Holy shit it's been a while since I've updated my blog.
What the fuck have I been doing since March 2014?
Well I guess the TL;DR of it is I was more active in both my space and games aspects of my professional life.
I graduated from my masters course with a distinction and decided to stay on at my job working on satellite software because not only does it pay much better than making games, but I can actually afford to do both using that wage.
I can't overstate what a fortunate and privileged position I have found myself in.
I fucking love my job, I have a comfortable living and I have 100% freedom of expression in the games I create without having to worry about whether it'll make enough money for the game after.
Not only do I earn enough to get by, but with appropriate budgeting, I can afford to attend various conventions dotted about the globe to help expand my knowledge and understanding of games.
What the fuck have I been doing since March 2014?
Well I guess the TL;DR of it is I was more active in both my space and games aspects of my professional life.
I graduated from my masters course with a distinction and decided to stay on at my job working on satellite software because not only does it pay much better than making games, but I can actually afford to do both using that wage.
I can't overstate what a fortunate and privileged position I have found myself in.
I fucking love my job, I have a comfortable living and I have 100% freedom of expression in the games I create without having to worry about whether it'll make enough money for the game after.
Not only do I earn enough to get by, but with appropriate budgeting, I can afford to attend various conventions dotted about the globe to help expand my knowledge and understanding of games.
One such convention was the A MAZE festival in Berlin which I went to in April 2015. That was fucking awesome. Or I guess amazing would be more appropriate. I realised when I attended it's actually the first "festival" that I've attended. I was amazed at the quality of the band we were given, having been used to the cheap paper ones you typically find on a night out in Dundee. Actually I'm still wearing the band, it's a nice reminder to myself to be more proactive, because I went to A MAZE hoping to get something out of it beyond simply a change of scenery. But as it happens, a change of scenery was exactly what I needed. I was actually able to show off a game that I had worked on from a game jam (this game). I had been relatively pleased with the game in Dundee, I'd shown it at a number of events and people unanimously enjoyed playing it. That confidence was seriously knocked in Berlin. I was amongst incredible games which put mine to shame. Fortunately, this didn't effect me negatively. Instead, it helped show me a target for where I wanted my games to be. In addition to getting to experience a number of fantastically creative games, there were also a number of speakers. I had not expected them to be as inspiring and provoking as they were. One speaker, Devine Lu Linvega, blew me away with his approach to life. He seems to take on so much and yet what he creates still appears to be consistently impressive. He also is constantly trying to learn new languages, having already mastered many. Language was something I became very aware of in Berlin. Not only because of the clear discontent that the locals had for me when I wasn't able to communicate effectively in German, but from seeing so many people from all around the world speak English. And not just some base line "Hello, where is the train station" English, but using vocabulary that it's easy for me to otherwise take for granted. I'm aware that in other countries English is taught more thoroughly as it's a good bridging language for people. But it made me feel so ashamed of my ignorant approach to language. I'd always struggled with learning foreign languages. In school we were taught French and Spanish, but I just couldn't pick it up. After Devine's talk, I realised why. As obvious as it may appear, I never thought of other languages the correct way. Instead trying to learn how their words swapped out 1:1 with English words, when instead I should have been learning how their culture looks at and interacts with the world. This different world view allows the world to be described in a different manner than English allows and indeed Devine had felt like his expression was limited by English which is why he set out to learn new ones. I want to learn new languages and I hope that this different approach helps.
Another speaker who brought me to the brink of tears was Christos Reid. Christos suffers quite severely from OCD. His talk offered an interesting perspective on games and helped answer some questions about games that I hadn't even realised that I needed answering. As someone who suffered with depression almost none stop, it felt like a very personal talk and it was really inspirational how he hasn't let his disorder prevent him from doing what he wants to do.
I suppose I should note what actually happened with my Postgraduate degree...
Well second semester continued presenting me with an overbearing amount of work. However I was happy with what I ended up making by the end of it. My Podracing game was... well as good as I could manage when it wasn't my primary focus. I would've liked to have had it more like a game and less like a tech-demo, as the other racers simply bomb it full speed to the end of the try without trying to do anything particularly impressive. The second semester game actually ended up being a lot better than I had imagined that it would end up. I also created a wee platformer game which reminded me for the 1000th time that platformers are not as straight forward as I keep thinking that they are.
