As the more attentive might notice, I have changed the version number of my mod from v0.3 to v1.0. This was a decision I made a while back (but I forgot my self-decided version change before writing the previous developer diary ).

Reason for the version change was simply because to reflect the fact that my mod releases aren't really beta (they are throughly tested for skirmish / online use) with the only potential beta area being the single-player campaign which is untested. Also, the mod an...

Today marked the first day I spent on furthering development on my mod for World in Conflict for some time. I was forced to put it aside for some time because of university and lack of personal time in general. Now that I have some time to myself again I figured why not dedicate some of that to Realmod once again.

The World in Conflict mod kit. Its what makes it all happen. Since it was a while since I last worked on my mod, I decided to conduct a reevaluation of things and ideas I had i...

For this update, my role in Asplode! was absolutely minimal. While I'm in the middle of a mild crunch for The Political Machine 2008 and then away at Rochester, New York for a Paramore concert, Josh was working asininely hard on version 1.2 of Asplode!. As started, my role in this update was purely peripheral as, in my spare time, I've been working on the start for Bipolar and taking some of Josh's code for his game and turning it into a more generic library that both of us can use in our curren...

Yeah, so, I'm releasing Asplode! now and such. And, along with the game, comes all of the source to the game.

I originally wasn't planning on releasing the source but as development winded down and I started to play the game for longer sessions I soon realized that the game became virtually unplayable on my machine after about seven-eight minutes. I thought this may have been a result of poorly-managed graphical assets so I took a couple days to optimize them (and, as a result, the VectorMod...

I've been playing a very time-intensive game of musical chairs with various three-dee engines over the course of the last two-and-a-half weeks in an attempt to find the one that would be best suited to my particular development style and the kind of game I want to create. And I can safely say that, tonight, I have reached the ultimate solution. That's right, after toying around with things like TorqueX, Torque Game Engine Advanced, OGRE, Irrlicht, Nebula3, and, finally, PowerRender. The latter two of the list appeared to have the most potential, with PowerRender being the closest thing to what I was looking for, but the most recent iteration of the engine is still under heavy development and, what was the most troublesome, seems to be getting very infrequent updates. So, after all of the wasted time, I decided that I was going to dig out my old C++/D3D9/D3D10 framework and just rip out the D3D9 parts for use in a new framework which I could use in the future.

I got exactly an hour-and-a-half of work done on that last night before I realized that it felt way too much like the kind of engine work I do at my job every weekday. So now, and for realsies, I'm back with XNA. I'll be releasing Asplode! this weekend in its terribly-performing state (and open source) and, hopefully, everything I learned in the development of that will help me create a far more useful toolset this time around as far as memory management is concerned. The most important lesson I have with me that I learned from Asplode! is that the most important thing about memory within a managed environment isn't necessarily the allocation of memory so much as it is the deleting of it. Apparently the garbage collector is a wicked beast that must be appeased in order to maintain stable gameplay performance. I don't know. I'm still getting the hang of the intricacies of C#. When I was working on Asplode! -- and this will be readily apparent in the source if people peruse it -- I didn't know anything about C#. I simply coded as if I would code a game using C++ and, when code didn't compile, I read up on why the error occurred and what I needed to do/learn in order to fix it. Hopefully, this time around, I'm a bit more well-prepared. It also helps that Drilian and I are teaming up for some of the more game-independent stuff.

Last weekend as a result of being hungover after my first time drinking in over a year and waking up on a couch in the apartment of a gay nineteen-year-old friend of my friend's and the first thing I saw being a Hannah Montana poster on the ceiling above the couch where I was sleeping I bought a license to TorqueX Pro. I've used other GarageGames products in the past for various experiments and random fun, but I've never used one to make a full game. I thought I'd use TorqueX for my new game ide...

At this point, I think that it's fairly safe to say that the meat of Asplode! is finished. All of the primary gameplay is in place, the enemies are all implemented and handled in a state that I'm fond of, and the player controls, responses, and such are all implemented. At this point any more features that I add to the gameplay portion of the game are either polish points or experimental ideas that I may or may not keep as part of the game (a few automatic weapon upgrades, various ideas as to ho...

Not that I spent recent nights playing stuff like Army of Two, Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer, Company of Heroes, Master of Magic, Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance, Bully, Ratchet & Clank, Geometry Wars, Everyday Shooter, Advance Wars: Days of Ruin, or God of War: Chains of Olympus instead of actually updating my dev journal or anything... But, yeah. Pretty much did exactly that. I've still gotten a bit done on Asplode! every night but, by this point, I'm mostly making various optimi...

Former intern-turned-remote-worker Nick told me that I should start posting some of the development journal entries that I have been previously posting over at my GameDev.net dev journal here. So that's what I'm doing. If the idea of developing a top-down space shooter in the fashion of Robotron is an attractive one to you, then I'd recommend reading the backlog of posts as a form of "Previously on the Journal of Rawr" catch-up.

One of my design mantras -- and I use the word 'design' loosely -- is that while coding the game I keep things as simple, quick, and efficient as possible. As one might guess, this can become problematic at times. Less so in the implementation of routines and ideas so much as it is the necessity of shooting down some gameplay mechanics that, while fun, would defeat the purpose of such a simple Robotron/Geometry Wars knockoff. And, really, that's all I'm hoping to accomplish with Asplode!.

http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/geekend/?p=1085

Well in our latest game, Street Smart Detroit, there are at least 2-3 of these that we fail against, but then again it is a very indie style game, plus there is a lot it is trying to adress, so this time, oh well.

I disagree with the AO game comment as well, since well, it just doesn't make much business sense... at least until the Porn Industry gets into it... perhaps we need a Porn Sim game... your the director and all... HA, that would b...

So we finally went ahead and released our game, Electropy.  It's been a long long process but it is so exciting to have created something and to start selling it.  I've been handling a lot of the business aspect, registering the LLC, getting set up with the IRS, figuring out how to do the accounting.  It's a lot of work but I've never had as much fun working 20 hour days.  We entered the IGF student showcase competition back in October and the finalists are released tomorrow,...

Listening to the LinkBobby Blackwolf podcast show today, he mentions how Portal was submitted to the IGF and one of the judges worked for Valve, saw the game and said we need to hire this team!

So, then Portal gets signed and now is released on Steam (I don't subscribe to it) so you really should think about that a bit if your an indie developer!

You would think that with the depressed economy in Michigan that the government would woo game developers the way Georgia is... but noooo they won't. At least that was the attitude 2-3 years ago when they tried to pass a law making it illegal to sell M-rated games, a crime actually, to underaged kids.

Just sad really... no hope in the future... the Big 3 are getting pummeled by Honda and Toyota, so even that is going the way of the dodo bird.

I watched Saving Private Ryan over this past weekend, since I hadn't seen it in a few years (and had only previously seen it on VHS), and I had forgotten just how great the movie really is. I wasn't sure how much I would enjoy it after watching Band of Brothers so many times due to the fact that Band of Brothers devoted so much more time to character development, as it had the luxury of a lengthy running-time as opposed to the time constraints placed on Ryan as a theatrical feature movie. The wo...