Since my last post, way back when, there have been quite a few developments.
First off, my Ludum Dare results came back.
Sadly, while I was happier with the resulting game, the results were lower this time than my last submission:
Coolness 79% (up 11% from #23)
#466 Humor 2.40 (down 0.89 from #23)
#847 Theme 2.83 (down 0.47 from #23)
#890 Fun 2.50 (down 0.03 from #23)
#923 Audio 1.50 (There was 0 audio in the games so…)
#951 Mood 2.16 (down 0.52 from #23)
#994 Innovation 2.30 (down 0.51 from #23)
#1016 Graphics 2.10 (down 0.12 from #23)
#1068 Overall 2.43 (down 0.18 from #23)
First off, my Ludum Dare results came back.
Sadly, while I was happier with the resulting game, the results were lower this time than my last submission:
Coolness 79% (up 11% from #23)
#466 Humor 2.40 (down 0.89 from #23)
#847 Theme 2.83 (down 0.47 from #23)
#890 Fun 2.50 (down 0.03 from #23)
#923 Audio 1.50 (There was 0 audio in the games so…)
#951 Mood 2.16 (down 0.52 from #23)
#994 Innovation 2.30 (down 0.51 from #23)
#1016 Graphics 2.10 (down 0.12 from #23)
#1068 Overall 2.43 (down 0.18 from #23)
Last time there were 1402, this time 2213. So landing in the top 25% for humour, top 40% for Theme and Fun, and the top 50% for the rest of the categories so from that I guess I should be pleased, but then there’s no getting away from the fact that my scores were 100% < 3 out of 5. Which is a failure in my mind.
Ludum Dare #28 is coming up in < a month’s time. With the recent release of Unity’s 2D tools, I imagine that will cover the majority of submissions. Which is understandable, I’d certainly do the same thing; it’s a great engine for rapid prototyping, but it does mean there are less submissions that test the programming abilities of the people taking part, which is one of the main parts of the competitions. The games are less impressive if the majority of the leg work has been taken care for you. With this game I had to devise my own methods for switching between games, having a menu etc. In unity, that’s all there already. It could mean more tweaked games are produced but it hides the true display of skill, which would be a shame. I however, won’t be participating as I imagine that I’ll be too buried under with work.
In the time before starting university, I had a lot of spare time. I decided I actually would like to carry on working on Wee Paper Planes. So I informed the team, if they wanted more work to be done I was able to do it. I got little to no response. I asked for the most up to date build to be uploaded so I could do work on it and that took forever. I was annoyed at how little communication there was. I started my masters course (which I’ll get to later) and so had no time to spend on WPP. Later I get an email from Iain saying Tiga are accepting submissions for the student category of their award ceremony. I look at the terms and conditions and sigh, the game needs to have either been released or be expected to release by the end of November. There was no way that was happening, but suddenly the team were speaking again, “lets apply!” they cried. I pointed them in the direction of the T&Cs and they started discussing releasing a minimal version. I annoyingly pointed out how I couldn’t work on it, as I’d told them plenty of times, and they suggested getting other coders in. I was really annoyed, but it eventual fell that they weren’t going to release it and so nothing else was said on the matter of submitting the game.
A month later I receive news that our game had been nominated for the award. What the fuck I asked the designer who I knew had applied. It was last minute apparently (the “goto” excuse on their part) and they decided to go for it anyway. I of course wasn’t brought in on the decision, but that’s only because it was last minute…
I knew from my mate who had received a Tiga award that they offer tickets for the nominees to go down to the ceremony. I awaited, foolishly, for such a notion to be brought up to the team. Nothing of the sort was mentioned. I then find out, on the day of the ceremony, that the two designers have gone down to the ceremony. They never decided to tell the rest of the team. When they came back up, the reason they never told me was because it was… Last minute. Oh fucking aye. I was really annoyed at them, their communication is unnecessarily terrible. Regardless, the outcome was that we won the award. This is certainly great, having a game that I worked on win a recognisable award is amazing to have on my CV. However, if we don’t release the game then we void the T&Cs and have a mark on our professionalism. I pointed this out and they just didn’t seem to care.