Did I talk about Microsoft imagine cup? I think that was April 2014. Alongside my numerous Uni projects and my part time job writing software for nanosatellites (because that clearly wasn't enough to take onboard) I continued working on projects with the Pixel Blimp guys. As I probably mentioned in previous blogs, I'd continued doing various jams with them and on top of that we managed to get into the Microsoft Imagine Cup where we were competing for a single national spot to compete in the world competition. As a quick run down of the Imagine Cup, there are 3 sections: Games, Innovation and World Citizenship... Games are fucking awesome, but it's really difficult to compete for the top spot through justifying good of our game, Wee Paper Planes, against the likes of software which can detect possible cancerous moles or platforms to help connect developing countries. Naturally we were instead shooting to win the Games section of the nationals. And we did it. Although being brutally honest as I always am, the games side didn't present much competition. I was genuinely shocked and appalled at the level of quality that we were competing against. There was only one exception, I forget the name of the game (sorry!) but it was really fun and really well polished, against those guys I was nervous. Fortunately, we had a pretty solid (for inexperienced students) pitch. As it happens, Abertay managed to send a few teams down the following year and they all looked much more up to standard. We had a huge helping hand getting organised and the likes for Imagine Cup from both Abertay's Iain Donald and also Microsoft's Lee Scott, I've no doubt they similarly helped guide the teams from the following year. While we weren't the overall winners of the Imagine Cup, we did end up being the team that went along and got drunk with the Microsoft execs. I believe we were the only team from Scotland, and so perhaps it was important for us to uphold the stereotype.
Have I blogged about Search for a Star? I don't think so, but basically I got in to the second stage this year. Sadly it was sponsored by Marmalade so naturally the coding test required working through what was broken in a build using Marmalade and to then add features. Ugh. Actually I was pretty happy with what I ended up with. You could apparently export to Android but wow fuck that. After using Unity for so long, it would be like shaving with broken glass.
I didn't hear anything further so I figured I didn't manage to get through to the final stage. Like I heard nothing back. From anyone. It was actually quite a waste of my time, plus unnecessary stress of having to use bloody Marmalade again.
Third semester came as more of a blessing, instead of however many different things I was trying to balance in the previous two, I only mainly had to focus on our third game which ended up being a "port" of a semester two game from PC to PS4. That'd be fine except for the fact we had to use that damned PhyreEngine. The game was functionally simple, so there was very little porting and more recreating in a different engine. Foolishly I'd highlighted my love for graphics programming and so that was the work load sectioned off for me. While we were working in the PhyreEngine, we did at least have the most capable programmers of the masters so fortunately we managed. What we pulled off was actually way better than I expected. I hadn't expected to end up with something that I could be happy to show to people. Look at it. Also shit. Looks like I still need to write up what I did for that. Probably partially good as there might be less heated angry rants about the team now there's been like a year to calm down. Although I'll be damned if I remember everything, my memory is pretty poor.
During the final semester, I got an email sent to a load of people from the lecturer who is basically Abertay's Sony contact. It detailed a pretty awesome internship and at this point I didn't know what I wanted to do. Unfortunately it said that it would start at a time when I would still be doing my Masters, I checked with the lecturer and he said I should not go for it. Originally I went with this, but then I thought "wait what, fuck that". I got a job working on fucking satellites because my thought process was "I won't be in any worse of a position for applying for it". So I went for it. I got an interview and popped down to their London Studio. I did a code test which apparently they do for any Sony programming interview. "Oh shit" I thought. Actually I didn't do too bad, getting most of it correct with only a few wrong answers including for a question asking what the contents of a memory dump represented. It was apparently an intentional curve ball and did it's job of looking scary as shit to me. However when I was told it represented an identity matrix, it was suddenly clear to see. Another thing I tripped up on that I should have known better was writing to a pointer which hadn't had any memory allocated to it, I'd been distracted by another part of the code.
As well as a code test, they did an interview asking about the various things I'd gotten up to and the there was a third part where they asked me to talk through designing a game.
