RebarCoder.com

Jonathan Rebar, Programmer and Designer

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so I felt obligated to post. So what am i doing now: I am working at Full Sail University as a Lab Specialist for the Graphics pool and also working as a programmer for a company that makes bank software. I am also working on learning XNA 3.0 and trying to find cooler software to work on than stuff for banks. I have recently been obcessed with Starcraft 2 and just got a beta key (finally!) but otherwise I am working hard and trying to keep my girlfriend happy.

I am blogging from inside of Final Presentations at Full Sail University. I know it looks like I fell off the face of the planet for a while but with all the work that had to be done to get Scurvy stable and ready for the public, it has been a lot of 12 hour days, 6 days a week. The entire Wicked Orange team is super excited about the presentation we have today and the game we have produced. Please check out the game website at http://www.scurvygame.com for info about the team and to download the finished game.

Thank you for following my progress this far. I am still looking for employment so if you have a job, I’d like to hear from you at jonathan@rebarcoder.com for whatever you have to say about the site or the game in general. I will still be posting little tips, tricks, tidbits, and research projects so be sure to check back often.

I have been down for the past few days with a bronchial infection.   Oin a brighter note, I have been watching some Leverage with my parents while on this lovely 2 week break but sickness has been the overwhelming determinent on this crazy break.  I leave for Orlando tomorrow for a small vacation with my family to hit up Disney and the surrounding establishments.  Fun Fun.

Before you get any ideas, title is a response to the Sit Down thing.  The fighting going on now is against the bugs in our game moving to our Beta build due in on Monday.  I am rocking out my work to get things into the game as quickly and painlessly as possible.  I want to get this jazz in here as fast as possible.  All in all, I am excited that we are approaching the milestone and terrified that it will be a skin-of-our-teeth turn-in.  On a side note, pending some badness in the build, I should be able to present the beta build for download and public consumption as we move forward to final in the hopes that people will grab it, play it, and respond with some feedback.  I may not be the QA Lead but I am the Gameplay Lead and am looking for input on what doesn’t work for you as a player.  I feel like we are super close to a great product!!

So we went to Final Project presentations today only to have them not shown outside due to rain.  Obviously the staff at Full Sail did not anticipate our resilience to rain and the like.  We have a sit down meeting with our External Producer on the state of our game levels today.  In adding some new functionality to the level terrain (making it more sculpted with collision meshes as opposed to Axis-Aligned Bounding Boxes) we took a little bit of the fun out of our older Level 1.  The main cause, I think, is that it turned into a game with a lot of walking and not so much grappling and swinging. That said, we have been making alterations and tweeks to many of our systems to accommodate this new terrain and we have gotten back a lot of the fun that our original level had.

Part of the problem with iterative design and implementations is that people working on certain mechanics or content can get a little close to the content they have created.  Not wanting to think that the time that they spent was a waste, they want the content to remain even though it may not fit or work properly with the new direction that the project is going in. This resistance can translate into content being in the game the ought not to be just to make it seem as though the work they did contributed.  In actuality what they have done is exposed a way not to do something which can wind up being more valuable in the long run than having the perfect system from the get go.  Sometimes throwing out a week’s work is the best way to push your game forward to better play and content down the road.

Actually I watched season 4 from start to finish on my day off yesterday while playing World of Warcraft and eating Pizza Hut Stuffed Crust Pizza (with mushrooms).  It was rather glorious.  On a side note, my fish are finally working, now I just need to put them into the game and add them to the Lua script loader so we can have multiple schools of fishy goodness.  In case you are curious about my code architecture for such things, I have CFish that make up a CSchool that chase after CFishFood and are contained within a CFishManager.  I know this may sound like a bad lab from AI class but if you can’t have fun with it, what’s the point? 

I also got some great feedback on my website this weekend and would hope that anybody (really everybody) would gimme a best/worst fo your web experience here so that I can continue to make changes and make this the best “I want a job” website around.

So I have the flocking fish kinda-sorta in a workable state but not doing everything I want them to do. I may table them chasing after a specific point for a bit and may just have them go in a straight line through the level to at least show that they work and then polish the snot out of them later. The good news is that the test app does finally work with them all moving in a direction together. I do need them to speed up a bit so they can move with the leader but aside from that, they look to be in a good place for now.

I am now starting work on the Animation Blending for Scurvy. In layman’s, this is basically taking the transitions between say, Scurvy’s run left and idle, and smoothing out the transition between the two so that it looks smooth like something you would see in an animated cartoon. Right now it looks like you just jump to a different page of the “animation flipbook” when Scurvy switches animations. These transitions will be super fast though and they will also disable some controls in my current plan for them. We will see, though, how they eventually get done.

Pray for me friends.

We have finished up our milestone acceptance for our Beta milestone coming up in 2 weeks.  I have a nice bit of work to complete between now and the Monday after next but it is not more than I can handle.  I did our final voice recordings for our title character yesterday with our Sound Engineer.  If their reactions were any indication, they should be pretty funny in game.  This milestone I am finishing up the flocking school of fish for the background of our game (which did not get finished last milestone as I was getting the game to run on our test machine for turn-in), adding the transition states for our animation system, and adding a new tutorial underwater mentor for Scurvy.  This character will be a clam that instructs Scurvy as to what he can do with his seed spitting abilities.  Scurvy looks to be shaping up well and we are excited to see what we can get put together for Beta.  If all goes well, I will likely post that installer into the Projects section so that everyone can try it out and give feedback if you like.

I also just applied for a couple of jobs I found online tonight.  God willing, I will get a positive response from some of them.  I look forward to seeing what happens in the future.  A lot has changed on the site here so be sure to take a look around if you haven’t been here in a while.

Spent most of today cleaning my apartment, getting a haircut and all of that.  All of this in preparation for the resummation of work on my Final Project game, Scurvy the Seaweed Slinger.  We are in our Alpha period now and the time has come to start reworking some of the hacks that we have in place that got our systems working but are not the way that we, ultimately, want them to function.  In the coming weeks not a whole lot will change in the game as far as content except some new models and such.  What will wind up changing dramatically is the gameplay and, as Gameplay Lead, that gets me very excited.  I look forward to seeing the work that comes out of the next two weeks.  Stay informed by checking the blog often for details.

So I am back with the family for Thanksgiving with one of my friends from the other group in our Final Project class, Carl Petty.  We have been eating much turkey and stuffing and such the past few days and have been enjoying some much needed time off.  I am taking this time to update my website and work on my project stuff that I have not had the opportunity to work on for the past few days.  It can be a bit distracting while working at home but I will make do.  Time for more Doctor Who!!!