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9月4日 New places to find me on the web!Work is well underway on my independent game project, Space Trader. Towards this end the very first (rough) version of the Space Trader web page is now online! Visit http://www.spacetradergame.com to check it out (keep checking back, I'll be improving it greatly over the next few weeks). In addition to this, my love of blogging has led me to open an additional blog space for news about the project. You can view this blog by visiting http://spacetraderdave.spaces.live.com. Please keep visiting both of these new sites and look for an initial release of the game soon! 8月16日 FeedbackFeedback is good. Feedback is awesome. Feedback is essential. Lack of feedback is detrimental to a project. Lately, I've been spending most of my time working on a project for my T.A. position. One of our goals is to create a library of documents for students to add to their experience at Brown. These documents will include tutorials for learning new techniques and procedures, informational for basic reference material, and worksheets, for students to complete on their own for better understanding. I've been working on this project with my manager, so I've received plenty of feedback through there, as well as from other instructors that I interact with daily who I've shown the work-in-progress to. This morning, I received my first bit of feedback from an instructor that I don't know as well. I'm happy to say that it was positive. Having that kind of positive reinforcement from someone who I respect and am not accustomed to interacting with on a daily basis provides a huge amount of motivation to continue with my work on this project. In another project, the development of a game with a small group of other students, I've been frustrated by an almost complete lack of feedback. They continue to seem content to work on projects only during class. My current task in this group is to write the story for the game. To that end, I submitted my first outline draft on Friday morning. I did not receive any feedback at all until Monday afternoon, and I still haven't received feedback from most of the other members of the group. I've decided to approach it as we've been taught to treat clients. I'll submit material to the group, whether they pay attention to it or not, three times before submitting a final draft. After that's been submitted, final critiques will be accepted. Critiques regarding points that had been outlined previously will be met with some harsh resistance on the grounds that they had plenty of time to say something before I spent my time writing it up into story or script form. Comments on the fairness or unfairness of this approach are appreciated. To do: I need to get serious work done on my individual game project due at the end of the quarter. This quarter has gone by deceptively quickly -- we only have 4 weeks left! 4 weeks to build models, textures, and program a game aren't a lot, regardless of how simple the game is or how large your team is. In my case, it's just me for the actual production of the game (I received some assistance with artwork from an outside contact). Hopefully, I'll have something playable after this weekend. 8月14日 TutorialsPart of my job as a T.A. is to create tutorials, video training modules, and other documentation to help future students. Naturally, this keeps me on my toes. Eventually, I intend to put up a website with the tutorials I've produced. In the meantime, I need to teach myself what ActorX is in 3ds/max... Gamasutra - Product: GarageGames Announces Torque X For XNA
Link to Gamasutra - Product: GarageGames Announces Torque X For XNA This is excellent news! Following the news that Microsoft would be releasing a free edition of XNA Game Studio, and only charging $99 a year for the ability to play your homebrew games on the Xbox 360, GarageGames has now announced the release of their engine specifically for XNA. What does this mean for me? The games I'm working on right now will be able to be ported extremely easily over to Xbox 360. Torque, as an engine, is now poised to take on the big names like Unreal with a huge following of indie developers, and I'm on the front lines with my knowledge of the engine and scripting. This is going to serve as an excellent motivation for a lot of people to get cracking on those Torque projects! Windows Live Writer
8月12日 WritingI love to write.
Sadly, since beginning my courses in Game Design, I haven't had a lot of opportunity to really write. Oh sure, there's been plenty of chances to write, but it's all been technical. Finally, I'm getting to write something on a more creative level. I do have to make sure to work with the rest of my group on it, which is a bit of a downfall since I've never written creatively and collaboratively at the same time before. Despite that, I'm excited to get the opportunity to experience it. I know I need to be open to feedback at every step of the way. It's not my story, it's our story, and I intend to carry that through the entire writing process.
Today I submitted my first draft of the basic story outline to the team. Even though that was almost five hours ago, I've received no responses yet. I hope that they don't wait until Tuesday, when the class is, to get back to me on it. I need their input to be able to continue, otherwise I'd just be wasting my time writing something that may not match with what they expect from me. 8月8日 Spaces FriendsTo all those who I just invited:
This is my blog for all things related to school and my developing career in Game Design. Please feel free to comment on anything I post. Also, I do take requests. If there's something you'd like to see me write about here, please let me know. I love talking about my experiences here at Brown.
I also encourage anyone else who might be interested in blogging to check out Spaces here. It's a very nice site that lets you make very clean looking blogs without all the extraneous ads and crap that other blogging sites have.
Thank you for visiting my page! :D Quarter 9 - Day 17Work continues on our major project. Our instructor covered what he expects from us in our documentation. I'd actually forgotten that, in addition to a proof of concept for our game, we must also have a full design document. I intend to step up the production qualities of all the documentation I produce for this project.
Unfortunately, the student who has undertaken most of the programming so far wasn't present today, so we didn't get to see a new build. Hopefully he'll be here with new material tomorrow or, even better, send something out in e-mail tonight.
Today, I'm mostly working on a set of Unreal tutorials for a class tomorrow. I'm hoping to have some well-polished documents ready for them tomorrow afternoon. I fear I'll have to be up late to have them finished on time. It was a bit of a rush assignment, though, and the payoff will be worth it: knowing that I provided the material that will help teach hundreds more students. :) 7月30日 The Difference Between School/Work and HomeThere's a big difference between the life I lead at school and the one I lead at home. While it's true that I do have a handful of friends that I met at school, the majority of my contacts there are strictly professional. At least, that's how they are for me. After a recent incident involving a contact from school who happened to have my personal contact info, I've begun preparing to put up better blocks between my personal and public lives.
It would also seem that since taking up the teacher's assistant position at school and passing the Game Club on to another who I felt was worthy to run it that there's a feeling among other students that I've become "stuck up." I can definitely see how one might get that impression, but I can't help that the people getting this idea chose to talk to me while I was dashing down the hall to get my equipment, eat lunch as quickly as possible and then get to work, especially since they were coming to me with a problem that's no longer under my control.
As mentioned earlier, I was also contacted while at home by someone from the school. I don't normally mind this, as long as there's a point. If someone wants to ask when my tutoring hours are or even quick help with a specific issue, I don't mind at all. This particular person ended up getting upset with me when I stopped responding, despite the fact that his only topics were regarding how good he believes he is in 3ds/max, what so-and-so said about such-and-such, and some girl he's supposedly hooking up with. These topics are not within the professional realm. They are boasting, gossip, and wishful thinking, in that order, so don't be surprised if I'm not thrilled to discuss them with you. |
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