Jobs jobs jobs...wherefore art thou jobs?

If you made some kind of association with Steve Jobs from the title, I smacketh thee...I'm trying to focus a bit more on the job market, however the last couple of days have involved being stolen away by my cousin for one day, and today another cousin visited.  Soooo, I've been kinda busy.  >.>

Also, happy halloween!  I made up a pumpkin today with my Grandfather today as well, although I only got to add on some nifty scars, and a blood splatter, it actually turned out really well.  Unfortunately the light he put in it doesn't work...but I'm sure he'll jury-rig something up.  o_O  That always has been his specialty.  But the amazing thing is, despite being jury rigged, everything he does works...better than most stuff too.  Although it may not be pretty, it damn well does the job.

So yeah, right now, I'm finally getting around to blogging a little bit, it's kind of nice really to relax a bit and explain my plans.  I wrote a little list of all the crap that I need to do over the next few days, so whoever is reading this, please tell me what you think!

• Update my portfolio
• Harper's Gate stuff.
• Add images for each project.
• Coding examples from each project.
• Make downloads easier to find.
• More personalized
• Add this blog in there.
• Add portfolio to Facebook and LinkedIn
• Find jobs to apply for.
• Make semi-generic cover letter
• Update LinkedIn/Facebook profile a bit.
• Update my resume.
• Add Portfolio to blog.

Now something to note is that all of these things don't have any specific order, they're just written out as things to do.  What will actually get done, I have no clue.  :-P  We shall see yes?

I was also considering changing this blog to look a bit more like my WordPress blog.  If anyone has any opinion on that, feel free to comment, thanks!

Finally unbusy!

Harper's Gate has officially been turned in for school!  The game really was never completed, sadly enough, however it turned out far better than I could have expected.  :-)

This means I'm officially done with school through DeVry!!!  Took me long enough, right?  Hehehe.  Onward to the job market, I'm officially available for employment as a computer programmer.  Doesn't matter what field for the programming, I am willing to do just about anything really.  Game's are definitely my passion, however I know it's really difficult to get into video games and the business itself is very difficult on programmers.  Right now I would much rather get my career going as a computer programmer than hop directly into video games.  Plus, I'm sure I can get a lot of work experience and more coding experience outside of video games.  For the few readers out there, wish me luck with my endeavors!  :-D

Long time no see huh?

Well, it's been over 2 weeks here, sorry for taking so long to post.  Been extremely busy with school.  @_@  So much craziness with school, it's not even funny.  Absolutely tired of it, however, it'll all be over with soon...

Anyway, I got a LOT of work done on Harper's Gate over the last couple of weeks.  I made a series of context objects, which acts as things like minerals, plants, and other things that you can interact with, i.e. collect resources from.  It's still in the baby phases of actually working...I'm focusing on getting assets created right now, so that's been a bit of a hassle.

There are many great things that have come out over the last week or so, including images, and various other things...Anyway, here's a basic list of images I made via GameMaker.

Each of these strips of images were created with Game Maker, it helps having the automated strip saving system...and the transparency.  I don't have any decent programs for making these images other than Game Maker, so yeah...These are strips of images I'm using.  From top to bottom, we have a grass strip, ingot strip, magical book strip, mineral (context object!) strip, ore strip, paper, pickaxe strip, Gate strip, potion strip, E button strip, stairs, and a flower of some kind...

These strips will be useful in many ways, the ores and ingots, for instance, show the different types of ores and ingots available, the book shows the inventory image of different levels of books you can find.  The pickaxes act the same way.  The portal image may be hard to see, but it has a transparent key hole in the center, and it's meant as an animation, rather than a single image.  Same goes with the E, however it's meant to loop back and forth.so it glows red, then back.

One of the unfortunate problems with Game Maker's strip system is that it makes it just that...a strip.  It does not make a grid shape, and if you have a fairly large image, the original image can go on and on and on...I don't have the tools to help me cut it into different sequences, so I'm just stuck with this.  @_@  I shall live though...

Anyway, hope you guys have enjoyed.  I'll try to post sooner, but judging by the way school is currently going, I will probably have a rough time doing so.