Baconjam 08 - Soul Runner

Today was the end of the Baconjam, reddit's annual game jam competition. Some friends of mine and I participated this year for the first time. Originally we were to compete in the Captivate Game Jam but this was unfortunately canceled so instead we found this gem of a competition.

The theme was "There were millions of them" so in the celebration of October, we created a fun little side scrolling endless runner/brawler called Soul Runner. The objective is to collect 1000000 lost souls in a cave of evil filled with spirits and skeletons. This of course was a 48 hr competition and we came a bit late to the party so our efforts were of about 30+ hours for 3 people, however I think that our final product was a success regardless.

Here are some screenshots of the game:

You can also play the game in the browser by going to our game jam page and pressing the web link: 

https://bacongamejam.org/jams/bacongamejam-08/308/

This is actually the second game jam that I have competed in this year. The first was the Humble Bundle/RPG Maker game jam back in July. You can still play Corruption here: 

http://3dwasabi.com/Corruption/

Plasma Ring Live - Live wallpaper for Android

I have recently released my second live wallpaper for android on the Google play store. This one is called Plasma Ring Live. It is a small shader that allows the user to control 3 rings or spirals of color (red, green and blue) that either escape or flow into the center of the screen. There are also controls for mirroring the effect, producing a grid of spirals or rings as the user sees fit.

It can be downloaded here: Plasma Ring Live on Google Play

Here are some pictures of the app.

Fractal Live Generator - Live wallpaper for Android

In my previous post I had mentioned that I was working on an Android app to be released soon. I have since released my first Android app to the market place. This app is called Fractal Live Generator and it is a live wallpaper for generating animated Mandelbrot and Julia sets.

You can download it from the Google Play Store here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.chrissteinberg.fractalwallpaper

And for some pretty pictures:

To test the waters of Android development I wanted something fairly simple and non-expensive to develop so that I could get an understanding of the publishing path for the Android market place. I felt that a live wallpaper would both be fun and straightforward to develop. I was right on both accounts. Doing a fractal generation application in OpenGL 2.0 was something I had planned on writing for a while regardless, but the excuse to put it on my Nexus 7 was too great. The biggest issue I ran into was determining what customizable features to add to the initial release and to keep feature creep down to a minimal to actually get the app released.

The actual process to release an app on the Google Play store was surprisingly simple. Once I had done a little research to determine what was required and what I was agreeing to in all of the legal documentation, actually producing the release apk and uploading it to the store was much easier than I expected. The major pitfall that I did run into was not being able to test on multiple devices since I only have the Nexus 7. It turns out that this is an issue as there have been multiple reports of people's devices not rendering correctly. Until I can get my hands on one of these devices that are not working properly, I simply have to accept that there will be people currently who cannot use my software. This was a valuable lesson to learn early however, as I now know that for future Android applications that the OpenGL ES 2.0 standard is not implemented or supported the same on all devices. It is much cheaper to have issues like this on a free app that I only spent a few weeks of spare time developing than in an app that I potentially have invested money to develop and months of effort into producing. I will have to invest in larger ranges of devices for testing and budget accordingly.

I do plan on doing some more live wallpapers as I think that the wallpaper is a great canvas to make some eye candy shader toys. It is also a great way to experiment with OpenGL ES 2.0 GLSL shaders in the mobile space. So definitely keep an eye out for more of these types of things from me.

2013 Year End Update

Once again it has been a while since I last posted here. Many reasons for this, mostly due to career changes. The last time I had posted I was working for a company called Zebra Imaging. After a good run in holography, the call of game development was pulling me back into the field I love...

At the start of 2013 I took a contract position for EA Sports. I worked on franchise mode for NCAA Football. This was a great experience for me, very rewarding. I was able to be a part of the NCAA 14 release and earned my first console game development credit. Working for EA was a wonderful place to work and the engineers that I worked with were very bright. It isn't easy building a AAA game every year, and even more difficult to take the same game and re-envision it each iteration. The team was very good at handling both of these challenges and in being a part of this process, I have learned much about production schedules and distributed development.

Unfortunately, this year EA has decided to end the development of the NCAA Football franchise of games. It was a shame as the next iteration promised to be great as well. I, being a contractor at the time was unfortunately not retained as a member of a different team. I was in the situation of looking for work again. Luckily, as a software engineer in Austin Tx, finding leads for new opportunities was not as difficult as I was imagining. It only took me about a month to find a new position. My new home is working on a contract with Aristocrat Inc. A world wide manufacturer of slot machine games. This work has turned out to be much more interesting than I had originally anticipated and the experience has also been quite rewarding. I am learning a lot about hardware drivers that I never knew and much about the Windows low level operating system features that I never bothered to investigate in the past but have found that the understanding of which has greatly improved my understanding of how the operating system handles distributing and managing of resources that my applications are requesting. I was very sad to have to leave EA but I am glad that I have found a new home (hopefully not as temporary) in a place that I find interesting and engaging.

On the personal development side of things, I have been doing a wide variety of side projects. From helping out a friend work on preparing his kickstarter, to working on a Unity platformer title here and there (to be announced by me sometime in the future in more detail), some additional side contract work when I can find it, and finally for Christmas I received a Nexus 7 from my wife which as spurred me to dabble in some Android development. The Android development stuff I hope to be releasing in the early part of 2014 as some smaller apps for sale or for free on the market place.

