Change, The Constant of Life

Hello everyone!

The past two weeks have been a whirlwind of changes at work which left me with very little time for rest and recuperation. I’ve been put into training for a new position, which means my work schedule has changed. It will change a number of times again in the near future before things stabilize. Along with that, I have to actively focus on learning a mass of new information needed to perform the job properly; no more taking the free time at work to think about game development or learn new tricks. Because of all of this I’ve been trying to reduce the amount of time I spend developing or playing games in order to spend more time with my family when I’m not at work.

I will temporarily pull back to posting these blogs every other weekend and aim to have them ready by Sunday evening my time. Once I’ve learned the job properly, the schedule will stabilize and the stress levels will go down considerably. The process shouldn’t take more than two months. Then I can return to spending more time working on games and reaching out to you all. This is the process of life, growing and changing.

See you in a couple weeks! (If I find the time/energy I will make a post next week)

Challenge Failed – Learned Much

Hello all! I hope you’ve been having a good week.

I’m a little sad to report that I have failed the Seven Day Roguelike Challenge this week in the primary goal of completing a game within those seven days. Once I had declared that I was taking part in this challenge, life decided to interrupt early and often. I didn’t get much sleep at night the first few nights due to our son waking up and being noisy. Then there were a number of events that my wife wanted to go to, so I had more baby duty than normal. My typically low stress days at work were fairly busy leaving little energy to get any coding done afterward. There were a number of other small things that served to drain my motivation to work during what free time I did have. And finally my wife is coming down with what is potentially strep throat. Individually these problems would have just been minor setbacks, but all combined during this past week created a pretty hefty wall to try to climb over.

With the goal of learning about new things, I had a lot of success. When I was really interested in procedural generation, I tried making a roguelike following a tutorial. However I quickly ran into a number of roadblocks and ended up putting that type of game out of my mind for a while.. This 7DRL challenge got me to think about those issues again and I managed to design the code in a way that worked this time around. The main areas I was having issues were dealing with high object counts to slow down the game logic each step, separating the camera from the game world, noticeably slow draw times, and designing a Graphical User Interface system. I have working solutions to these areas now and will have that code base to work with on future projects including next year’s 7DRL. Along with that, some old ideas that had been lying dormant for years have resurfaced; I will probably end up working on a game inspired by Final Fantasy Tactics and Fire Emblem in the future.

I look forward to seeing you all next week!

First Game Jam

Hello everyone! Are you having a nice weekend so far?

Today I am participating in my first game jam ever, the 7 day rogue-like (7drl) challenge. Starting now I have 7 days to make a small but complete rogue-like* game. This is going to be a very interesting experience. I had started a rogue-like project a couple months ago, but ran into a bunch of coding and design snags, and eventually had to put that aside. I am excited to start over with that and hopefully be able to have a finished and working game by this time next week. A bonus to this challenge is that it lines up with my short work week, and so I will be off and free to get busy on “winning” this challenge.

Last night, with the help of my wife, I’ve finally upgraded to a real desk. It is weird having a clear space for all of my computer equipment and an open desktop space. I actually want to sit at my desk to work again! My wife is happy about that since I was hogging the use of the laptop that she prefers to use for the past week or two. It is also slightly safer for a walking toddler to be around; the dinner tray setup that we used to have was fairly unstable and would tip over if he used those for balance at the wrong time.

I will provide daily updates to my progress through twitter at @renauddmarshall. Next week’s blog will potentially be delayed until Sunday so I can announce my success or failure and what I’ve learned. You can also see how much time I have left on this countdown timer

See you next week!

* Roguelike is a subgenre of role-playing video games, characterized by procedural level generation, turn-based gameplay, tile-based graphics, permanent death, and typically based on a high fantasy narrative setting. – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roguelike

Partial Success

This is coming a little late today but I wanted to get the update on the goal out there.

I was a little short of my goal of putting an hour each day into coding and designing, but I did restore some of the desire with designing games. The underlying coding structure of Color Combat needed to be redesigned to allow for the game to expand without being too complex to manage and that has been accomplished. There isn’t a visible change in the game but that was one of the real hurdles to getting back into working on it.

A few of the other hurdles in life have also been passed. Language class is over and I achieved my goal score of 2+/2+ on the Defense Language Proficiency Test. I’ll be returning to my old work schedule that will give me more time overall to be home with the family and work on this game. The stress of life is decreasing some, and I intend to increase my productivity in response. The future is looking brighter again!

This was another shorter post to share the results of last week’s goal. I don’t have specific plans on next week’s post, but my birthday is coming up in a few days so something will probably come to me.

See you next week!