Later, I found out, from a different member of the team (not the actual lead), that they were planning on working on it to get it to release asap. They’re actually taking the piss. There is no justifiable reason to keep me out on such a decision. Even if they’re planning on dropping me an bringing in other programmers, they should at least have the decency to let me know instead of going behind my back and then stabbing me.
Going back to mid-September, I started my Masters of Professional Practice in Games Development. I’d so far been unsuccessful in getting a job. Something I, perhaps arrogantly, hadn’t anticipated. This was quite stressing as my budget was quite tight, I had worked out based on having a job that I would be fine to participate in the course. Being unemployed however, created a large flaw in my plan. For the next 2 months, I would be living on the bare minimum, receiving at best “thanks but no thanks” emails from jobs I’d applied for.
Mixed in with this stress, the course itself turned out to be much more difficult than I had thought. I’m not an idiot, I knew it was going to be a tough 52 weeks. I tried to prepare myself for a grueling 12 months work, but it still wasn’t enough. I learnt in the first week of how we would be using marmalade for our semester 1 game and then either UDK or PhyreEngine for the other two semesters. Not news I wished to receive. I had no experience with Marmalade, all that I knew of it was the horror stories from 3rd year of the endless issues the coders faced. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the threat of my own 3rd year nightmares - PhyreEngine - was unnerving. It’s been 2 years since, but from talking to MProf students of the previous year, it’s not got any better. Starting on Marmalade, I quickly learnt for myself just what a horrible clusterfuck of a framework it is. It tries to provide a platform to create games for the ridiculously fragmented smartphone market. However it’s convoluted and quite involved. To make matters worse, at the time of starting, the documentation available was 5 years out of date and even that was terribly put together. There was next to no help online bar some equally out-dated tutorials. From these bare parts I was able to start putting together test applications. I had to test what I could do as soon as possible. I knew Marmalade could handly 3D so tried that first. However I hit a brick wall with an error that I couldn’t solve, I asked around the other coders in MProf to see if they had similar issues. All of them were either using the 2D API or the provided example game engine (which was terrible). I decided to drop 3D, it would have only added to the work load in the long run. Alongside learning the 2D API, I also was learning Box2D, which was euphoric in comparison to Marmalade.
Throughout the next couple of months, I continued to fail to get a job and the work load at uni kept increasing. I was getting unbelievably stressed out. I was approaching the point of no return, where I just simply would not be able to afford the heavy tuition fees and living expenses. Iain emailed me to pass on an application to a company in Dundee that deals with satellites. That’s cool I thought, I read through the requirements and was dismayed, almost all the shit they used I hadn’t touched. They did say however, that they weren’t expecting people to know it all, they just wanted good programmers. Well. “Good programmers” is a subjective term… But even still I guessed I wouldn’t be good enough to work on embedded systems for fucking satellites. I thought about how I’d applied to bloody McDonalds, the lowest of the low, and figured, what do I have left to lose? So I applied. One of the items mentioned in the application was Unity, so naturally, I told them about my time with unity and Wee Paper Planes.
It seemed to do the trick, they asked me in for an interview. It so happened that the interview day was the same as the Tiga award ceremony and so I wouldn’t have been able to go, but that didn’t detract from my annoyance about not being asked. In the interview, I talked. I talked a lot. Perhaps too much, but nerves got the better of me. I found I wanted the job so fucking bad, perhaps to prove I was more capable than I gave myself credit for. I talked about myself and what I’d done, I explained my misunderstand of the “Unity” software to which they were referring to; In preparation for the interview, I’d looked at all the software they mentioned. Unity had stood out as an odd thing to include amongst everything else, but I figured it was down to it being easy and quick to get something up and running. One of the other items was CMock. I looked at this and came across “Unity”. A unit tester. Fortunately, this misunderstanding drew a humorous tone with the 2 interviewers. The interview went on for over an hour and I could barely speak afterwards. I’d definitely done as good of a job as I felt I could. I left immediately feeling good but that soon drained as I considered that I wasn’t the only interviewee. There are so many impressive coders at Abertay, and I imagine equally so at Dundee Uni, so what chance did I have?
Well a pretty good chance it turned out. Not 45 minutes after the interview did I receive an email telling me I got the job (and then a few hours later I got a Tiga award, a good day in my books). I couldn’t believe it, all the stress was broken out of and I felt fucking amazing. I learnt later that I was right in my assumption that there were more capable coders who applied for the job, however one of the interviewers would be working in the Dundee office and wanted someone they could work with. The more capable guy gave the impression he’d go off and do things his own way with no communication. So I guess not being a know it all worked in my favour.
