alpha_two

Well, I managed to finally submit the game I've been working on. Feels good, sort of.

Let's sum up a few things, in case you weren't keeping track (who is?) :P

Officially, I started coding this project around middle of July. I don't recall the exact day anymore, but this puts the project at roughly 7-8 months (there was a serious amount of slack around the time Gears 3 launched, among other things.

Is 8 months too long for a project? There's been all sorts of mishaps along the way, like learning to program in objective C, learning cocos2d, upgrading cocos2d, a hard drive crash, etc. I also managed to make a few other additional boneheaded decisions, like supporting iPad + iPhone at the same time, supporting GameCenter, and other additional complications. And of course, I had the issue of being a one man wreaking crew (by choice, for a reason I'd explain later), and you end up with designer art (which is better than programmer art), designer code (which is worse than programmer code), and music that can only be described as "beeps and boops". Knowing what I know now, I can probably redo everything under 3 months.

Now, all that's left is a)the release, and b)all the write-ups that accompany the release. In a way, it's not a game I think I should advertise, not in the traditional way, for a few reasons:

1) It's a free game, so yeah, not a big deal.
2) It's not a feel good game. So it's not something that your typical iOS audience would care for
3) It needs context and closure: sure, the mechanics are in place, but what it is right now is something that tells a story.
4) It's essentially in beta form, 12 stages, completable in 20 minutes, assuming you know what you're doing. It's far short of what I would have wanted it to be.

More importantly, I don't know what's next. Working on this app/game was a way for me to a)brush up on some sort of coding, b)work on a game of sorts and c)bide some time till I figure out what to do as employment. It's been a year, and I really don't know what to think anymore about working as a game designer at a professional level. Is it viable for me, from a financial standpoint, or should I cut my losses and run at this point? I'm not sure anymore.

Sorry to end on a downer point (hmmm…sounds familiar), but yeah. I guess I'll do another update as things gets closer to a release date for the game.

So, we're approaching the 11th hour (month, but who's counting) and I feel like I've wasted most of the last year. If someone were to write a biography about it, that last year would all be summed up in a chapter called "The Lost Year".

At this time last year, the choices I had was to either stick around working on something I didn't want to work on (and more specifically, have no relevant skills or interest in) or quit and find another job. I figured that I had a full year of EI to burn, and in the worst case, I can decided then.

Then is now.

I don't know what to think anymore. I look at the people around me, and clearly people have moved on. The call of money and moving on with life is clearly growing stronger, and it's absolutely depressing to think that this will be a deciding factor.

Some have asked, why not go do something else on the side, and come back to games afterwards? I've briefly mentioned it before, but I'll clarify my feelings about that now:

There is no going back. If I choose to leave game design now, there will be no going back. If I take any other programming job out of games, I won't bother using whatever free time to work on games, I know myself better than that, and the pay will far outpace it to the point that I'd never look back.

So there's that, the new binary choice of my next decision:


wait till core game design job comes around (or start my own)

OR

get out of games


I don't expect anyone else to have an answer for me, that's ok. I felt like I needed to write this out somewhere.

While working on Cocos2d, I've stumbled upon the fact that CCSprite doesn't actually contain copy. If you look up 'CCsprite Copy", there's quite a few hits on what to do, but none of them worked for me:

1)The simplest solution people suggested is to use "spriteWithFile" or their other variants, but this doesn't work is you're using a TextureAtlas.
2)Calling "spriteWithSpriteFrameName" again isn't an option, because currently you can only allocate it one time.
3)Running "spriteWithTexture" by pointing to the old sprite was the most promising, but that only copies the entire texture atlas.

The trick, apparently, was using 3) with a specific rect definition:

CCSprite *originalSprite = [CCSprite spriteWithSpriteFrameName:@"Image.png"];
CCSprite *newSprite = [CCSprite spriteWithTexture:[originalSprite texture] rect:[originalSprite textureRect]];

originalSprite is a sprite created using texture atlas, and we can create a new sprite using the originalSprite's texture and rect coordinates.

It's not "copy", but at least this a a decent way to allocate the texture for now.



EDIT:
Another thing to note: if you're using TextureAtlas and the texture itself is rotated, then the above won't work. Instead of setting the rect in the init line, you need to do a second step to copy over the rotation.