I didn't hear back from Sony so assumed that I hadn't gotten through, until I got a call which said I was "third in line". They said that I did very well but there were two people who were really good. The internship was to take on two people, so the cynical side of me felt like this was just something they were saying to "be nice". Although it would be a peculiar thing to do when they didn't need to say anything at all, bare perhaps a polite email - ignoring is pretty damn rude people. However, a couple of weeks later, I got a call from Sony asking whether I was still interested in doing the internship. God fucking damn it. The internship sounded so fucking cool, it was broken into three different sections which would have given me a good overview of working within the Sony London team, and I was particularly interested in getting a chance to work with PlayStationVR. Unfortunately, this call came at a point where I had just been sure of what I wanted to do with myself. I didn't know whether I wanted to go into AAA, where there's job security (OK well actually that's no longer such a strong case) but almost certainly no creative freedom, or whether to go into a smaller, indie company where I have input, but at the same time it would be really risky. My boss at Bright Ascension pointed out that they were happy for me to stay on and when I worked out with them a way that I could both work in space and on games, I was sold on that path. And then that Sony call came in. Fuck me was it painful to turn it down. It would have been a fun 3 months for sure, but with no intention of continuing working at Sony, I felt like I would have just taken away a really good opportunity for someone who did want to go into AAA game development.
After they finished their undergraduate, the almighty Iain managed to swing some space near the MProfs for the Pixel Blimp guys to do more work. They'd made a game in another game jam which they were working on to try to release because they were trying to get into the Microsoft Ventures program. They got in and invited me along but fuck that. The risk was so high and after those terrible first few months of my Master with no money, I could not risk that again. We'd also worked further on a game we made during a game jam (as ever) and managed to get a stand at that year's Dare Indiefest. Each year the MProf students also have a stand, but as I learnt it's not a given, the producers are supposed to organise that. Fortunately we did end up getting a stand. We also had two PS4s to show our game off. Having two stands was pretty awesome, although crazy tiring. That Dare Indiefest was the best one to date, it was so busy and there were people worth speaking to from the industry.
Dare for this year changed. Instead of being 9 weeks of (paid) development from scratch for teams, you're able to "continue" working on a game that's been in development and showcase it at Dare Protoplay. I'd written off Dare the second time I failed to get in, as I new I'd never have the time during my masters. You can however enter a year after you finished your studies and with this new model, I could work on my game jam game and also do it while still being at work. So I applied, not really thinking I'd get in - it would only be myself and another artist.
Around this time, I'd also applied for a "Space Studies Program" run by the International Space University. The program is ~9 weeks long and covers a broad overview of the space sector, from Orbital dynamics and Space Life Sciences to Space Law and Policy. I was and continue to be very conscious of my lack of background in engineering, especially for space. It means I'm constantly fascinated with new things that I come across at work that appear trivial to my colleagues, but it also leaves me feeling very inadequate. So I applied hoping to get a better understanding of space. I didn't expect to get into either SSP or Dare. And got into both. SSP ran from 6th June - 8th August (and was in Athens, OH) and Dare was 13th - 16th August... "Oh fuck" I thought. SSP was intense, with days usually being non-stop from 8am til 11pm. Finding time to organise our Dare entry along with the time difference was... an interesting experience. Somehow we managed it and I was really happy with how it ended up, although I was working on the assumption that I somehow had an entire week and a bit after getting back from Ohio. Instead, I had to do alot of work while travelling back home and when I got back home. From waking at 6am EST on Saturday to 4pm GMT on Sunday, I didn't sleep and was mostly working on the game. At 4pm I decided I should maybe at least nap. I had a 4 hour kip and when I got up and turned on my Windows 8 laptop, it blue screened. Fuck. I had no back up of the Dare game. I had no backup of another game from a game jam that I hosted in Ohio. I had no backup of the pictures that I'd taken during my 9 weeks in fucking Athens. Also, holy shit is the Windows 8 blue screen the worst. Fucking smiley faces and vague as fuck messages only served to enrage me further. By some miracle I managed to get my files off my laptop before I had to reformat it. I forget every time how tedious setting up all your damn programs is.
So we managed to have something decent for Dare, although as I predicted, we tweaked it each night based on feedback. Also as predicted, through knowing people from teams every year for about 4 years, Dare was atrociously organised. It was only during the competition I realised what a missed opportunity it was being able to work besides the different teams for 9 weeks. There were a few nights organised to try to network with each other, but it still wasn't as tight nit as I would have liked. When we were set up, it was immediately apparent, we weren't going to get a BAFTA, almost all of the games were amazing. Being conservative, there were 6 other games worthy of a BAFTA nomination besides our own. Not one to build unrealistic hopes, I turned my hopes to the audience award. People loved our game. I quickly through together a highscore board application which allowed us to add an additional competitive incentive. Although I discovered that our game was so strongly cooperative, that this only influenced a handful of people, all male. The majority of people just loved playing the game, the experience. Which is actually pretty fucking awesome.
