anyways the build is up now so check it out under the projects section.

So this holiday season there are alot, I mean alot, of great games coming out. Last month we had Fable 2, Farcry 2, Fallout 3, STALKER 2(I know thats not the name but it’s easier to reference it), Spiderman: Web of Shadows, Dead Space(Which is scary as hell), and Silent Hill: Homecoming. So that was just October for great games coming out.

In November we get Left 4 Dead, WoW: Wrath of the Lich King, Gears of War 2, COD: World at War, Mirror’s Edge, Banjo Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts(Which looks phenomenal), Tomb Raider: Underworld, and Sacred 2.

In December we get a couple of games, the new Prince of Persia game which looks insane, and a new Destroy All Humans.

So as a gamer I am insanely pumped about the games coming out this holiday season. Also if you are a former WoW addict and haven’t checked out Wrath of the Lich King yet I highly recommend you give it a shot. Picked it up last night and I have to say I am really impressed with the polish and changes they have made to WoW since I last played in April.

So if you’ve never played video games in your life then you probably don’t know who Blizzard is. But if you’ve been playing games for more than 3 years then Blizzard should be a name that tingles parts in your body. They’ve made small games such as Diablo I,II, and working on Diablo III. Starcraft I and working on Starcraft II, Lost Vikings I & II, and the small franchise of Warcraft I,II,III, and World of Warcraft.

So Blizzard stopped by Full Sail to talk to students and give a presentation about Blizzard themselves. Alot of the presentation was about how to get a job at Blizzard as a programmer,designer, or artist. They also discussed how they are making their local internship program national now and how they are starting to hire a lot more entry level positions. So it was a great presentation and you would think I would be plenty satisfied with them just giving a presentation.

But I was 1 of 7 lucky game development students who got to sit down with Blizzard for an hour and talk about many different things. I was also part of one of the lucky final project groups who got to sit down with the Blizzard people and have them check out our game and talk about how things are done at Blizzard. That was great and they seemed to really like our concept, we also told them that we got a lot of our abilities from WoW and Diablo. They seemed surprised by that.

Oh but it’s not over yet, Rob Coble the head of Career Development for the Game Development program here at Full Sail called me earlier this week end informed me I had the rare opportunity to actually sit down and interview with Blizzard for 20 minutes. This was amazing and I was very excited to actually get to sit down with them. The interview itself was a lot of fun and I really appreciate them coming down and checking out how great Full Sail really is and how passionate we are about games here.

So to end this I would really like to thank the two employees from Blizzard Entertainment University Relations who stopped by and visited out school: Choua Her and Sumer Ortiz.

Check out this story on Cnn, this guy is amazing and is the reason i’m proud to be American. There is a statement in the article about how this guy is an endangered specie. Very touching article.

Article Here

So went ahead and added my resume finally. I also added all of my final project documentation for the two projects I worked on: Ghostly Manor and Super Power Surge Spike. So if you get bored check em out.

So our Feature Fragment 1 was on this past Monday. Feature Fragment 1 is essentially the first core features we aim to implement into our game. WE did amazing, we actually had alot of our FF2 stuff almost done as well so we are ahead of schedule as of right now. I didn’t want to post the FF1 build though mainly due to a couple rare bugs we found in the release mode of the build, but FF2 will be complete a week from Monday so i’ll get that build up as soon as possible.

As far as the team synergy goes, we are doing great. Everyone on the team seems to have become alright with how the team works and we have discovered most of everyones limits and how far to push them. We do have the occasional fight but the fact we are so productive really balances that out. I am very happy with Team Booty Rock so far and can’t wait to show off our final product.

So last week we had our first milestone for the new game i’m working on. This milestone is called the proof of concept. The whole point of this milestone is to prove to our investors that we have the ability to build the technology for the game we pitched a month ago.

So what we ended up pitching was a basic menu in place with some menu music playing, a simple animation playing for our avatar in game, the ability to shoot a fireball and collide that fireball with enemies who are just a bunch of spheres set up around the level, and finally some simple platforming in with a mix of simple gravity. Notice how I mentioned simple alot, we really wanted to focus on gameplay elements since that’s what most of our game is truly made up of.

So we ended up doing really well on our POC, our External Producer Brian was really happy with what we came up with.

I am currently in the process of uploading our most current build were working on up to my website, but it shows what we had for POC with some more tech added as well. Feel free to leave me feedback on the build if you’d like.

You can download the build in my projects section or download here.

Ok so it’s been a while since i’ve posted. A LOT has happened since last post, our team ended up failing our first class so i was reshuffled back into a new group. So far the group is great, we have a bunch of passionate guys which can be good but also has it’s downfalls. We do argue alot but it’s always about our game which is great.

So my graduation date is now pushed back to Febuary 2009, but it was for the better. But been busy designing our Asset list, Gantt Chart, and Tech Doc these past few weeks. We are very eager to start programming in the next upcoming months.

So we are contemplating using Google’s Sketchup program to make the smaller content in our game because of the abundance of free models out on the internet that are made in Sketchup. This plugin allows you to take a sketchup model and export it out as a DirectX x File format.

Link

Ok so we had a team building exercise yesterday in our Public speaking class. In this exercise we were given 250 something toothpicks, a bag of small mashmallows, and a bag of big marshmallows. Now what we had to do was build the tallest freestanding structure in twenty minutes. It was a grueling task but we came out victorious(wink wink).

Heres a picture of the winning structure:

And of course Caseys soon to be famous I LOVE RENDERING picture: