Nephews, IGFs, Chinas, and Game Jams

By Mike Daly
February 1st, 2009

Trevor

A lot of stuff has happened since December. The first (chronologically speaking) and most important was that my nephew Trevor Long Daly was born. Between myself and my 3 brothers, this is the first child of the new generation; my parents are now grandparents and I'm now and uncle. I hope he will like video games.



Trevor Long Daly


IGF results

Shortly after Trevor was born, they announced the finalists for the 2009 Independent Games Festival. You might recall that I submitted a game called "Connexus". As it turns out, I am not a winner. On the bright side, I didn't really expect to be a winner; I mainly entered so that I had a solid goal motivating me to follow through with the project. I have to decide what to do with Connexus now; I'll probably post it here sometime, but I might go through the additional effort of porting to Xbox and putting it on community games; we'll just have to wait and see. We'll have to wait quite a while to see.



IGF fail


China

My entire family just took a week long family vacation to Shanghai China to Visit my brother and sister-in-law (Dave and Joka) and, of course, Trevor. This was the first time all 6 of us have been together at once since, uh, a long time I think.

In addition to meeting my Nephew and carrying him around on my chest for a while (while he was pooping and crying), there were some interesting things in China. One thing was that we went during the Chinese new year. For the Chinese, I think that new years (which is based off of the lunar calendar, I believe) is the most significant holiday; more significant for them than Christmas is for people in the US. There isn't a central fireworks show (as we are accustomed to on Independence Day) but rather, everybody gets tons of fireworks and sets them off whenever they feel like. On new year's eve and new years day, there was basically continual fireworks going off. As it got close to midnight, you could look out across the city and see fireworks going up from dozens of different locations constantly for hours. There were fireworks bouncing off of our building. It was super awesome. Seeing how much the Chinese love fireworks made me realize how much Americans are pansies about fireworks.

Another interesting thing was that we went to an acrobatics show that was really cool. There was a bunch of stuff in the show that was amazing (in a very literal sense; I was amazed).

Global Game Jam

As soon as I got back from China, I grabbed 4 hours of sleep then dashed off to the Triangle's site for the Global Game Jam. I helped out in organizing the event, so it was unfortunate that I missed the first day. I didn't work on a particular team, but rather moved between teams and pitched in wherever people needed help. I think this worked out well, because it allowed me to address team balance problems without getting tied down.

I think the event worked out great, thanks to the efforts of Mike Lee (the lead organizer). There were a lot of people, the venue was great, and we came up with some really impressive games. I did some coding, such as creating an XML level loader for the two side-scrolling games, and did a little music for one of the games. However, the thing I probably spent the most time on was doing the art for a game called Space Fish. I think it turned out pretty decent:



You should see it in motion



The player


Here's the song that I came up with for the game Space Defenders of the 23rd Century: Tether Main Theme. As usual, you'll probably have to save it to listen through the whole thing, but it's only like 40 seconds long.

I'm busy

This sequence of events was complimented by an ever-increasing amount of stress at work. Leading up to the China trip, I was working a lot of overtime. This was to the point that I was totally unprepared for the trip as well as the Jam that I jumped into immediately after I got back. It was very hectic. Unfortunately, it's probably only going to get worse from here until GDC. I'm probably not going to have any time to work on interesting things in the meantime.

However, Jody and I have already been working on something pretty awesome that's already almost done. Perhaps you will see it next update.

End transmission.

Comments

Short month; short update

By Mike Daly
February 26th, 2009

At the end of my most recent post, I mentioned that we had something fancy up our sleeve for this month's update. Well it turns out that it's not ready (despite being sooooo close) so I'll just keep that in my sleeve until next month which will probably need it worse than this one anyway.

I know I frequently make this excuse, but I don't have much to say because I've been really busy at work lately. However, this time I really mean it! I've been working a lot more than usual and when I get home I either don't have any time to do interesting stuff or I'm so wasted that I don't want to.

Current video games

This makes it hard to play games; a month or two back I was most of the way through Aquaria, Crayon Physics Deluxe, Mega Man 9, and Bioshock. However, I haven't picked up any of them in quite some time. My brother brought home Street Fighter 4 earlier this week and despite my pessimistic curiosity, I haven't even tried it yet. The only game I've set aside any time to play has been Spelunkey. That is mainly because it can be played in small increments without loosing anything if you just drop it and because it's damn addictive. Maybe addictive in a bad way; I'm not getting much out of it the more I play it but I feel compelled to keep playing so that I can try my luck again. It's like gambling or something.



My shameful scores


Pose Mania

The very first day of February I came across a webpage called Pose Maniacs. There is a little application there that shows you a random pose from a pretty large collection and you have 30 seconds to draw it before it switches to another. The idea is you do this for something like 5-10 minutes a day and you'll get a lot better at drawing. I always wish I could spend more time drawing, but it's a hefty time investment and has to compete with my other hobbies. However, I can easily swallow 5 minutes a day if it makes me better so I decided to try it out for a month. I'm pretty proud of myself in that I managed to draw for 5 minutes every single day this month so far. I'll miss tomorrow and Saturday, the last two days of the month, because I'll be headed up to Washinton DC for Tim Lind's batchelor party, so I did three sets today to make the grid complete.