Sadly, we lost out on the audience award, and as expected, we didn't get into the top 3 for the BAFTA nomination.
Oh, I'm just going to leave this here for future reference if ever I want to get the damn song stuck in my head again.
Space. This site is heavily focused on my games development, but this is a catch up blog on what I've been up to so how can I not talk about Space.
The SSP actually didn't end up being what I wanted it to be. I didn't learn really anything about engineering as I had hoped. What I did learn though was that I already had a pretty good breadth of knowledge on space. All my hobbyist read ups apparently put me above basic knowledge of space. I also got to do some really really fucking cool shit.
The SSP takes place in different parts of the world each year. At first I was upset about it being in Ohio, compared to more exotic locations in the past. However it ended up working to my advantage, because Ohio has spawned a lot of astronauts and so I got to meet a lot of astronauts. Actually so many that I stopped being nearly as buzzed and was able to instead focus on getting their personal experience beyond simply "Oh my God tell me what the Earth looks like". It also meant that we got to build bigger rockets that go much higher than you're allowed to in other parts of the world. And when they gave us a requirement to build a big rocket, my team delivered, making the biggest rocket at over 1.5 metres. We used F rated engines, but I regret not pushed to order G rated ones as our rocket ended up going only half the required height (still over 500ft). We had to try to get an egg safely back to Earth. We would've succeeded had there not also been a requirement that the egg touched a brick. Our egg came back untouched bar that single contact point. Fortunately it didn't end up being as upsetting as I had feared, because fuck me it was cool. My team's rocket was the black and white P-2 rocket, after the V-2 rocket, and thankfully was one of the ones with a softer landing.
We also got to get together into teams and control a rover that was over in Canada. We drove it around a mockup of Mars to try to visit various sites of interests, and were the only team that managed to make it to all of the sites. I was on the sensors, keeping an eye on the IR camera and controlling the LIDAR sensor. Holy fuck it was awesome. We were simulating our control group being in orbit around Mars causing a few second delay on controlling the rover. We then had an 8 minute delay to ground back on "Earth".
Feeling like I had to prove my background in games wasn't so bad compared to all the astrophysicists and rocket scientists surrounding me, I decided it would be a good idea to host a game jam during the program. I made a game in 10 minutes during a 15 minute talk to try to convince people, who likely had no idea about game development, how easy it could be. SSP was really busy and so there were only a handful who actually showed up and only two managed to make it to the jam. This bummed me out slightly, until I got to see what the two had made. These two had no prior experience making games and what they made was amazing, one made a rover game while another made a two player shooter game. Even more humbling was the fact they were so inspired that they went on to spend a week making a game to simulate the possibilities for using VR for training astronauts. I was genuinely touched and it felt amazing to have inspired people like that.
What else did I do...
Oh I got to go to Belgium and buy 3kg of chocolate, that was pretty fucking sweet. My boss approached me asking anxiously whether I'd like to go to Belgium for work, like he was asking whether I'd like to go scribe for Donald Trump for a month; how was there every any question?
I also got to do some client work. The company that I'd worked with during second semester approached me in the following semester for extra work as they liked working with me - which was pretty awesome.
I know that I gave them a pretty sweet and cheap deal, but asking for the money that I did still made me uncomfortable. I had to keep reminding myself of what I was worth after 5 years of university and the experience I've gained alongside that, compared to say, some spotty kid at McDonalds. But even with that logic, I'd calculate the cost and be like "woah shit, I can't ask for that much.. can I?"
Still, I got my taste of working with a client, although they were a lot more welcome to altering their vision based on feedback than I had expected, and a lot more I suspect most clients would budge. Still, working on a game for a client alongside working on satellites was just too exhausting. The client work allowed me to easily fund things like A MAZE, but I'm just going to have to look at other options if I want to continue doing those sorts of things.
Another speaker who brought me to the brink of tears was Christos Reid. Christos suffers quite severely from OCD. His talk offered an interesting perspective on games and helped answer some questions about games that I hadn't even realised that I needed answering. As someone who suffered with depression almost none stop, it felt like a very personal talk and it was really inspirational how he hasn't let his disorder prevent him from doing what he wants to do.
I suppose I should note what actually happened with my Postgraduate degree...
