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.