I probably can’t talk about the specifics of my work at Bright Ascensions, but what I can say is that it is amazing so far. Hard, no doubt, I have to learn a lot in a short amount of time, but the idea that code I make is going to end up in space is an amazing motivator. I still cannot believe the turn around in my luck. I’ve gone from stuggling to find a minimum wage job doing some shitty work that would’ve probably made me suicidal to a rather well paid job, that will be amazing for my CV (working on embedded systems, rapidly learning new tech, actually having to take on a good coding standard, the list goes on) and to top it all off, I’ll have code in space. I mean fuck. I love space. Space is me absolute favourite thing to think about. After perhaps chocolate and kittens. I have now false hopes about making it into space; it’s unbelievably unlikely. But getting something I created into space? That’s the next best thing, right? I could look up to the sky and know something I did is operating up there. It’s a thought that’s been assured by my colleague but is still too hard to believe.
There’s no doubt that the amount of stress in my life hasn’t decreased, in fact it will more than likely continue increasing to health declining amounts, but no much more worse than the inevitable health decline brought on by my chocolate intake. The difference is the type of stress. I was not coping well over the last few months because I knew I was unstable. I had no control over how my life was going. I’m organised, I’m a planner. I plan everything. I’m uncomfortable with being spontaneous, but I plan so effectively that it can sometimes appear spontaneous. Not being able to control how badly my situation was spiraling out of control was not a good place for me to be in. Having a fuck tonne of work to do? Fine. I actually partially enjoy that sort of stress, it’s good to have things to do. But either way, I can control the work. I know what the work is so I can adapt the plan to what needs to be done.
One final event that I should probably document is the Tiga game hack that I participated in. This was a mere 24 hours, but I was up for it. I decided I would use Unity instead of Gosu, so I wouldn’t have to lug my laptop to Uni. Unfortunately, the hack fell on the weekend of the alpha deadline for my masters semester 1 game, as well as when I had a mid-term exam for maths, as well as the week I started my new job. Needless to say but it was quite hectic. It turned out there was noone available that I wished to form a team with and so I went it alone. I realised, perhaps a little late, that I had no idea how I was going to do the sprite animation. Shit. Fortunately, a few days ago was when Unity added their 2D functionality. Not so fortunate was that this was useless to me working on the Uni computers where the Unity installed was a good 3 builds old. The theme was childhood. Immediately, my thought was the ground is lava. Who didn’t play that as a kid? However I quickly decided I’d need to run home and get my laptop and put the most recent Unity on it. I was annoyed because by this point I’d wasted a good couple of hours. On my way out, it happened that Pixel Blimp, with whom I made Wee Paper Planes, had managed a later entrance. The tickets sold out quickly so a lot of people didn’t manage to make it in. With them now in however, I was open to join their team. Fuck it, I thought, we can make something more impressive in a team. Their idea was “Orbital defence” where you simply orbit a planet and fire at oncoming asteroids. That’s ok but where’s the theme. They had the shooter as a kid in a cardboard ship, but that wasn’t good enough. I provided the back story where the kid is watching TV and on it is a talk about a meteor shower (their’s plenty to choose from) and the kid interprets this, with his vivid imagination, that it’s actually earth being in danger, and so he gets into his cardboard ship and protects the earth. As with WPP, the designer had a very specific control scheme in mind. You click the left side of the screen to rotate counter-clockwise, and click right to rotate clockwise and then hold both to fire. This meant that you couldn’t move and shoot but the team went with it anyway.