Well second semester continued presenting me with an overbearing amount of work. However I was happy with what I ended up making by the end of it. My Podracing game was... well as good as I could manage when it wasn't my primary focus. I would've liked to have had it more like a game and less like a tech-demo, as the other racers simply bomb it full speed to the end of the try without trying to do anything particularly impressive. The second semester game actually ended up being a lot better than I had imagined that it would end up. I also created a wee platformer game which reminded me for the 1000th time that platformers are not as straight forward as I keep thinking that they are.
Did I talk about Microsoft imagine cup? I think that was April 2014. Alongside my numerous Uni projects and my part time job writing software for nanosatellites (because that clearly wasn't enough to take onboard) I continued working on projects with the Pixel Blimp guys. As I probably mentioned in previous blogs, I'd continued doing various jams with them and on top of that we managed to get into the Microsoft Imagine Cup where we were competing for a single national spot to compete in the world competition. As a quick run down of the Imagine Cup, there are 3 sections: Games, Innovation and World Citizenship... Games are fucking awesome, but it's really difficult to compete for the top spot through justifying good of our game, Wee Paper Planes, against the likes of software which can detect possible cancerous moles or platforms to help connect developing countries. Naturally we were instead shooting to win the Games section of the nationals. And we did it. Although being brutally honest as I always am, the games side didn't present much competition. I was genuinely shocked and appalled at the level of quality that we were competing against. There was only one exception, I forget the name of the game (sorry!) but it was really fun and really well polished, against those guys I was nervous. Fortunately, we had a pretty solid (for inexperienced students) pitch. As it happens, Abertay managed to send a few teams down the following year and they all looked much more up to standard. We had a huge helping hand getting organised and the likes for Imagine Cup from both Abertay's Iain Donald and also Microsoft's Lee Scott, I've no doubt they similarly helped guide the teams from the following year. While we weren't the overall winners of the Imagine Cup, we did end up being the team that went along and got drunk with the Microsoft execs. I believe we were the only team from Scotland, and so perhaps it was important for us to uphold the stereotype.
Have I blogged about Search for a Star? I don't think so, but basically I got in to the second stage this year. Sadly it was sponsored by Marmalade so naturally the coding test required working through what was broken in a build using Marmalade and to then add features. Ugh. Actually I was pretty happy with what I ended up with. You could apparently export to Android but wow fuck that. After using Unity for so long, it would be like shaving with broken glass.
I didn't hear anything further so I figured I didn't manage to get through to the final stage. Like I heard nothing back. From anyone. It was actually quite a waste of my time, plus unnecessary stress of having to use bloody Marmalade again.
Third semester came as more of a blessing, instead of however many different things I was trying to balance in the previous two, I only mainly had to focus on our third game which ended up being a "port" of a semester two game from PC to PS4. That'd be fine except for the fact we had to use that damned PhyreEngine. The game was functionally simple, so there was very little porting and more recreating in a different engine. Foolishly I'd highlighted my love for graphics programming and so that was the work load sectioned off for me. While we were working in the PhyreEngine, we did at least have the most capable programmers of the masters so fortunately we managed. What we pulled off was actually way better than I expected. I hadn't expected to end up with something that I could be happy to show to people. Look at it. Also shit. Looks like I still need to write up what I did for that. Probably partially good as there might be less heated angry rants about the team now there's been like a year to calm down. Although I'll be damned if I remember everything, my memory is pretty poor.
During the final semester, I got an email sent to a load of people from the lecturer who is basically Abertay's Sony contact. It detailed a pretty awesome internship and at this point I didn't know what I wanted to do. Unfortunately it said that it would start at a time when I would still be doing my Masters, I checked with the lecturer and he said I should not go for it. Originally I went with this, but then I thought "wait what, fuck that". I got a job working on fucking satellites because my thought process was "I won't be in any worse of a position for applying for it". So I went for it. I got an interview and popped down to their London Studio. I did a code test which apparently they do for any Sony programming interview. "Oh shit" I thought. Actually I didn't do too bad, getting most of it correct with only a few wrong answers including for a question asking what the contents of a memory dump represented. It was apparently an intentional curve ball and did it's job of looking scary as shit to me. However when I was told it represented an identity matrix, it was suddenly clear to see. Another thing I tripped up on that I should have known better was writing to a pointer which hadn't had any memory allocated to it, I'd been distracted by another part of the code.
As well as a code test, they did an interview asking about the various things I'd gotten up to and the there was a third part where they asked me to talk through designing a game.
