• Made gingerbread house for the first time (I can remember)
• Celebrated Christmas at the Knutsons
• Celebrated Christmas again at my parents
• Happy birthday Amanda!
• Went to my cousin Amanda's wedding in Virginia and had a blast on New Year's Eve
• Went skiing with the Knutsons in Breckenridge for a week

It was all great fun and, as usual, I didn't take any pictures. However, I was able to find at least one picture of holiday festivites to share thanks to the facebook:

I learned that perhaps the most important part of a gingerbread house is the path leading up to it

Exciting news at work: we've released our iPhone game Hero Academy! I think it turned out great. Although I don't have an iPhone, I do have an iPod touch at work that I can use for testing/playing so if you want to play me, send an invite to "MikeD".

Yo dawg, I herd you like tactics so I put tactics in your phone so you can stay awake while you sit in a meeting

Also, I've gotten the chance to play a lot of video games in and around the holiday season. Here are the ones I'm working on (I recommend them all!):

• Dark Souls
• The World Ends with You
• Super Mario 3D Land
• Mega Man Zero Collection
• Advance Wars: Dual Strike
• Cave Story+ (Steam)
• Jamestown (Steam)
• Bit Trip Runner (Steam)

I don't know if it's sad or awesome that the wikipedia page on any given game is so much more useful than the game's official page. Anyway, see you next month.

On this particular weekend, Amanda was scheduled to fly into Dallas to visit me for the weekend (we typically visit each other every two weeks, alternating who travels). When she got home from work she found an envelope left on her doorstep with the ominous instructions "Open Immediately". In the envelope was short illustrated book of how we met and got to know each other, what made us grow close, and the challenges that we'd overcome as a couple. Towards the end of the book, she reached a page instructing her to stop and open the front door. When she did (with eyes already full of tears) I was there on one knee and proposed. We then flew back to Dallas together (I secretly booked a ticket on her flight when she made her reservation for it a month before).

The book I gave her was entitled "Mike and Amanda's Go Time (Oh Yeah!)". The title is a reference to an electrical engineering hobby project that Amanda and I worked on once upon a time that we code named "Thursday Night Go Time Oh Yeah!" in which we made an LED keypad puzzle with a custom programmed ATmega328 micro controller.

Feel free to nominate me for a Caldecott Medal

The ring itself was custom made (thanks, Chris Van Dyke) based off of a design I came up with. On either side of the diamond is a small yellow gold castle set against a white gold background with a circle above it. The castle (in addition to being a fine symbol of strength, safety, and stability itself) has the proportions of the castle you find at the end of a stage in Super Mario Brothers, which I felt sybolised both our shared love of video games as well and victoriously reaching a milestone. The circle above the castle is a little firework. It also proves what a dork I am, which perhaps has some value too.

I think it turned out pretty classy looking

We are both super excited to be engaged! However, we still have a lot of stuff to figure out. We still don't know who will end up moving, but us being together in either NC or TX is way better than us being apart so I'm sure I'll be happy with what we end up with. We haven't settled on a date yet.

In other news, I've almost completed Orcs Must Die! on Nightmare difficulty, which is no small feat! Also, we've announced a new game! Meet Hero Academy! I'm not working on this one (the game I'm working on hasn't been announced yet) but I've been doing a lot of playtesting and I'm excited to see it so close to complete. I feel like there are probably other important things I should be mentioning, but I can't remember them. Oh well, I think that's enough for now anyway. Happy Thanksgiving!

China 2011

Amanda and I finally got around to going to China together in September! It was a really awesome vacation consisting of things like:

• Visiting my brother Dave and his family including new niece Kaylin! (super cute)
• Taking a train out to an old water town for a day (temples, gardens, and hunt for non-sketchy food)
• Visiting Old Town Shanghai (fancy tea house, dumplings, and cool gardens)
• Tallest observation deck in the world
• Pixar museum
• Tasty breakfast buns and Happy Lemon bubble tea

Young Trevor is quite a handful these days

I even added a few of the pictures to the China Gallery.

Orcs Must Die!

