Augusta GGDA’s First Meeting!

Posted on September 1, 2010 by Dorian Patterson

I finally got around to sending those emails I need to send, so the date, time and place is set. If you’re in a game developer or interested in making games in anyway, and are in the Augusta area (that is the metropolitan area known as Augusta), you should come! The event should be on the calendar sometime this week (should any changes occur), but I’ve set the meeting for Tuesday, September 14 from 6:30 PM – 7:30 PM @ Village Deli Sub & Pub in Daniel Village Shopping Plaza off of Wrightsboro Road. It’s an informal affair, so feel free to eat while you’re there. We’ll meet and greet first, and also talk about SIEGE. I’ll have a more concrete idea of the agenda in the coming days.

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Ludum Dare 18! Augusta GGDA

Posted on August 22, 2010 by Dorian Patterson

I decided to enter Ludum Dare, a tri-annual game making event. This particular time, aside from their usual 48 hour solo competition, they’ve opened up a more causual 72-hour game jam.

I attempted to make something for the compo, as I don’t know any game developers in the Augusta area yet, but I spent all of yesterday failing to put together a workable platformer engine. I decided to scrap that and make a beat-em-up. I’ll probably have something workable for the compo deadline, but I might just skip it and submit something tomorrow.

In other news, I’ve been appointed by the GGDA President as Chapter President for Augusta. I’ll be contact local universities soon (this week, tomorrow), and hopefully we’ll have our first meeting by mid September. While, I’m probably a bit young and inexperienced for the position, I’ll do my best to help build a community of game developers in my hometown. Assuming there are any besides me :P

On the off chance some reads this, lives in Augusta, and wants to/does make games, please get in contact with me. As soon as I know how to get it up, the chapter website will be the source of news for our chapter.

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Some scam sites to be aware of

Posted on August 17, 2010 by Dorian Patterson

Avoid JobNab.com and Career-Network.com. If you get any emails from them or any other person saying they found your resume on another job site, and think you should join theirs, dump it to spam. Always do your research. I almost got screwed today had I not done my research.

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Game Dev

Posted on August 7, 2010 by Dorian Patterson

For the past few days, I’v been working on a game project I started a while back to get familiar with using Game Maker. It’s been amazing the amount of progress I’ve been making, and the amount of focus I have. Maybe being out of school has something to do with that, but I’m putting in at least 4 hours a day on this one game.

I mentioned this on my old Blogger blog, so there are a few entries about it already. I like using Game Maker because it’s fairly easy to get a new idea in quickly, test it, and fix it. The lack of total control is already starting to be a bother though. There are also a lot of programming staples that are missing from GML (like increment and decrement operators and multiple assignment). I guess working with MEL I’ve gotten used to lite programming.

Anyway, I’m going to spend no more than a month on this, and then move on to another project in ActionScript using either Flixel or FlashPunk.

I’m also working on yet another attempt to enter something for the 11 Second Club compo this month. I’ve gotten the first pose blocked, but I’ve got up to 9 more to go, and then, of course comes the rest.

Still in between deciding to find work and going back to school. I’m looking an a position completed unrelated to the games industry because I was contacted personally via email. I’m also looking into the programs at Full Sail University. I like that many programs are available both on campus and online. I’ll probably choose the option that’s cheaper (probably online), but if I decide to go back to school, I also want to go somewhere, and Florida is not Georgia so…

Anyway, that’s what’s been going on. Still have crappy DSL (I think the modem is dying, I’ve had to power cycle it twice today).

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My computer’s busted.

Posted on August 1, 2010 by Dorian Patterson

The headline line says it all. My PC bought brand new almost three years ago, will not finish the boot sequence anymore. I can’t even get into the BIOS settings. Luckily, I was able to back up all my important data, but in the mean time, I’m working on an outdated Celeron with 512 MB of RAM. I’m starting to miss those outdated hunks of crap at the drama lab.

This is the perfect excuse to build my own from scratch, but I just don’t think I’m a good place financially to do so. Regardless, I have no way of doing anything related to game development besides design for a while. I should be coming back to Athens for a day this week to close out everything related to the Respiratory Lecture project. If I’m lucky, a job opportunity will magically fall into my lap again. But I think my good fortune has run out.

Lastly, I’m still waiting to see if I actually graduated or not. I’m not worried; I just hate waiting.