I finally compared what I was drawing at the beginning to what I was drawing at the end and I must say ... I did not get any better. Drawing a whole person in 30 seconds is really hard! You have to either look at the pose or look at what you are drawing but never have time to compare the two so you either end up with one of those crappy blind drawings or like one tenth of a character's outline.

Anyway, to give myself a false sense of accomplishment, I bumped it up to 90 seconds for the last set of the month just to see how it would turn out. Not too bad. I composited all of the pages down to one quarter size; here you go:



At least you can tell they are supposed to be people. Click to see the whole thing.


In conclusion

Happy February people; I hope you enjoyed it more than I did. Next month is GDC and I can't wait for it to be behind me.

Comments

The New Dueling Monkeys! GDC! Shotguns! Lightning! Complaining!

By Mike Daly
March 31st, 2009

March has been incredibly busy for me. I don't think I can even remember all the interesting stuff that has happened but I'll do my best. The first and foremost thing worth mentioning is the new site design. You might have noticed? Well if you haven't noticed (hopefully because you are using TEH RSS TECHNOLOGY) then check out Dueling Monkeys. Jody has done an awesome job of adding a bunch of swanky new features. A few highlights:

  • Collapseable/Expandable posts!
  • Post comments!
  • No more unreadable and/or dead links in the navigation bar!
  • Re-worked gallery!
  • Graphical overhaul (I helped with this part)!
  • Improved news post archive browsing!
  • Updated about page!
  • Random quotes in the page header


So cool!


The part I'm actually most excited about finally unveiling is the totally new games page. Holy crap, it's a chronologically ordered list of most of the games I've worked on over the past several years. Each game even has its own page with detailed descriptions and image galleries!

This was basically the big update that I might have mentioned in the last post or two that we just now got around to making live. I think it's pretty sweet and I'm really happy with it. If you like the new design you can even say so by LEAVING THE FIRST NON-TEST-RELATED COMMENT EVER! If you dont' like the new design, you can still say so by posting a new comment! I'll be happy that you used the new comments for a little while, then I'll find you and beat you up.

I'd love to walk through the individual games on the games page, but I've already got too much to talk about this post so I'll save those for another day. I didn't even remember most of those games until I went through a clean up pass on my hard drive a while back and found a ton of old crap.

And I do mean crap.

Game Developer's Conference

The most recent thing I've done is attend the 2009 Game Developers Conference (GDC). This year was particularly important for my company (Emergent) because it marks the launch of our new game engine - Gamebryo Lightspeed. This is the thing that I've been making the demo of for the past few months. Most of my co-workers were putting in a lot of overtime to try to get us ready for GDC and fortunately, I think the show worked out really well for us.



That's our booth!


As cool as it is to go to GDC, I didn't actually do much other than man the booth all day every day that I was there. I did get to do a little cool stuff here and there, but all in all it was a very tiring GDC in which I didn't learn very much. To be honest, I really wasn't looking forward to it in the days leading up to GDC because I was really exhausted from working so much overtime and I knew that it was just going to be more work. It is actually a huge relief to have GDC behind me, mainly because it definitively marks the end of this absurd crunch that I've been going through the past few weeks.

In any case, I'm still really glad that I got to go. I got some interesting cultural experiences such as walking through the Ternderloin of San Fransisco. I did actually meet and talk to some interesting people. I got to see all the positive reactions to our new engine. The Independent Games Festival booth and awards were awesome, as usual. I probably got to do some other interesting stuff that I've already forgotten. It's all kind of a blur already.

Crunch

I just wanted to dedicate a short section to say that crunch sucks. Working every day of the week and having no free time really sucks. I haven't been doing any social activities; I haven't played any games; I stopped exercising; I bought new underwear to avoid doing laundry; the house was a mess; the yard was a mess; I was a mess. I noticed that my productivity on a 13 to 14 hour day had dropped below that of my typical 8 hour day. I felt like a zombie.

Last Sunday (right after I got back from GDC) was one of the best days I've had in months. Absurdly enough, I spent the whole day doing chores. That is how bad crunch sucks by comparison.

And this was the cause of it; the demo I've been working on. It is called Mangled Metal. I'll probably go into more detail and post more/better screenshots later.



Mangled Metal


Wedding Time

One of the events that I was able to get out of work for was Brandy's wedding. Congratulations Brandy (who almost certainly does not read this webpage)! The wedding was very nice until I was forced to dance. I hate dancing. Not too much to say there, but another aspect of the wedding event was the bachelor party. We went up to DC to hang out with Jason and Eric then a little farther to Baltimore. One of the things we did there was rent shotguns and shoot skeet. I must say that shooting a shotgun at a moving target is fun times. Ironically, while I was doing it, I was thinking to myself "This is just like a real life video game!". There were some other unique experiences on the trip (such as getting tackled) but I'll leave the rest to the imagination.

