Alpha on monday

As the title states quite clearly, Alpha presentations are this coming monday (September 29). Prior to Thursday I wasn't particularly enthusiastic as the game was suffering from a significant lack of... game? Everything appears to be falling into place now with the inclusion of fresh animations and the ability to stomp on enemies and world objects. That last "feature" is entirely the result of the producer's confusion. At our last milestone on Monday he accidentally double jumped near an enemy and thought that he had jumped off of the enemies head. Hopefully the combination of bouncing from enemy to enemy and squishing each enemy will add a bit to the game play experience, but I'm still concerned about the group as a whole focusing on elements outside of the gameplay. Too much time is being spent creating dynamic menus and heads up displays and there still isn't a clear answer as to why these things are even needed in the game. Can't wait for November to roll around :D

Fun times!

GDC Austin was the best career decision I've made in a while. I met some interesting people from various companies and hopefully I've got a job lined up in the Austin area once school is over. God I can't wait for school to be over. I'm presently in lab working on final project because FF2 is due on monday. Tomorrow is my b-day so I had not planned to work on the project but it looks like that might not be the case ~_~

Insomniac was at the even but after speaking with a few indie game devs and actually attending an Austin IGDA event, I'm really not to keen on the idea of working for a large company. I've got my whole life ahead of me after all. Maybe going big is a bit too ambitious. I want to learn and grow as a programmer and a smaller company might actually be able to offer me that opportunity. Only time will tell.

In other news I am on the brink of a nervous breakdown looking through pages of broken code, thousand line long comments, and generally poorly designed systems that is turning out to be my teams final contribution to our school. Aside from the team hiccups I've been getting an awful lot of "your code is broken" from certain individuals even though I have managed to verify to their satisfaction that it is indeed the work of "gremlins" outside of my particular module. Between meeting students from other schools at AGDC and dealing with the students here I expect to find my skills to be a valuable commodity to some very fortunate employer in the near future. Now taking offers.

Insomniac Games at GDC Austin!

I was excited to be going to Austin next week in the first place but now I find out that Insomniac will be making an appearance. Can't wait to shake some hands and meet some people and hopefully learn a bit more about Insomniac along with the other developers.

Feature fragment 1 was ok. I'm sure that we exceeded the expectations of our EP (not even sure what EP means now that I think about it) but we were still lacking in documentation. This has been an ongoing problem mainly due to a lack of communication in the group but the project is coming along smoothly. We meet every day but Sunday so it definitely isn't an issue of getting work done. I just finished incorporating collision with world objects but I'm waiting to upload changes until the meeting tomorrow so that I can address a few observations. This puts me a full week ahead and some days ahead of my projected date of completion so now I've got some time to help others or iron out some old nagging issues. Finally fixed the "phantom bounding volume" issues that I was having as well.

And now to get some sleep. Next update might be a while as I leave for Austin on Saturday.

Feature Fragment 1

It's been a long week. Group meetings from Monday till Sunday aren't fun but the end justifies the means. The game is solid at this point. Everybody is ahead of schedule so we should be well prepared for Feature Fragment 2 two weeks from now. Can't wait to get some assets into the project but it looks like most of that stuff won't be here until after GDC Austin.