The team comprised of said designer, myself, another coder, the audio guy from WPP, an artist and the other designer from WPP helping out with the art. The latter could only help out for a couple of hours as he had prior arrangements. With me joining the team, this freed the other coder up to do what he wanted: graphics. He had a shield asset that he’d made and wanted to port over for the mobile platforms. I was fine with that, I wanted to do the gameplay. We all worked pretty much flat out for the rest of the 24 hours. I was surprised how I wasn’t feeling that tired, although we were all definitely tired, when there were disagreements, the fuse was rather short. Fortunately there were no major fall outs. What we ended up with wasn’t completely what was originally planned. But taking into account the tremendously short amount of time available ( I decided I prefer the ol’ 48 hours) I was really pleased with what we created. It is actually really fun, and that’s without having the time to properly playtest and tweak. There were of course bugs, but the game was actually really close to a complete product. As such we’re planning on releasing it after doing a bit more work on it (alongside WPP I guess…) It shouldn’t require too much work to be done to it and we can then release it. If we manage to get both out then, combined with the Tiga, my honours, my (hopefully) masters and the experience I gain from my part time work, I would hope I’m quite employable.
So to conclude, because I guess this post is long enough to warrant it, I’ve been incredibly busy and stressed, but after a rather dark and gloomy 2 months, things are starting to look up. I hope that it continues that way
Ludum Dare #28 is coming up in < a month’s time. With the recent release of Unity’s 2D tools, I imagine that will cover the majority of submissions. Which is understandable, I’d certainly do the same thing; it’s a great engine for rapid prototyping, but it does mean there are less submissions that test the programming abilities of the people taking part, which is one of the main parts of the competitions. The games are less impressive if the majority of the leg work has been taken care for you. With this game I had to devise my own methods for switching between games, having a menu etc. In unity, that’s all there already. It could mean more tweaked games are produced but it hides the true display of skill, which would be a shame. I however, won’t be participating as I imagine that I’ll be too buried under with work.
In the time before starting university, I had a lot of spare time. I decided I actually would like to carry on working on Wee Paper Planes. So I informed the team, if they wanted more work to be done I was able to do it. I got little to no response. I asked for the most up to date build to be uploaded so I could do work on it and that took forever. I was annoyed at how little communication there was. I started my masters course (which I’ll get to later) and so had no time to spend on WPP. Later I get an email from Iain saying Tiga are accepting submissions for the student category of their award ceremony. I look at the terms and conditions and sigh, the game needs to have either been released or be expected to release by the end of November. There was no way that was happening, but suddenly the team were speaking again, “lets apply!” they cried. I pointed them in the direction of the T&Cs and they started discussing releasing a minimal version. I annoyingly pointed out how I couldn’t work on it, as I’d told them plenty of times, and they suggested getting other coders in. I was really annoyed, but it eventual fell that they weren’t going to release it and so nothing else was said on the matter of submitting the game.
A month later I receive news that our game had been nominated for the award. What the fuck I asked the designer who I knew had applied. It was last minute apparently (the “goto” excuse on their part) and they decided to go for it anyway. I of course wasn’t brought in on the decision, but that’s only because it was last minute…
I knew from my mate who had received a Tiga award that they offer tickets for the nominees to go down to the ceremony. I awaited, foolishly, for such a notion to be brought up to the team. Nothing of the sort was mentioned. I then find out, on the day of the ceremony, that the two designers have gone down to the ceremony. They never decided to tell the rest of the team. When they came back up, the reason they never told me was because it was… Last minute. Oh fucking aye. I was really annoyed at them, their communication is unnecessarily terrible. Regardless, the outcome was that we won the award. This is certainly great, having a game that I worked on win a recognisable award is amazing to have on my CV. However, if we don’t release the game then we void the T&Cs and have a mark on our professionalism. I pointed this out and they just didn’t seem to care.
Later, I found out, from a different member of the team (not the actual lead), that they were planning on working on it to get it to release asap. They’re actually taking the piss. There is no justifiable reason to keep me out on such a decision. Even if they’re planning on dropping me an bringing in other programmers, they should at least have the decency to let me know instead of going behind my back and then stabbing me.
Going back to mid-September, I started my Masters of Professional Practice in Games Development. I’d so far been unsuccessful in getting a job. Something I, perhaps arrogantly, hadn’t anticipated. This was quite stressing as my budget was quite tight, I had worked out based on having a job that I would be fine to participate in the course. Being unemployed however, created a large flaw in my plan. For the next 2 months, I would be living on the bare minimum, receiving at best “thanks but no thanks” emails from jobs I’d applied for.