Lightning Time

A few posts back, I indicated that I had been working on some lightning. As deadlines started looming for the demo, I realized that there was the potential to be able to use the new lightning shader that I have been working on in the demo but that the window for adding it was quickly closing. I threw what I had together and dropped in the game really quickly and the result turned out not that bad. Sadly, we didn't have time to port it to all platforms, so it only showed up on PC which we rarely demoed on. I think the effect turned out to look pretty sharp though.

I haven't taken any screenshots of the effect in-game, so I'll hopefully think to do that in a later post (now that I'm allowed to talk about it). So for now all you get is a crappy little Animated gif that I put together.



Shocking!


As usual, I'll give the requisite "it really looks better in high resolution at 60 fps" complaint. Perhaps sometime later I'll divulge the SUPER SECRET TECHNIQUE I used to make it. Now that I look at it, there are a couple of things about it that bug me; it could use some more polish.

Sleepy Time

Now that I've got GDC behind me, the world feels like it's full of sunshine and rainbows. Hopefully this means that I'll be able to start working on neat things in my spare time again, which means any dear readers of this webpage will have some more interesting things to hear about.

Can't remember anything else. Going to bed.

Comments

DrMuffin
May 1st, 2009 - 11:11 am

"The website nobody visits anymore." Yeah that's true. I never visit. Not even to leave a random comment.

Narf.

DOOMer77
April 8th, 2009 - 01:58 am

Looks nice, good works guys!

Mike Daly
April 3rd, 2009 - 12:13 am

We have comments! I'm so happy!
...
But now I want an RSS feed for comments.

Sam
April 1st, 2009 - 11:43 am

New site looks nice!

Jody
March 31st, 2009 - 11:55 pm

Great news update Mike! Welcome back to the weekends.

Mistakes, more China, more presentations

By Mike Daly
April 20th, 2009

Earlier today I realized that I had made a mistake. A very stupid mistake with expensive and tragic consequences. My employers are sending me to China to help with a sales trip; I'm going to give demonstrations of how to use our new engine Gamebryo LightSpeed. This evening I realized that my flight left this morning. For some reason I had been assuming for weeks that it left tomorrow. That's a big mistake. I frantically tried to make new travel arrangements, but the earliest it is possible to arrive in Beijing at this point is half way through the seminar I'm supposed to be presenting in.

I don't have any excuse for this; if I had just been slightly more dilligent I would have double checked the departure time and everything would be fine. Because I didn't take some tiny bit of effort, the seminar won't work out ideally and I have to go through this added expense (and stress) of making new travel plans. I don't feel good about this; I actually feel physically ill.

Fortunately, there is a technical account manager already in China who can stand in for me, so not all is lost.

China

In other news, I get to go to China; that's pretty cool. I'll have a few days in the middle in Shanghai where I can hang out with my brother Dave and his family. I really thought I would have had more to say about this, but I really can't get over that first bit of stuff I was talking about so I'll just leave it at that.


Here is a screenshot that has nothing to do with what I'm talking about


Triangle Game Conference

The North Carolina Triangle area has put together a conference called the Triangle Game Conference. A friend of mine submitted a proposal that he and I would give a talk on benefits and organization of Game Jams and it got accepted. I get back from China in the morning and I'll be presenting at the conference in the afternoon - it's going to be super crazy!

Independent Game Festival

I forgot to mention this last time, but I recently got some feedback on my game Connexus from the Independent Game Festival judges that reviewed it. here is what it said:

"Promising and conceptually interesting - good luck with this project!" - 2009 Independent Games Festival Judge

Wow. Really? I actually would have been a lot happier not having recieved that feedback. At least then I could have continued under the illusion that the judge put more than 30 seconds worth of thought into my game before passing on it. That vague one sentence description could have applied to any entry in the entire festival.


Here's another out of place screenshot


Games

When I went to the Game Developer's Conference last month, I started playing Advance Wars 2 again - that's a great game. It makes me want to make a strategy game. At home I've been playing Battle for Wesnoth again. It's not nearly as good as Advance Wars 2 but has a lot of content and it's free. Hooray strategy.

Comments

Triangle Game Conference, Taiwan, Mangled Metal, and Gamebryo LightSpeed

By Mike Daly
May 4th, 2009

Last week, Mike Lee and I gave a presentation at the Triangle Game Conference entitled "Jamming with Games". The presentation was divided into 4 sections that explained Game Jams (such as the Triangle Game Jam).

We covered:

  • Definition & History
  • Benefits
  • Best Practices
  • How to organize an event

Overall, I think it went really well. We had decent attendance considering that we were in the last time slot of the conference and it's a subject that most game developers probably don't care much about. I'm supposed to post the slides so that anyone who attended the talk can reference them. Hopefully those people waited a few days before visiting my site (or just visited Mike's instead). Here they are:

Jamming with Games (PDF, 119 KB)

There is a lot of additional context in the speaker notes if you want more. It got me fired up to start work on organizing the 2009 Triangle Game Jam.