EDIT: So apparently, my backup drive was causing the boot issue. I think it had something to do with how I last formated it. I formatted it into exFAT instead of NTFS, so I redid that and hopefully, that will stop the problem. My guess is during the boot up sequence, the boot loader tried going into the drive and for some reason couldn’t get out.

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“How goes the hunt?” “It does not a fare well. Something is scaring all the game away.”

Posted on July 21, 2010 by Dorian Patterson

This is an imaginary quote I’m using as a metaphor to describe how my job hunting has gone lately. It seem everytime I seem to find something I would be okay doing, I falls through my grasp for some reason.

I think it would be prudent for me to just go ahead and finish my second degree. Doesn’t matter it would probably put me into about $10,000 in additional debt. I think it would pay off in the long run.

But It wouldn’t be smart to rush into this. So, I’m setting a deadline to decide this when I go visit my parents this weekend. I need to offload some of my junk to make moving out easier.

The camp I’ve been helping out at is interesting to say the least. For the most part, it seems most of these kids have terrible focus, so who knows if they’ll even get to a playable prototype. Still, a few of them have actually picked up interest in new skills. I’ve taught a kid basic object manipulation in Unity, and there’s a kid who is already a fairly talented artist (has his sights set on going to SCAD). There’s two more days left in the camp, so I’ll be over there for then and for the final presentations of Friday.

I was offered a freelance job, but I didn’t qualify because I won’t be a student at the time they’ll need me. I passed on the info to a friend of mine who passed it off to her boyfriend who is definitely qualified, both technically and student-status wise.

I also heard about an awesome job while easedropping on the Dramatic Media grads and Mike Hussey, a professor in the department, who I consider my mentor. Unfortunately, this is a graduate assistantship, but I’m going to drop the client an email anyway and test me luck. You never know.

I also heard from a friend of my sister’s that a Georgia game studio based in Atlanta has internships available. I should inquire about that as well.

There are also three(ish) grant projects that I could possibly be brought in on, but they wouldn’t start until late fall, early winter.

So, nothing is waiting immediately on the horizon, but I still think I’ll fair well post-graduation.

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Awesome “making of” documentary of an awesome movie.

Posted on July 19, 2010 by Dorian Patterson

So I just finished watching Persepolis (which is awesome), and I’m about halfway or so of the behind the scenes documentary, and this is definitely a must see for anyone wanting to go into traditional animation.

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“Life is a Highway”

Posted on July 14, 2010 by Dorian Patterson

and I want to fly over it at breakneck speeds! Life has been ridiculously fun the in just the past few days. And even though I don’t have any prospective jobs waiting for me immediately after graduation, I’m not worried. I think someone up there is truly looking out for me.

Anyway, my plan to stay in Athens for a year to build a stronger portfolio just might come through. I’m going to look at place to live at later this week and next week, and see if I can get hired at GameStop.

I start working at a video game camp tomorrow. How cool is that?

Also, went on to my first (but hopefully, not last) GGDA meetup yesterday. Had some interesting conversations.

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Development is slow. I am way in over my head.

Posted on July 4, 2010 by Dorian Patterson

So I wanted to add in basic movement in Open Animal Crossing (OAC). I already had the mesh translating properly, but I wanted the mesh to face the direction it was moving in. Turns out to be harder than I thought it would be. I tried looking at the 3rd Person Controller script from Unity’s 3rd Person Platformer game, but even after tying to cut out a lot of the extraneous code, I wasn’t able to get the result I wanted. There doesn’t seem to be an exact example of what I want either. I found a solution that was very close on Unity Answers, but I couldn’t get it to make sense. Still I’ve only been at it for about two hours, so I won’t count myself out just yet.

I have a short video I’ve upload on YouTube of the “progress” I’ve made so far.

I just solved it! Yay! I won’t bother uploading a new video until I do something more interesting. Animation perhaps?

Anyway, you can transform objects relative to themselves as well as the world. I just had to specify using world space. Something to look out for from now on.

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Rigging is hard!

Posted on June 29, 2010 by Dorian Patterson

I’m getting a little tired of trying to rig this character just so I can animate him. I tried following this tutorial on Autodesk’s Area, but it called for using a script that’s no longer at the location specified. So, I’ll need to find another one.

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