CCSprite *originalSprite = [CCSprite spriteWithSpriteFrameName:@"Image.png"];
CCSprite *newSprite = [CCSprite spriteWithTexture:[originalSprite texture]];

CGRect rectInPixels = CC_RECT_POINTS_TO_PIXELS( [originalSprite textureRect] );
[newSprite setTextureRectInPixels:rectInPixels rotated:[originalSprite textureRectRotated] untrimmedSize:rectInPixels.size];

This way, you're carrying over the original sprite's rotation.

It's kinda scary now that it's been nine month since I last "worked". Sure, I'm still crunching away at this iOS game thing, but really, it's not exactly something that will pay me, nor do I expect for me to make anything off of it (even with "hats"). For a while, there were a few of us designers who were pretty stuck in the same situation, but now that I actually own the "last man standing" title, it's much more worrying.

This iOS game is still coming, I really don't know when, but hopefully soon. My apple dev license expires april, so I guess the latest is april.

At this point, I really don't know if I can can actually stick around with game design. There just doesn't seem to be a market for someone who's only got 3 years experience in design for consoles and portable systems. It's either social/mobile (which I'm indifferent about), or requires many more years as lead design. Watching news of studios getting shut down over the past year has been depressing.

Here's to 2012. Here's to me hopefully finding "work".

Ever wonder how facebook works? No, not the technical side, the "social" side. Is it really connecting people, or rather just distilling everyone down to just "updates".

As an interesting experiment, I removed my birthday listing from Facebook on Tuesday, just because I can. It's played out pretty much how I expected: Just like any other day. The fact that I was mostly away at Gamercamp was also an interesting way to spend the day...

...don't worry about it, people, it's just an interesting observation, that's all...

So yeah...

Going up to Montreal last week for MIGS Job Fair was, in my mind, the last major push for me to stay in games: if was probably the best chance to bang on doors and see if anyone is looking for designer.

...we all know how that turned out.

In a way, the "career fair" was what I expected: Mostly students looking in towards the industry, and companies showing as a "goodwill gesture" to promote they exist, but stopping just short of actually hiring. Essentially, they're hoping to scoop up the star employee.

What's more interesting/disappointing is what happens when you utter the word "design": the response is often the same, as if it's some sort of disease that you gotta get out of the way. It's disheartening to see it happen, as if somehow the games industry has decided that it's no longer important now they they have business-driven freemium models to keep them afloat.

I really don't know how much longer I can keep this up.

More specifically, in a format so that people you know won't know it's you?

On some levels, I think it's possible to get even better, more objective responses, abstracted away from who I am personally.

...not that I'm doing it right now about what I'm doing...

I think today's flight has been the most hassle filled flight to the US I've had in a while. I guess telling them that you're a freelance game designer, and telling them you are going to a gaming development convention really triggered something. More detailed questions arose out of that, in addition to checking out my business card and website. Have two loose copies of my resume doesn't exactly help my case... I think they were convinced that I was doing an interview... They eventually let me go with a "you know, if you are doing interviews, you'll need to get a visa for a work permit first".

I'm not sure how that makes any sense, but I assured them that there is no interview. Oh well.

The fun part was that this delayed my timeframe, and coupled with the sudden gate change for the flight, caused me to frantically run around the airport from one end to the other before they took off.

Fun times.

2.5 hours check in to go to the US isn't enough, apparently.

So late one night I was randomly channel surfing at 3AM, and I stumbled upon Motoring 2011. In it they talked about how most people actually have their mirrors setup wrong because they've been taught wrong. They then showed a way to setup your mirrors that eliminates all blindspots without the need of turning your head around.

Then I found an article about it:
http://www.wikihow.com/Set-Rearview-Mirrors-to-Eliminate-Blind-Spots

I tried it out this morning, and surprisingly it works pretty damn well. A little disorienting, but works well.

Try it and see what you think!

While I initially started the iOS development projects, I had planned for a few simple apps before quickly moving to games. Two months in now, I've got 4 apps out (which is fine), but I can't stop updating them, which is putting a dent into the "hey let's make games" part of the plan.

Sure, fixing bugs is pretty much a plus, but where's the fine line of supporting an app for "things that should be in there" vs "nice to have features" vs "magical ideas out of the sky"? I'm all for getting features so that the "apps" make sense, but the more time I sink in to it, the less I feel like it's going anywhere.

I've finally started doing something in cocos2d. Hopefully everything goes smoothly, and I'll have something in 5 weeks.