China & Taiwan

I just recently got back from China and Taiwan. It was unfortunate that I missed the first seminar, but it wasn't the end of the world (although it felt like it before I left). The main reason I went was that my company (Emergent) wanted an engineer to attend 3 seminars we were holding in Beijing, Shanghai, and Taipei to give live demonstrations of our new engine: Gamebryo LightSpeed. For each demo I would show our sample game Mangled Metal, then show how you can rapidly change the game using the tools and engine features that come with Gamebryo LightSpeed.

Luckily, right in the middle, I had a few days free in Shanghai. I spent that time with Dave, Joka, and young Trevor. That was great; my favorite part of the trip.

The last leg of the trip was in Taipei, Taiwan. At first I wasn't very impressed with Taiwan; every building everywhere you looked was run down and dirty, but the places we stayed were extremely overpriced and I was surrounded by all this elitist high fashion shopping that I'm basically allergic to. However, I got a chance to visit two customer game studios while we were there and that was really cool. Both places were really nice, seemed to have cool people working there, had interesting games, and tons and tons of toys. The seminar was pretty nice too, and since I left directly back to the airport I left with a better impression than I started with.

Mangled Metal

I keep making allusions to Mangled Metal. This is the sample game that demonstrates the use of Gamebryo LightSpeed. Over the past seven months or so, helping create this sample has been my primary job responsibility. Getting to work on a sample is a double edged blade; there are a lot of fun and interesting challenges and it's a great chance to be creative. However, on the other hand, our company doesn't usually work on projects like this so our development process was pretty immature in a lot of ways. This led to a lot of unfortunate headaches, not the least of which was months of crunch to keep the project on schedule. Hopefully we will do better next time, but I'm a little hesitant to want to work on the next sample after this experience.

Anyway, Mangled Metal is a third person action game set in the War Machine universe. The player controls a War Jack - a steam/magic powered metal robot approximately 2~3 meters tall. The warjack walks through a valley/graveyard area pounding on bad guys until he gets to the end where, after pounding all the bad guys, the game abruptly ends.


You are probably getting bored of Mangled Metal screenshots by now


The player can perform light attacks in a combo while moving, make a heavy attack, or a charge attack if running. The player can also cast an area of effect spell. Some of the technology highlights include 3D directional sound, GFx (flash) UI, dynamically destructible environment props, and physics simulation with ragdoll. The combat mechanics, enemy AI, and triggers/events are all driven by scripted behaviors written in Lua.

It is a really useful sample for showing off the new tools in Gamebryo LightSpeed, it's development provided critical guidance for the work that went into the LightSpeed product itself, it gives our customers a good starting point and reference code for starting their own projects, it was larger than any other demo Emergent has done in the past so it stressed our pipeline in good ways, and an early version of the sample formed the basis of our base game sample application. There is a lot of good stuff about it so I guess I should be proud of having done so much work on it.

When the project was first starting out, before the artists had ramped up and gotten something they could show, I created a bunch of placeholder art just to get things running. We actually ended up shipping a bunch of my placeholder art with Gamebryo LightSpeed in our samples. I'm a little entertained by that; I never intended for it to be used as part of the product, but that is a sentiment that we express about a large number of components of the engine.


This is some of my proxy art we ended up shipping


Gamebryo LightSpeed

Gamebryo LightSpeed finally went gold a few days ago. We are now internally working on preparing the final build for distribution to our (rather large number of) evaluators and customers. This marks a huge milestone for our company and yet another accomplishment that I'm glad to have behind me. It seems like there have been a lot of things that I couldn't wait to be over with recently.


Hello, sexy!

Technically, we (Emergent employees) aren't supposed to be discussing this externally because we haven't announced it to our customers yet. Marketing also wants to make sure that everyone sends the right message about the release. We are also supposed to use a different version of the logo. I guess I just feel like being a rebel today.

Comments

Tornados and Comics

By Mike Daly
June 1st, 2009

Earlier this month I spent a weekend at my friend Jewel's river house. The purpose of this event was to see her off as she has now moved to Fiji where she will work for the Peace Corps for the next 27 months.


Good luck Jewel!


Around the same time my older younger brother (brother no. 3) just completed boot camp for the US Air Force.


Good luck Chris!


When I returned home, apparently a tornado had come through the area. There was lots of leaves and pine needles and stuff in the road, but generally no big deal. I didn't think much of it until I noticed that in my back yard some random tree landed on my grill. This is very mysterious; there was no debris this size anywhere else and I don't know of any trees of this type even remotely close to my back yard.


WTF?!