I didn't hear back from Sony so assumed that I hadn't gotten through, until I got a call which said I was "third in line". They said that I did very well but there were two people who were really good. The internship was to take on two people, so the cynical side of me felt like this was just something they were saying to "be nice". Although it would be a peculiar thing to do when they didn't need to say anything at all, bare perhaps a polite email - ignoring is pretty damn rude people. However, a couple of weeks later, I got a call from Sony asking whether I was still interested in doing the internship. God fucking damn it. The internship sounded so fucking cool, it was broken into three different sections which would have given me a good overview of working within the Sony London team, and I was particularly interested in getting a chance to work with PlayStationVR. Unfortunately, this call came at a point where I had just been sure of what I wanted to do with myself. I didn't know whether I wanted to go into AAA, where there's job security (OK well actually that's no longer such a strong case) but almost certainly no creative freedom, or whether to go into a smaller, indie company where I have input, but at the same time it would be really risky. My boss at Bright Ascension pointed out that they were happy for me to stay on and when I worked out with them a way that I could both work in space and on games, I was sold on that path. And then that Sony call came in. Fuck me was it painful to turn it down. It would have been a fun 3 months for sure, but with no intention of continuing working at Sony, I felt like I would have just taken away a really good opportunity for someone who did want to go into AAA game development.
After they finished their undergraduate, the almighty Iain managed to swing some space near the MProfs for the Pixel Blimp guys to do more work. They'd made a game in another game jam which they were working on to try to release because they were trying to get into the Microsoft Ventures program. They got in and invited me along but fuck that. The risk was so high and after those terrible first few months of my Master with no money, I could not risk that again. We'd also worked further on a game we made during a game jam (as ever) and managed to get a stand at that year's Dare Indiefest. Each year the MProf students also have a stand, but as I learnt it's not a given, the producers are supposed to organise that. Fortunately we did end up getting a stand. We also had two PS4s to show our game off. Having two stands was pretty awesome, although crazy tiring. That Dare Indiefest was the best one to date, it was so busy and there were people worth speaking to from the industry.
Dare for this year changed. Instead of being 9 weeks of (paid) development from scratch for teams, you're able to "continue" working on a game that's been in development and showcase it at Dare Protoplay. I'd written off Dare the second time I failed to get in, as I new I'd never have the time during my masters. You can however enter a year after you finished your studies and with this new model, I could work on my game jam game and also do it while still being at work. So I applied, not really thinking I'd get in - it would only be myself and another artist.
Around this time, I'd also applied for a "Space Studies Program" run by the International Space University. The program is ~9 weeks long and covers a broad overview of the space sector, from Orbital dynamics and Space Life Sciences to Space Law and Policy. I was and continue to be very conscious of my lack of background in engineering, especially for space. It means I'm constantly fascinated with new things that I come across at work that appear trivial to my colleagues, but it also leaves me feeling very inadequate. So I applied hoping to get a better understanding of space. I didn't expect to get into either SSP or Dare. And got into both. SSP ran from 6th June - 8th August (and was in Athens, OH) and Dare was 13th - 16th August... "Oh fuck" I thought. SSP was intense, with days usually being non-stop from 8am til 11pm. Finding time to organise our Dare entry along with the time difference was... an interesting experience. Somehow we managed it and I was really happy with how it ended up, although I was working on the assumption that I somehow had an entire week and a bit after getting back from Ohio. Instead, I had to do alot of work while travelling back home and when I got back home. From waking at 6am EST on Saturday to 4pm GMT on Sunday, I didn't sleep and was mostly working on the game. At 4pm I decided I should maybe at least nap. I had a 4 hour kip and when I got up and turned on my Windows 8 laptop, it blue screened. Fuck. I had no back up of the Dare game. I had no backup of another game from a game jam that I hosted in Ohio. I had no backup of the pictures that I'd taken during my 9 weeks in fucking Athens. Also, holy shit is the Windows 8 blue screen the worst. Fucking smiley faces and vague as fuck messages only served to enrage me further. By some miracle I managed to get my files off my laptop before I had to reformat it. I forget every time how tedious setting up all your damn programs is.
