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.

Little to no news so far...

So, I've got school going, and I think I've got an idea for the things I want to change a bit...I need to add in the sound system for my game, since I completely overlooked that before...I didn't want to have to deal with sound yet, soooooo I'm SOL on that now, I need sound.  I'll have to make all the sound effects, music, and artwork for this game too.  -_-  So you'll be seeing more updates in the art department.

Speaking of which, I hope you enjoy the next pictture.  This is meant to be a sprite with the different item icons for pickaxes, and eventually what Harper will also use, once I can animate them.  @_@  

So yeah, I still need to work on some other stuff today, tomorrow, and for the rest of my life on this program...@_@

I had some small ideas for the game that I wrote down last night.  The sound was one of them...I need to add sound ID's to the parsers, in order for objects to make sounds, and also a sound effect to the worlds, so you can have some background music.  I also need to set up a system for when the player collides with an event of sorts.  Something that can be used as a hit-box, and moves the player over to the next scene or something of that nature.

I was also considering my resource manager...it only holds resources right now, i.e. textures, and fonts, but I could make it hold the parsers as well.  I think this would help condense things a bit more, but also reduce the coupling of objects, and the visibility of all the parsers, except the settings parser, that one I need to have direct access to.  So basically you would have indirect access to each of the parsers, with the resource manager being the inbetween.  Reduces coupling and visibility, but keeps the same abilities.

But then the question comes, is it worth the change?  I would probably have to change a lot of code for that to work, and would it really be all that much more useful?  I have no fucking clue...so instead of creating a bunch of crap that i may or may not be able to use better, I'm just going to leave it as a to-do later...post-school type edits.  @_@  Anyway, take care my very few readers...

So much to do, so little time...

Well, it looks like I've got my final coming up.  I'm glad I've gotten my program this far to be used for it, and hopefully by the end of the session I'll have a usable and displayable program to put on here.  So far, I've got my new character model, and that's about it.

The game's title is now Harper's Gate.  The name is a bit tentative but it works for now.  The idea still remains as a 2D variation of Monster Hunter with RPG elements...I'm going to be working on developing sprites over the next several weeks I'm sure, and I'll keep you guys (my very limited readers) up to date!

Also, here's Harper in all his pixelated glory...He currently has no arms, but those will be added in programmatically as separate sprites.  These are all of his progressions from a simple idea of a character with a red mask on his face.  o_O  There are two sections in there that are going to be his animation.  To be honest, they're rather meh, but I don't have to make something amazing in the graphical department.

This is the look I want him to have for his final coalesced look.  But the arms are basically going to be separate from his body so I can animate them separately.

Train trips and mind boggling teachers!

So, tomorrow I'm gonna be heading down to LA to see my buddy Eric, looks like it'll be a very fun trip, full of...two 14 hour trips on 4 trains, and 2 busses.  o.o  And what's definitely sounding like a good time.

I would also like to note that I have an awful teacher in class this session...I had an exam today that was about Networking alright, so we went over a lot of basic programming in networking...So I expected we would go over the same information as we did in class.  I think the only thing we really went over was the last 5 questions out of 26...I had to google everything else.

He also had a question like this in it...

What is true for network protocols:
TCP is used for streaming.
UDP is used for streaming.
and a couple other ones that were blatantly false.

So...funny thing, TCP and UDP can be used for streaming data...I know this isn't a good example for school, but wiki is usually right, since you have tons of people who edit it...but you also get trolls, and they suck ass. But anyway, it says that UDP can be used for streaming, and same with TCP.  TCP is more common, but UDP can still fucking do it.  So why am I given such ambiguous questions on an exam, which is meant to test your knowledge of a subject?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streaming_media

And I also got one like this:

Which protocol is more popular:
TCP
UDP
SSL
IMAP

So...first off SSL is out, cause that's the Secure Socket Layer, not a protocol, aaaaand...IMAP is used for mail...>.>  I have no clue which one is more popular, cause I like TCP over UDP any day...This is a multiple fucking choice question with one answer.  Subjective questions have MORE than 1 answer, because the answer is different with everyone.  My guess was TCP, since it's easier to use, but to be honest, it could have easily been UDP for all I know...how am I supposed to know what's popular and what's not when it comes to Internet Protocols...Maybe I like using UDP, because you don't need a connection to the server?  I don't understand it one bit, personally.

This was a very disappointing networking class that I paid a lot of money for.  And if there are any DeVry teachers or managers listening, you need to fucking fire whoever made the curriculum for the GSP 465 class, and picked out that awful book...it works for Linux, don't get me wrong, but I'm not using Linux, and probably a good portion of your students don't use Linux because you have a free Windows 7 download...Brains are here for a reason, and it's not nomming.

Programming ideas.

Alright, so I've been thinking about things, and discussing them with my new friend Gaming Gryphon.  I'm going to have a bit of a rough time with the mobs, trying to find ways to create a series of behaviors to tack on to the mob based on what they are.  I'm thinking I can make a section in the mob XML file something like Behavior
   XYZ
/Behavior

Where XYZ is just a string value of one behavior to add.  If there are multiple behaviors you add them into a list, then in the update method loop through all the behavior classes, and execute them.  Although I'm thinking an FSM would work best...but it would be a bit too complex for mobs with multiple behaviors.

However, if I could make a list of behaviors that work together that would be nice to get done finally.  The problem ends up being time restraints, and asking myself what i really want in the program, rather than all the weird quarkiness that i want to add for the complexities.

Anyway, watching Doctor Who Season 4 episode 15.  :-D  I will post some more later tonight.