Games I'm playing

I've recently found myself distracted by two great games; Cogs and Defense Grid: The Awakening. Defense grid should be coming to Xbox Live Arcade sometime soon. I should also mention I have an ulterior motive; it uses Gamebryo. They both have free demos; try them out!.


It is really good



Also really good


My younger younger brother (brother no. 4) recently got a DS and picked up Castlevania Order of Ecclesia. I would post a link, but Konami apparently can't make a decent webpage to save their life so it's not worth visiting. Anyway, the game is a lot of fun; I would recommend it. I have run into a few problems though:

  • I played it for a few hours and my eyes are now totally bloodshot (this isn't the game's fault but it still hurts it)
  • There are some mechanics and enemies that make it really frustrating at times
  • The official webpage is terrible

Just in case you were wondering.

New project: Comic Game

I've started work on a new hobby project. I told myself I would finish Orbital first and maybe improve Connexus as well, but a few weekends ago I caved and started anyway.

The idea is simply an interactive comic book; kind of like one of the old choose your own adventure stories but you can do more than just branching. Here is an analogy: If an old-school text adventure is like taking a test, playing comic game is like taking a multiple-choice pop quiz where the score doesn't count towards your grade.


click to see a sample story permutation


Here is another path through the same story:


click to see a sample story permutation


THE END

Comments

Homecoming!

By Mike Daly
July 6th, 2009

The biggest news recently is that after years of toil and dismay, my brother David has finally gotten a VISA for his Wife Joka to live in the US. They should be moving to the states from China sometime this month. It will really be great to get to see Dave more than once every few years. Not to mention that I have a new nephew, Trevor, to play with too. It's very exciting! I can't wait to see you guys!

Europe Surprise!

A few weeks ago, my boss stops by my desk and asks "How would you like to go to Europe?" I said, "Sure; when?" and he said "THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW". The conversation didn't go exactly like that, but that's basically what happened.

The trip was a one week sales trip to Serbia, France, and the UK to talk about my company's game engine: Gamebryo. In some cases, we talked to potential customers, showed them how stuff works and answered their questions. In other cases, we visited existing customers where we gathered feedback and try to work through any problems they were having.

Serbia was pretty cool. It was a lot more European than I expected for lack of a better adjective. The guys that we met there were very cool. They all spoke good English, were well educated, and had a lot of common cultural experience thanks to the internet (they love South Park). During the time we visited them, we hacked together a racing game prototype using their assets, which was fun. We ate a pile of meat with every meal. Our hotel was very nice; it was apparently built by a wealthy mobster. The guys we visited were called Eipix.


Hello Serbia


France was really busy. We traveled from Serbia to France in the morning, visted our customer all day, then got on the train for London in the evening. There wasn't any time to see much of Paris, although fortunately I've been there before.

We visited two studios in the UK. The first was a customer. There was one aspect of our engine that gave these guys a lot of trouble, so I got to basically sit there for a few hours while this one guy told me all the ways it was crappy. That wasn't a great experience, but at least it helped reinforce that we shouldn't put crappy things into the product. The other guys we visited had barely started evaluating, so there wasn't much to do other than give them a presentation.

Overall, I had a lot of fun. The best part of the trip was Serbia.

Comic Game

I mentioned Comic Game in my last post. I've been making very slow progress, but I'm finally at the end of phase one of the project:

  • A client application for rendering and displaying interactive comics
  • Comics are fully data driven
  • Completed comics are composited and saved as external images
  • One complete sample comic - "Once Upon a Time" by Mike Daly

I've also created a new Games Page entry for it: Comic Game which has more info, some screenshots, and a download link for Phase 1. If you happen to download it and play through a story, look in the 'saves' sub-folder of the executable: it should contain an exported version of your playthrough of the story. I'd love to see what stories people follow. Be aware that the game has a pretty long loading time before it even shows the window. Sorry.

Comments

New Games, new lessons

By Mike Daly
July 22nd, 2009

I've been told that sometimes I don't do a good job with updates because I make a big post about once a month that interleaves a bunch of topics such as personal life, work, and hobby stuff. This makes things a little tricky to parse for readers that only care about one or two of those subjects. Therefore, I have decided that it would be better to make smaller posts a little more frequently. This will help things be a little more targeted, and prevent me from having trouble remember stuff months after it happened.

Triangle Game Jam 09 & Sunny Day

A group of professional game developers from the NC Triangle area got together over the weekend of July 10-12 to hold the 3rd Triangle Game Jam. This is the second year that I was the lead organizer of the event and it was really gratifying to see things work out as well as they did. There were 14 people, we made 4 games. You can find more info about the event and the theme that inspired the games on the Triangle Game Jam website.

The game I worked on was Sunny Day. I've added an entry in the games page for it, which includes a download link and a list of requirements. Keep in mind that in the weekend, we weren't able to get some things implemented that would have made it feel like an actual game - specifically, there isn't an ending or scoring. But hey, it was done in 2 days; what do you expect?