All in all, as a software developer, I feel like 2013 has been a year of growth for me, both intellectually and professionally. I look forward to 2014 with some hope that it will be a little less stressful, but at the same time with greater ambition for completing some of my personal side projects. I also wish for the best for my friends and family for the new year. Who knows, maybe I will be a little more ambitious with this site or maybe a rework of the site/new address is in order. All of that is speculation however as I have put little thought into the blog in a while.

Happy New Year
-Chris

UDK Day 1

Today is the day that I start really cracking down and learning unreal script. I have worked with it in the past on and off, but never really got into it as my real world life tends to take me a little deeper down the rabbit hole (i.e. C/C++/C#/HLSL/GLSL/etc...).

The reason today is the day is that my friend and I have some serious plans that we have been talking about for about a year now. Hopefully getting the game play mechanics in place won't take that long... assuming that I get this unreal scripting stuff figured out.

A few issues that I already foresee:

1. No free to use IDE with code highlighting + code complete/intellisense. I can use visual studio which is great, but I still get no code highlighting. Apparently there is a tool called nFringe but its not free to use for commercial projects, and we hope to eventually sell this jewel. 
2. No free to use IDE... oh I already said that one, well looks like I'm gonna have to Rambo program this stuff. The biggest problem is class member and function lookups. I have to open the script file that I am working with just to find out what functions I have access to. Makes me sad if you can't tell. 
3. Syntax is close to C++ or C# however it is just enough different that when I'm coding quickly I can already tell my brain is going to flip back to C++ land and I will bork something up. 
4. No project file containing all the script files. I could set this up in visual studio, but then I will have an .sln file sitting around that doesn't make a whole lot of sense and I am not yet sure if that will cause the compiler to have issues if it is in the same folder as the script files it is housing. I will figure something out with this, just not there yet at the moment. 

There are more I'm sure, not to mention the learning curve of learning a new engine and a new scripting language and a whole new development paradigm... its gonna be AWESOME!

Oh and as a follow up to my last post, its not a social game, its not gonna be shovelware, both of us feel that we want to make a game WE want to play. Hopefully others will like it too as a result and as any indie developer hopes, maybe it will revolutionize the industry.

New Job - Zebra Imaging

Since my last post I have found a new job. I am currently working as a holographic rendering engineer at Zebra Imaging (www.zebraimaging.com). I have been enjoying my new position and have been learning quite a bit. Holographic technology is very cool and the products that we have here are cutting edge.

It does make me a little sad that I am not working in games anymore (at least for now), however it has come to my attention lately that I have become quite bitter about game development and jaded as far as video games relevance on human culture and civilization. I find this most true when I look at the booming of social gaming and online gaming. I find that the lack of story or purpose to most of these games removes a key aspect that makes games interesting to me. I do not see the reason for putting in thousands of hours of you life into something with no goal. I feel that this is already the crux of life and that I play games to escape the pointlessness of life for a while. The epic feeling I get when slaying Satan in Castlevania: Lords of Shadow (a great game by the way), or defeating Bowser to save the princess, these are why I play games. I do not play games to receive an achievement for pressing the button 300,000 times to farm the same crop over and over again, merely to receive a glowing cow that simply sits on my farm.

I look at these latest trends and the amount of money that is going into the development of these social games and the associated recent closure of studios and cancellations of projects at some studios and it saddens me. (Edge of Reality being one, in regards to the termination of their Sims expansion project, most likely in lieu of the successful launch of The Sims Social and the noticeable trend of Sims players migrating to that service). Games are expensive to make, really good ones even more so. If publishers are not willing to risk the money to build something innovative and excellent, instead merely only willing to devote money to these social game experiences with no real depth or innovation (honestly there isn't any, its a formula, merely convincing players that they have an initial investment that they don't want to lose, thus encouraging them to come back), then what does this mean for games as an industry, or as a whole?

I know its not entirely the end of the games industry, there are still developers out there making great single player experiences. Some are still progressing in the aspects of innovative storytelling.  However, I honestly do not believe that industry cares about the products it creates anymore, only the money is important to them. Strong arming reviewers, releasing day one DLC, micro-transaction models with devalued products, all of these are examples of this in my opinion. The only way this will ever change is if players stop putting up with the garbage and make a stand against poor quality practices. Unfortunately the human race has failed me once again and have whole heartedly bought into these atrocities at least for the foreseeable future. Until this changes (and I still have a job at Zebra Imaging) I don't know if I want to go back into game development as my full time job. We shall see though I suppose.

Regardless, this post as become more of a rant on games than the announcement of my new job. So I will leave it here with the thought that whatever happens, I'll still be a gamer, I will just be more careful with how I spend my gaming dollars, giving my money to companies that I feel still have a solid grasp on what gaming is and what it should become.
 

Update: Looking for work

So I was unfortunately a casualty in the recent layoffs at UTV Ignition. I am sad to leave and I believe that Faxion Online is a great game and a great product. Unfortunately there just wasn't the support that the game needed to succeed and a development team is too expensive to keep around. I understand it was business and that is fine. Unfortunately that means I am currently unemployed.

I recently had an interview but that was not as successful as I had hoped. Thus I am reviewing what is currently in my portfolio and am redesiging this site to include more of my work. I may need to port it over to crystal space or something but I will figure that out. I might just end up redirecting for the art and such.

Anyways, I have been programming and making a game. No details yet, but safe to say that I am confident in the chosen tech and the ability to quickly get to a level building alpha state. It has renewed my energy from an unsuccessful interview and it has helped me keep busy during my unemployment. Hopefully more on this very soon.

That leads me to my last update, I am looking for work in the Austin area. If you are interested in receiving a resume, please let me know.