Finishing stuff up

Things are finally starting to slow down. I have finished all of my finals except for game engine. My Advanced Seminar project went fairly well. Of course it could have been a lot better, and I'm not happy about my artwork at all, but I am generally happy with the end product. The last thing I need to do is some work in Game Engine. Torque Game Engine is being quite sassy, and I still need to finish up some parts of my "game" for my final. It isn't going to be anything flashy. You run around an environment, collect 5 rocks, and then go through a tunnel that opens up when you collect them all. It's simple, but surprisingly complicated to implement.

On a super awesome side note. Our America's Army maps have been officially released. If you want to try my teams map, just download Americas Army, and look for the map Canyon. That's me! I have been playing it a little. It is so rewarding seeing people having fun with something you built. I only wish every project I worked on was half this awesome.

oh and I'll be posting the final version of my seminar project on my portfolio website in a couple days. It is called "Flight of the Damocles".

IT's ALL WRONG!!

The last twenty four hours have possibly been the most stressful day of my life. Our America's Army map went live today. Late last night, we realized that we still had some bugs to fix that we had created through our earlier fixings. After all the shenanigans, it ended up being 2 oclock in the morning by the time we "finished". I quote the word finished, because finished we were not. You can probably imagine how stressed out I was at 2 in the morning, now imagine how stressed I was at 6 in the morning. Long story short, several of us pulled an all nighter just to have a version from 10 days ago get posted up for download in the game.

Yeah... you can imagine the violent seas of Dhali inspired anxiety that I am swimming in right now.

MIGS Post and etc.

Ok, so tons of stuff have happened. MIGS was amazing. I have thirty pages of notes taken on subjects ranging from storytelling in an open environment to increasing meaning in video games to uses metrics to meter difficulty in level design. It was as Kintaro Oe would say, "very educational!" I didn't do as much networking as I would have liked. It is very intimidating to try and strike up a conversation with someone you want to be. I saw a few of the other guys manage to get a lot of business cards, but most of their conversations looked empty. I had a few conversations here and there, and I asked many of the speakers questions, but I only ever gave out my business card to one person. Whatever the case, MIGS was excellent. There was so much that happened and I can barely scratch the surface here.

We started fixing bugs revealed in beta testing of our America's Army maps just a few days ago. I tried to coordinate things from here, but that is rather hard when you are so far away. I also wasn't able to help with the fixing of the bugs. My computer doesn't like the AA mission editor. Luckily the bugs were few, and my team mates were gung ho about fixing them. I believe the last of them were fixed today. The map is due to be released on the 10th. I'm pretty happy about it.

I also posted a new prototype on my website. It is a simple side scrolling dodging game. After doing a few quick prototypes and talking with some people about prototyping, I have decided that I am going to try and step up each prototype each time. This last prototype actually had some artwork in it although simple. I am going to try and step it up some more for the next one. I might try working on a prototype of some mechanics for my production II project.