It's supposed to be very happy


Comic Game

I mentioned last time that I recently completed phase 1 of my Comic Game experiment. Apparently that got lost on the noise because it was at the bottom of a wordy post about other topics. It probably also had something to do with lack of a screenshot. I've added a list of requirements to the game's page, which also contains a download link in case you didn't realize. Just to make sure that everyone realizes it's there; here's your friggin' screenshot:


Now you know it exists


Other news

Despite what I said in the beginning of this post about being more targeted, I'm going to mix in a little personal life stuff here because it is recent, relevant to me, and I don't want to make a separate post talking about it later.

My dad recently received a life-threatening injury and had to have emergency surgery. He was in intensive care in the hospital for a while and was unconscious for a few days. Don't worry; he's well on his way to recovery now so it seems like he'll be fine.

However, going through an event like this gets you thinking about things. I've come away from this with a short list of realizations I thought I would share:

  • If you've got something to say to your loved ones, don't wait to say it.
  • When life-changing things happen, remember that they don't just affect you; they affect everyone that cares about you.
  • Being in good health is very important. It's worth the effort to eat right and stay in shape.

I'm sure everyone already knows all this stuff, I just want to give a reminder and put a little emphasis on it. This stuff is important guys, for real.

later

Comments

Daly Homes Inc

By Mike Daly
August 11th, 2009

My dad turned 50 last Wednesday. In the weeks leading up to his birthday I couldn't think of anything to get him because he's the sort of guy that gets whatever he wants for himself. I decided to use my skills to create something for him what probably not many people have - his own video game. The game approximates my dad's career as a general contractor.

I worked on the project a total of 29 hours over the course of 8 days. Unfortunately, this was a week where I also had to work a bit of overtime in the office, so it was a tight squeeze getting it done in time. In any case, it's done now. I've added a new games page where you can read about it, see screenshots, download the game, etc: Daly Homes Inc.


It's a construction game


Tragically, there were a few things that got cut due to time that would have made the game much easier to play. Particularly, a 'how to play' screen that describes the goal. Well, you'll just have to read the game's page and figure it out for yourself. If anyone ends up playing it and has any feedback, I'd love to hear it; you can post a comment.

Now that this project has wrapped up, I get the exciting task of deciding what to work on next: so many choices!

In other news

I finally found something to spend some of my Amazon gift card on. If you are a fellow that likes video games, and likes pretty pictures, you may also be interested in the Street Fighter Tribute art book.

Later

Comments

Jody (as guest)
August 24th, 2009 - 11:13 pm

Good work Mike! (I am really just testing the comments out, but good work anyway.)

What is next?

By Mike Daly
August 24th, 2009

So as you might have noticed, I just finished a few projects. I made the prototype for Comic Game, I worked on Sunny Day at the Triangle Game Jam, and I made Daly Homes inc for my dad's birthday. Now it is time to choose what to work on next. However, I've been trying to decide what to work on next for a few weeks, and there are just too many good options. Allow me to enumerate.

Start a new project

One option is to start a new game project. I've got quite a long list of ideas that I'm excited about working on, but the one that comes to the front of the list would be a game simiar to the SNES Mario Kart. Here are the reasons I'm interested in a nutshell:

  • The mechanics of the original Mario Kart are really simple and I don't think it would take long to reproduce the experience
  • Mario Kart was a really fun party game; the Xbox 360 needs games like that
  • I'd like to experiment with an idea I had of a friction gauge that makes the mechanics of when you turn, skid, slide, etc a little more obvious to the player
  • I'd like to take the random stage hazards and random items out of the game - these just kept making newer Mario Kart games worse
  • I'd like to experiment with an idea I had for auto-balancing gameplay in which the further behind you are, the easier it is to perform skill-based maneuvers to catch up
  • If I used bitmap files and XML as the level editor, I could make it really easy to mod so anyone could easily add their own track

Release an old project on Xbox Indie Games

I've create a bunch of crappy games and posted them here. However, making those games is a lot of work and not that many people visit this webpage or subscribe to this blog. It would be nice to have more people appreciate what I work on by actually releasing it in a way that lots of people will be aware of it. However, given the state of my current projects, I would want to polish them up a little more before doing this. This is what I'm thinking:

  • Add a puzzle mode, online multiplayer, a better tutorial, and a graphics overhaul to Connexus
  • Add the last few effects, a soundtrack, better AI, and online multiplayer to Orbital

Port Comic Game to the web

A while back, I created the Comic Game prototype. I could do a whole lot more with it:

  • Create an interactive comic editor so that anyone can create branching comic storylines
  • Create a library of re-useable art that anyone can use in the editor
  • Create a few more comic stories
  • Port the viewer and editor to the web so that anyone can view and create interactive comics from anywhere
  • Beg my favorite webcomic authors to create interactive comics for the webpage

Develop my skills of an artist

I am not a talented artist. However, I like the idea of being one. I think it would be cool to take some time off from programming, and just practice drawing, digital painting, re-vitalize my knowledge of 3d modeling to make it current, and just generally do lots of study and practice. I've found that the limited set of art skills that I already have come in pretty handy on a regular basis so it couldn't hurt to expand that. I also spend a lot of my time browsing digital art; I really wish I could create some of the stuff I appreciate so much. I also have a theory that if I spend my free time doing art instead of programming, it will keep me from getting burned out as easily on programming, which I do for my day job already.