Mixed in with this stress, the course itself turned out to be much more difficult than I had thought. I’m not an idiot, I knew it was going to be a tough 52 weeks. I tried to prepare myself for a grueling 12 months work, but it still wasn’t enough. I learnt in the first week of how we would be using marmalade for our semester 1 game and then either UDK or PhyreEngine for the other two semesters. Not news I wished to receive. I had no experience with Marmalade, all that I knew of it was the horror stories from 3rd year of the endless issues the coders faced. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the threat of my own 3rd year nightmares - PhyreEngine - was unnerving. It’s been 2 years since, but from talking to MProf students of the previous year, it’s not got any better. Starting on Marmalade, I quickly learnt for myself just what a horrible clusterfuck of a framework it is. It tries to provide a platform to create games for the ridiculously fragmented smartphone market. However it’s convoluted and quite involved. To make matters worse, at the time of starting, the documentation available was 5 years out of date and even that was terribly put together. There was next to no help online bar some equally out-dated tutorials. From these bare parts I was able to start putting together test applications. I had to test what I could do as soon as possible. I knew Marmalade could handly 3D so tried that first. However I hit a brick wall with an error that I couldn’t solve, I asked around the other coders in MProf to see if they had similar issues. All of them were either using the 2D API or the provided example game engine (which was terrible). I decided to drop 3D, it would have only added to the work load in the long run. Alongside learning the 2D API, I also was learning Box2D, which was euphoric in comparison to Marmalade.
Throughout the next couple of months, I continued to fail to get a job and the work load at uni kept increasing. I was getting unbelievably stressed out. I was approaching the point of no return, where I just simply would not be able to afford the heavy tuition fees and living expenses. Iain emailed me to pass on an application to a company in Dundee that deals with satellites. That’s cool I thought, I read through the requirements and was dismayed, almost all the shit they used I hadn’t touched. They did say however, that they weren’t expecting people to know it all, they just wanted good programmers. Well. “Good programmers” is a subjective term… But even still I guessed I wouldn’t be good enough to work on embedded systems for fucking satellites. I thought about how I’d applied to bloody McDonalds, the lowest of the low, and figured, what do I have left to lose? So I applied. One of the items mentioned in the application was Unity, so naturally, I told them about my time with unity and Wee Paper Planes.
It seemed to do the trick, they asked me in for an interview. It so happened that the interview day was the same as the Tiga award ceremony and so I wouldn’t have been able to go, but that didn’t detract from my annoyance about not being asked. In the interview, I talked. I talked a lot. Perhaps too much, but nerves got the better of me. I found I wanted the job so fucking bad, perhaps to prove I was more capable than I gave myself credit for. I talked about myself and what I’d done, I explained my misunderstand of the “Unity” software to which they were referring to; In preparation for the interview, I’d looked at all the software they mentioned. Unity had stood out as an odd thing to include amongst everything else, but I figured it was down to it being easy and quick to get something up and running. One of the other items was CMock. I looked at this and came across “Unity”. A unit tester. Fortunately, this misunderstanding drew a humorous tone with the 2 interviewers. The interview went on for over an hour and I could barely speak afterwards. I’d definitely done as good of a job as I felt I could. I left immediately feeling good but that soon drained as I considered that I wasn’t the only interviewee. There are so many impressive coders at Abertay, and I imagine equally so at Dundee Uni, so what chance did I have?
Well a pretty good chance it turned out. Not 45 minutes after the interview did I receive an email telling me I got the job (and then a few hours later I got a Tiga award, a good day in my books). I couldn’t believe it, all the stress was broken out of and I felt fucking amazing. I learnt later that I was right in my assumption that there were more capable coders who applied for the job, however one of the interviewers would be working in the Dundee office and wanted someone they could work with. The more capable guy gave the impression he’d go off and do things his own way with no communication. So I guess not being a know it all worked in my favour.
I probably can’t talk about the specifics of my work at Bright Ascensions, but what I can say is that it is amazing so far. Hard, no doubt, I have to learn a lot in a short amount of time, but the idea that code I make is going to end up in space is an amazing motivator. I still cannot believe the turn around in my luck. I’ve gone from stuggling to find a minimum wage job doing some shitty work that would’ve probably made me suicidal to a rather well paid job, that will be amazing for my CV (working on embedded systems, rapidly learning new tech, actually having to take on a good coding standard, the list goes on) and to top it all off, I’ll have code in space. I mean fuck. I love space. Space is me absolute favourite thing to think about. After perhaps chocolate and kittens. I have now false hopes about making it into space; it’s unbelievably unlikely. But getting something I created into space? That’s the next best thing, right? I could look up to the sky and know something I did is operating up there. It’s a thought that’s been assured by my colleague but is still too hard to believe.