So we managed to have something decent for Dare, although as I predicted, we tweaked it each night based on feedback. Also as predicted, through knowing people from teams every year for about 4 years, Dare was atrociously organised. It was only during the competition I realised what a missed opportunity it was being able to work besides the different teams for 9 weeks. There were a few nights organised to try to network with each other, but it still wasn't as tight nit as I would have liked. When we were set up, it was immediately apparent, we weren't going to get a BAFTA, almost all of the games were amazing. Being conservative, there were 6 other games worthy of a BAFTA nomination besides our own. Not one to build unrealistic hopes, I turned my hopes to the audience award. People loved our game. I quickly through together a highscore board application which allowed us to add an additional competitive incentive. Although I discovered that our game was so strongly cooperative, that this only influenced a handful of people, all male. The majority of people just loved playing the game, the experience. Which is actually pretty fucking awesome.
Sadly, we lost out on the audience award, and as expected, we didn't get into the top 3 for the BAFTA nomination.
Oh, I'm just going to leave this here for future reference if ever I want to get the damn song stuck in my head again.
Space. This site is heavily focused on my games development, but this is a catch up blog on what I've been up to so how can I not talk about Space.
The SSP actually didn't end up being what I wanted it to be. I didn't learn really anything about engineering as I had hoped. What I did learn though was that I already had a pretty good breadth of knowledge on space. All my hobbyist read ups apparently put me above basic knowledge of space. I also got to do some really really fucking cool shit.
The SSP takes place in different parts of the world each year. At first I was upset about it being in Ohio, compared to more exotic locations in the past. However it ended up working to my advantage, because Ohio has spawned a lot of astronauts and so I got to meet a lot of astronauts. Actually so many that I stopped being nearly as buzzed and was able to instead focus on getting their personal experience beyond simply "Oh my God tell me what the Earth looks like". It also meant that we got to build bigger rockets that go much higher than you're allowed to in other parts of the world. And when they gave us a requirement to build a big rocket, my team delivered, making the biggest rocket at over 1.5 metres. We used F rated engines, but I regret not pushed to order G rated ones as our rocket ended up going only half the required height (still over 500ft). We had to try to get an egg safely back to Earth. We would've succeeded had there not also been a requirement that the egg touched a brick. Our egg came back untouched bar that single contact point. Fortunately it didn't end up being as upsetting as I had feared, because fuck me it was cool. My team's rocket was the black and white P-2 rocket, after the V-2 rocket, and thankfully was one of the ones with a softer landing.
We also got to get together into teams and control a rover that was over in Canada. We drove it around a mockup of Mars to try to visit various sites of interests, and were the only team that managed to make it to all of the sites. I was on the sensors, keeping an eye on the IR camera and controlling the LIDAR sensor. Holy fuck it was awesome. We were simulating our control group being in orbit around Mars causing a few second delay on controlling the rover. We then had an 8 minute delay to ground back on "Earth".
Feeling like I had to prove my background in games wasn't so bad compared to all the astrophysicists and rocket scientists surrounding me, I decided it would be a good idea to host a game jam during the program. I made a game in 10 minutes during a 15 minute talk to try to convince people, who likely had no idea about game development, how easy it could be. SSP was really busy and so there were only a handful who actually showed up and only two managed to make it to the jam. This bummed me out slightly, until I got to see what the two had made. These two had no prior experience making games and what they made was amazing, one made a rover game while another made a two player shooter game. Even more humbling was the fact they were so inspired that they went on to spend a week making a game to simulate the possibilities for using VR for training astronauts. I was genuinely touched and it felt amazing to have inspired people like that.
What else did I do...
Oh I got to go to Belgium and buy 3kg of chocolate, that was pretty fucking sweet. My boss approached me asking anxiously whether I'd like to go to Belgium for work, like he was asking whether I'd like to go scribe for Donald Trump for a month; how was there every any question?
I also got to do some client work. The company that I'd worked with during second semester approached me in the following semester for extra work as they liked working with me - which was pretty awesome.
I know that I gave them a pretty sweet and cheap deal, but asking for the money that I did still made me uncomfortable. I had to keep reminding myself of what I was worth after 5 years of university and the experience I've gained alongside that, compared to say, some spotty kid at McDonalds. But even with that logic, I'd calculate the cost and be like "woah shit, I can't ask for that much.. can I?"
Still, I got my taste of working with a client, although they were a lot more welcome to altering their vision based on feedback than I had expected, and a lot more I suspect most clients would budge. Still, working on a game for a client alongside working on satellites was just too exhausting. The client work allowed me to easily fund things like A MAZE, but I'm just going to have to look at other options if I want to continue doing those sorts of things.
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