Slack off and play video games for a while

This is what I've already been doing for the past few weeks. I've been playing Command & conquer: Red Alert 3, Battlefield: Bad Company, Professor Layton and the Curious Village, and more Defense Grid: The Awakening. There are a handful of games out there that I'm interested in playing and it would be nice to be a little closer in touch with the state of the game industry. Plus, it would be easy and fun.

This reminds me, I just recently finished the story for Professor Layton and the Curious Village. This game is super-awesome. I recommend it for anyone with access to a DS.

The Point

Why am I going on and on about my hobby options? As I mentioned before, I've been having some trouble deciding. So I want your input. If you read this blog/news feed, I would like you to post a comment saying what you think I should work on. Jody just added a feature so that you don't have to be registered to submit a comment. I also want to figure out if anybody still ever reads news posts.

For the sake of color, here is a picture that I drew/colored while trying to decide what to do next. It is a fanarts; do you recognize the character?


If you guess right, your vote counts twice


Comments

The Mummy (as guest)
August 31st, 2009 - 01:21 pm

You posted a bunch of great ideas! The 2 I like the best are doing some finishing on Orbital, which I found highly addictive, and working on your skills as an artist. Do you think you could work on a set of 12 or 13 pieces of art for a calendar? It would make cool Christmas presents and if you focus on themes for each month, or a common theme for the set, it might provide you with a self-limiting exploration in artistic skills.
I do love Orbital :)
Mum

Mike Daly
August 30th, 2009 - 09:06 pm

I talked to Mike E and Pawel. Pawel votes Mario Kart, Mike E votes Art.

Mike (as vince) (as guest)
August 27th, 2009 - 08:56 pm

Vince says: Art.

You need it to complete the Triforce.

(he also complained about comments not working from archives (which is now fixed))

N8 (as guest)
August 26th, 2009 - 04:03 pm

Obviously MarioKart!

Jody (as guest)
August 26th, 2009 - 02:18 pm

That's Terra, btw. I forgot to mention it earlier. Trust me.

ConnexusVote++;

Nolan (as guest)
August 25th, 2009 - 10:50 am

Polish is boring; new projects are fun.

(Also, that's totally Terra.)

Mike (as guest)
August 24th, 2009 - 11:18 pm

I'm actually leaning a little bit towards Connexus already (with online multiplayer)

Jody
August 24th, 2009 - 11:12 pm

Although I think you should really add online multiplayer to make it really complete.

Jody (as guest)
August 24th, 2009 - 10:43 pm

Connexus!

Survey Says...

By Mike Daly
September 4th, 2009

So here are the tallies to the poll I took last update, including the votes of some people I talked too offline:

  • Mario Kart: 6
  • Release Connexus: 3
  • Skills of an Artist: 2
  • Release Orbital: 1
  • Comic Game: 0
  • Slack off: 0

Therefore, I will begin working on a Kart racing game soon. Stay tuned to see how things are progressing.

Morning Hair

sometimes when I wake up in the morning my hair is very poofy. Sometimes I take pictures with my crappy digital camera. It's no spinning beard picture but it's still pretty funny to look at:


It seemed a lot crazier at the time


Opus 17

I sat down with MUSAGI again earlier this week and wrote up a new piece of music. Please enjoy Opus 17 (if you can).

Oh yeah, it's also my birthday. I'm now 27. This will be my last birthday that is a whole cube number for a while

Comments

Wesley (as guest)
September 8th, 2009 - 10:35 pm

dude, connexus is a winner with some polish! FINISH HIM! FATALITY!!! you get 3 gold, end turn. Now in regards to the hair, awesome.

Karma Riot

By Mike Daly
September 27th, 2009

I've been trying to think of a good title/theme for the Mario Kart clone recently and the one that I like so far is KARMA RIOT. Mainly because it's an anagram for Mario Kart. It also gives me some options for the theme. I've worked on it about 18 hours total over the past few weeks, and I think I'm making pretty good progress on the functionality. It helps a lot that my friend Pawel is pitching in as well.

I haven't really started on any of the art, so visually it's going to look completely different once I get to it, however many parts of the game are already in place:

  • Analog steering, gas, breaking
  • Data driven track physics parameters - different surfaces (as authored by MS paint) can have different traction and drag
  • Loosing traction allows you to powerslide
  • Lap counter and recognizing game over
  • Multiplayer and split screen support
  • Traction meter

Here are some screenshots for you to enjoy:


We tested the simulation with a top-down renderer


Then just recently added the perspective rendering with proxy art and AI


I like the idea of super-deformed ATVs rather than go-karts. This is my mockup


This is the spinaround of my test sprite

Well, that's it for now. The other bit of news is that (the aforementioned) Pawel got married. Congratulations to Pawel. I wish I could post a picture of the wedding party (I was in it), but I don't have one handy and Pawel is currently living it up in Hawaii.