So the game I spent much of this year working on FINALLY came out. I'm really proud of Orcs Must Die!. It's a really fun game, and I'm not even the only one that thinks so, it's getting great reviews as well. EVERYONE SHOULD BUY 10 COPIES!

Lucky for me, Amanda was visiting Texas the weekend of the release party, which resulted in this awesome pictue:

I worry sometimes that Amanda is a little hesitant to kill orcs

One thing that was not so awesome about that weekend was that I got all 4 wisdom teeth removed right before it. Once again, I was lucky to have Amanda around to help me out with that.

As for what I'm working on, I've been having tons of fun doing preproduction for future projects, although what they are must remain a mystery for now

New car

After Amanda left the weekend of the OMD release party, I managed to get in a pretty serious car accident that totalled my old 98 Honda Accord. It seems that neither myself nor the guy that hit me have any permanent damage which is really fortunate considering the state of our cars.

So that meant renting a car, doing a bunch of research, then setting out the next weekend to find a new one. I considered many different types of cars, went on a few test drives and haggled with a bunch of salesmen until finally settling on a 2012 Honda Accord LX.

So new, it doesn't even exist until next year

Well, I think that's about enough for one update. See you all later.

Fortunately, Mike has kept up with things much better and has showed off some really cool stuff in the area of his profession. I just sat there and stared at a spinning rectangular sphere for like 3 minutes.

Anyway, I wanted to share with you all that next week I'll be starting a new job! It is actually two jobs, but I'll be working about half of a normal day at each position on average. I wasn't really looking for a new job, but an opportunity came up and I didn't want to regret missing out. Tough decision, but it's done.

So, the first job is with my academic advisor from NC State. He's working on a research project funded by the National Science Foundation. I don't have a lot of details to share, so I'll wait until things develop to say more. I will be working out of the very building where I took many classes, at Poe Hall. I am prepared to feel old.

The other job is working at a small company I've done work for in the past called WhiteBox Learning. They make web-based 3D modeling software to be used in the classroom to simulate some more hands-on activities you may remember from middle or high school: C0₂ Dragster cars and Popsicle stick bridge design. The idea is to give students a chance to design these on the computer and see the physics behind a faster car or stronger bridge, and to give them the opportunity to make as many test runs on the computer as they need before building the real thing.

The work I've done for them in the past has all been related to content delivery, mainly from the teacher's perspective, but also the front-facing website, online sales, and site administration. Now that I'm more full time I'll also get to learn the Unity3D engine and help out with some of the 3D simulations, which I'm really excited about. Maybe I'll need to read up on Mike's past articles!

Anyway, that's the deal. Hopefully it was a good move.

Also, if any of you have not found out by now, Amanda and I got a puppy. He is a Golden Retriever named Charlie and he is a ton of fun. I go to bed and get up earlier than I ever thought I would, but he's been awesome to have around. I have pictures on my Picasa Web Album, but I will try to get some uploaded here soon.

A lot of levels in games are rectangular (from above) - being a rectangle makes a lot of things easier. Rectangles correspond to the shape of textures and regular geometric grids that can be used for terrain height fields. It's easy to make a rectangular world wrap too by just making sure it is tileable and drawing a few extra copies of the world once you get within sight of borders. A rectangle lets you use euclidean coordinate space. If I wanted to create a world, it would be easy to draw a rectangular map.

However, it would be cool if the world was really stylized, like you are walking/flying over the surface of a mini planet. You can percieve the curvature of the world - it falls off in your peripheral vision and things climb up over the horizon as you move. Well, if your map needs to be spherical, it suddenly becomes a lot harder to draw. You have to start using spherical coordinates too, which complicates things like finding distances or even moving at a consistent speed in any direction.

The thing I came up with is a way to use a wrapping rectangular world, but give it the illusion that it is spherical - a spherical rectangle. It's not rocket science or anything, but I think it's a neat concept and can be kind of a brain teaser to figure out how everything can continue to line up as you move over its surface.

View of the terrain from high above

Same perspective, but without the spherical illusion

Finally, I put together some animated gifs of the world spinning in a few directions; can you tell that the rectangular world is repeating in every direction? The world still retains its rectangular proportions despite how much you spin the sphere - mysterious!