Category: My Blog

My personal blog. Documents my advancement as a programmer.

As i’ve mentioned in previous posts me and my team(Digital Colony) entered Dare To Be Digital 2009 and created the game Pollen.

The last weekend was spent showcasing this project in the EICC in Edinburgh at Dare Protoplay. The entire event has been alot of fun, especially seeing the kids enjoying playing our game. At one point we even had a parent request to buy a copy, which was amazing :D

On Sunday night the awards were dealt out, and unfortunately we didnt win anything :( but nonetheless a massive congratz to Color Coded, Shunk, and Gentlemen of Fortune’s Quick As Theives for winning the BAFTA nominations :D

Our team website (http://digitalcolony.co.uk) should soon have a link to download the game if anyones interested, and i’ll be adding a section about it(and the other massive backlog of projects) to the projects section of my portfolio :) I might even get round to uploading a couple of pics of Protoplay!

Finally, i’d just like to thank everyone for thier support over the course of the last 10 weeks, from the mentors and my team, to the people who turned up at protoplay :D its been alot of hard work, but has also been very rewarding and fun!

- Copey!

Annother Small update, just a week and a couple of days until dare protoplay, and the games beginning to feel alot more finished!

Saying that, there is still LOADS to be done, but it looks like we might have managed to avoid any overly brutal crunch time :D while it looks like some other teams might be putting in crazy hours to finish the project, we’re looking like we’re only going to be needing a couple of extra hours a night to pull it off – hopefully!

Today was spent freaking out over getting out Promo-Video prepared, but after much wrestling with exporting the video we’ve finally got it done only a couple of hours late. So here’s a wee vid to watch!

(You can also click here then click the “new in HD” button for a better quality video)

Okays, so it turns out i fail at keeping this thing up to date :-P However i will be finding time to update it over the next few weeks with lots to tell! Figured I’d post a wee blog with info on whats to come.

First of all, finished third year at uni and passed (woo I have a degree! :-D now for honors…) with reasonable grades, but not quite as good as i’d have hoped: AABBC. Getting a C for Maths was a bit disappointing but it’ll just motivate me to put in proper work for it in the final – and important – year. Also had been hoping one of those Bs would be an A, but oh wells, again just means harder work this upcoming year. Some time soon i will be updating the portfolio to include all the new work.

On a much more interesting note, earlier in the year me and 4 other third year students(2 other programmers: Hazel and Kieran; and 2 artists: Jess and Abi) formed a team for applying to the Dare To Be Digital compitition… and got in! Our team Digital Colony is creating the game Pollen, a side scrolling adventure game with bee’s! The compitition is now in its 8th week, meaning only 2 and a bit to go until Dare Protoplay :O

Anyways, figured I’d end this post with some screenies and a vid of the game! :D

woo particles!

 It is now 4 days after the project deadline, and we’ve all very happy with the “finished” product: Some Assembly Required. The game itself is a simple platformer. You play as a damaged robot, and must scale a giant robot to retreive an item for two shady characters. 

The development in itself has gone very smoothly due to following the SCRUM agile development method, however we did encounter several hiccups allong the way, mostly relating to problem with art assests, and problems with NxOgre – a Ogre3D wrapper for PhysX. In hindsight it would have been better to simply use PhysX itself without the wrapper, but nonetheless we managed to get it working after several days of banging our heads off the wall (in particular me, since i was the fool who opted to deal with physics :P)

 On Tuesday we presented our finished Prototype, and it seems to have been very well recieved, and now we’ve to give a final presentation at the Hannah Maclure Centre, along with all the other BBC Prototype projects, which should be a fun event seeing what everyone else has produced :) Overall the project has been a huge success, i’ve enjoyed it emmensely and its very nice having a small game created as a group in my portfolio. I’ve learned a massive amount from this project and taking on this knowledge will help drastically within future projects, such as the Dare To Be Digital compitition which will be discussed in a future blog post :) Information about the game itself will soon be found within my Third Year Projects section. 

At some point in the next week i’ll try and get a post up about my teams entry into the Dare to be Digital compitition.

On Saturday me and 4 other students from my year at Abertay entered into a programming Competition hosted by Realtime Worlds. The idea was for each team to complete various game programming related tasks within a strict deadline, with only 1 computer available per team. It was broken into two sections. In the first we were provided with 3 tasks which were to be completed in 3 hours. For the second we were to complete a further task within a hour, but with a twist: We were to create AI for our player in a Asteroids type game and compete against the other teams.

When we entered into the competition originally we didnt realise that it was mostly aimed at Honors and Masters students, and found that out of the 7-8 teams, we were the only third years. Feeling as though we would not stand a chance, we entered anyway thinking that at least it would be a bit of a laugh, and the second section would be quite a bit of fun :)

The first section didnt go so well for us, finally only completing 1 of the 3 tasks, with an almost complete second – which unfortunely did not yet output anything, so would have gained us no points. Feeling slightly defeated our spirits were however raised significantly when £200 worth of domino’s pizza arrived, which naturally we decimated fairly quickly(Made me very happy, given i was quite hungover and had not yet eaten that day ;) )

Feeling refreshed, and quite stuffed we began the second task – writing AI for the Asteroids game. We decided to go for quite a basic script, which focused on defensive shooting to keep us alive, while hopefully spraying enough bullets about to earn us a significant amount of points :)

For the most part this worked, starting with us sitting at the top of the scoreboard for the first level … however we crashed when there were no more asteroids on screen, but managed to finish third nonetheless.

When final points were tallied up, we werent hopeful assuming us to be fairly near the bottom of the scoreboard, if not last. However it turned out that the other teams had encountered similar problems along the way, and we were pleasantly surprised to find we’d come third, winning us a £15 amazon voucher each :D

Overall the competition was an entertain experience, and i’ll definantly be entering again next year – possibly even sneaking into first or second place.

Finally remebered to get screenshots of my 2.5D Doom Clone while in uni today, so thats them up now :)

Its taken alot longer than i had originally thought to do it, but thats the portfolio completed :) Obviously it will need to be constantly updated as new projects are started and finished, but keeping it up to date shouldnt be too much hassle.

If you happen to notice any problems(typos, inconsistancies, anything) or dont like aspects of the webite aesthetically, please post your problem – I’ll try to fix them, and make the site look better if its not good enough at the moment :)

Thats me now got all the applications i created in second year up :)

Now that thats the most time consuming parts up i’ll try and get First Year, the In Developement section, and possibly a photo of myself on the About Me section up tomorrow.

Also if anyones actually bothering to read this, care to comment on the banner? Dispite everyone i ask saying its looks good, others who i show the site to always ask why its all dotted, not realising it was intentional. Obviously i would prefer it if people would say its crap if it is, so i can replace it with something better :)