Comments

Mummy (as guest)
October 16th, 2009 - 08:52 am

Very cool!

October update

By Mike Daly
October 18th, 2009

Hey everyone, It seems like its about time to catch up on things; I'll start with an update on Karma Riot.

I'm still working on Karma Riot with a decent amount of regularity. A few other people have expressed interest in helping out with it, so I'm spending a little time trying to organize tasks and describe them such that the other people understand what needs to get done. Hopefully help will be a time saver in the long run, but even if it isn't I still think it's worth it because I'm helping other people learn how much fun it is to make games.

I've mostly been messing with graphics code recently. I sunk a lot of time into setting up a shader to draw the background all of the way up to the horizon; it wasn't a hard problem, but I didn't realize there were free shader debugging tools out there. Too bad I found out about them after I figured out what I was doing wrong. Anyways, here is a new screenshot:


Click to see the split-screen version

On a completely unrelated note, I spent last weekend visiting my family back in the mountains. I took some time while I was there to start socializing my 10 month old nephew in the ways of video games.


He's starting to get the hang of Geometry Wars

That's all for now. Don't forget to start putting together your Halloween costumes!

Comments

The Mummy (as guest)
October 27th, 2009 - 12:25 pm

I love the pic of you and the little guy!

Jody
October 19th, 2009 - 12:03 am

Wow dude! You have been busy since I last checked in. However, I must say that the soundtrack needs immediate attention. Good work though!

November Update

By Mike Daly
November 24th, 2009

I think a lot has happened since my last update. However, I can't really remember what's happened because it's been so long. Oops. I won't wait as long next time.

I wish I could show you some pictures of our halloween costumes. However, I didn't take any and Jody hasn't uploaded them, fortunately I found this picture of me in my costume on the internet:


Yep, that's definetely me

Edit: OK, Jody did end up posting some pictures in the Halloween gallery. Here's a picture: of us. You may recognize Ryu and Chun-Li in the image as well.

Last week I made a surprise visit to one of our customers/evaluators at work. Mainly, the surprise was on my part; I got asked if I could go to Seattle after lunch and was on an airplane 4 hours later. Anyway, that was a lot of fun. I hung out with Loose Cannon. All in all a good trip.

Work has been pretty hectic lately. It's one of those things I wish I could talk about, but that wouldn't be appropriate. Hopefully I'll start work on a cool new mini-project soon.

I've also spent a decent amount of time in and out of the clinic lately trying to figure out what the problem with my pancreas is. Here is the forumula for every visit:

  1. Wait
  2. Perform uncomfortable test
  3. Wait
  4. Results inconclusive
  5. Schedule another (more uncomfortable) test

Here is a summary of what all the doctors have told me in plain english: "Your pancreas is messed up. However, it's not too messed up. We have no idea why."

To round things out, here is a rapid fire list of things I find interesting right now:

Karma Riot is making great progress too, but I'll save that update for once we've passed our next milestone.

Have a nice Thanksgiving

Comments

December Update

By Mike Daly
December 16th, 2009

Hey all, I'll be brief this month. Karma Riot is coming along well, but unfortunately, we still haven't quite hit our milestone yet, so I'll continue putting off the big update there.

In the meantime, I have some little bits of filler for this month. For one thing, last night I threw together two tracks for Karma Riot so that it could have at least a little sound. They are pretty short and repetitive, but I think the'll do the trick for now:

Ninja Turtles

When I was a kid, I loved the Ninja Turtles. I recently aquired a stack of old NES games, and among them was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: the Manhattan Project. Just to give you a taste of nostalgia and to remind you what the 90's were like, here is an excerpt from the back of the box:

Surf's up, dude! The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles make a little getaway to the Sunshine State. Until Shredder makes a major getaway with the entire island of Manhattan! His power hungry plot gets even more bogus when April O'Neil becomes part of the heist. What a relaxing Vacation. Not! Those mondo mutants must make waves to get back home to save April and Manhattan, and send Shredder on a one way trip to geeksville.

My how language has evolved.

George the cat

In other news, George got pretty sick recently and had to spend some time in the emergency veterinary clinic. It turns out he has cancer, although it does react to drug treatment, which hopefully keep him healthy for up to a few years. In any case, that kind of sucks and what also sucks is the massive emergency treatment bill and the apparent ongoing cost of drug treatment.

Vacation Time

On the bright side, I'm going to Hawaii with the fam for Christmas this year. I leave in a few hours. See you later, suckas!

Comments

Jody
December 16th, 2009 - 11:28 pm

Man, I am very sad to hear that about George. Me and George used to be pretty tight. Here is a picture of us from back when I lived with Mike and worked from home.


Sleepy George