There’s no doubt that the amount of stress in my life hasn’t decreased, in fact it will more than likely continue increasing to health declining amounts, but no much more worse than the inevitable health decline brought on by my chocolate intake. The difference is the type of stress. I was not coping well over the last few months because I knew I was unstable. I had no control over how my life was going. I’m organised, I’m a planner. I plan everything. I’m uncomfortable with being spontaneous, but I plan so effectively that it can sometimes appear spontaneous. Not being able to control how badly my situation was spiraling out of control was not a good place for me to be in. Having a fuck tonne of work to do? Fine. I actually partially enjoy that sort of stress, it’s good to have things to do. But either way, I can control the work. I know what the work is so I can adapt the plan to what needs to be done.
One final event that I should probably document is the Tiga game hack that I participated in. This was a mere 24 hours, but I was up for it. I decided I would use Unity instead of Gosu, so I wouldn’t have to lug my laptop to Uni. Unfortunately, the hack fell on the weekend of the alpha deadline for my masters semester 1 game, as well as when I had a mid-term exam for maths, as well as the week I started my new job. Needless to say but it was quite hectic. It turned out there was noone available that I wished to form a team with and so I went it alone. I realised, perhaps a little late, that I had no idea how I was going to do the sprite animation. Shit. Fortunately, a few days ago was when Unity added their 2D functionality. Not so fortunate was that this was useless to me working on the Uni computers where the Unity installed was a good 3 builds old. The theme was childhood. Immediately, my thought was the ground is lava. Who didn’t play that as a kid? However I quickly decided I’d need to run home and get my laptop and put the most recent Unity on it. I was annoyed because by this point I’d wasted a good couple of hours. On my way out, it happened that Pixel Blimp, with whom I made Wee Paper Planes, had managed a later entrance. The tickets sold out quickly so a lot of people didn’t manage to make it in. With them now in however, I was open to join their team. Fuck it, I thought, we can make something more impressive in a team. Their idea was “Orbital defence” where you simply orbit a planet and fire at oncoming asteroids. That’s ok but where’s the theme. They had the shooter as a kid in a cardboard ship, but that wasn’t good enough. I provided the back story where the kid is watching TV and on it is a talk about a meteor shower (their’s plenty to choose from) and the kid interprets this, with his vivid imagination, that it’s actually earth being in danger, and so he gets into his cardboard ship and protects the earth. As with WPP, the designer had a very specific control scheme in mind. You click the left side of the screen to rotate counter-clockwise, and click right to rotate clockwise and then hold both to fire. This meant that you couldn’t move and shoot but the team went with it anyway.
The team comprised of said designer, myself, another coder, the audio guy from WPP, an artist and the other designer from WPP helping out with the art. The latter could only help out for a couple of hours as he had prior arrangements. With me joining the team, this freed the other coder up to do what he wanted: graphics. He had a shield asset that he’d made and wanted to port over for the mobile platforms. I was fine with that, I wanted to do the gameplay. We all worked pretty much flat out for the rest of the 24 hours. I was surprised how I wasn’t feeling that tired, although we were all definitely tired, when there were disagreements, the fuse was rather short. Fortunately there were no major fall outs. What we ended up with wasn’t completely what was originally planned. But taking into account the tremendously short amount of time available ( I decided I prefer the ol’ 48 hours) I was really pleased with what we created. It is actually really fun, and that’s without having the time to properly playtest and tweak. There were of course bugs, but the game was actually really close to a complete product. As such we’re planning on releasing it after doing a bit more work on it (alongside WPP I guess…) It shouldn’t require too much work to be done to it and we can then release it. If we manage to get both out then, combined with the Tiga, my honours, my (hopefully) masters and the experience I gain from my part time work, I would hope I’m quite employable.
So to conclude, because I guess this post is long enough to warrant it, I’ve been incredibly busy and stressed, but after a rather dark and gloomy 2 months, things are starting to look up. I hope that it continues that way
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