The DisTurBinG Blog

Moving On

I read this awesome book that my friend gave me three months ago:

This book led me to start looking for random people on the internet and in person to network with.  It has a lot of the basics that anyone who wants to make connections would know, but it also has things that sound fairytale-ish, but truly work when you implement in Real Life :).

I began implementing these concepts.  Catching up with old friends, making deeper impressions, going out to lunch more often, now 21 - Even grabbing a beer.. or 2.  The last few months after MassiveWar have led me down a path that I’m very excited to peruse.

This book and recent changes in my life have lead me to get 6 interviews so far, tens of new strong connections in the software industry and closer with people who are in the game industry doing the big stuff.  Today, I’m working on my senior project which went from a website due to the hardcore task that it would have been doing it a lone on a framework that is STILL ever-changing.. (Symfony2) to a game.  With my new connections, I joined a start-up down south in LA.  I am excited to share more information later.

Other than That, I have my classes picked and have been working on a lot of cool unit testing and networking tools for unity, two of my most wanted to practice things yet.

I’ve learned that getting to understand networking by actually doing it from scratch added so much knowledge to my ‘theory’ in how it worked.  Also learning about Do It Yourself dependency injection and the concepts of Google’s GUICE allowed me to create an amazing injection framework in Unity.  All done by reading the concepts of this great blog.

I decided I will for sure keep my blog up, talk about my senior project and go between personal and technical things throughout the months.  May have to change domain names sometime soon though.

~DisTurBinG

The Turn Over

MassiveWar is shutting down and have hopes to finish the game published through www.mgeapps.com

I have been influenced to different ideas away from MassiveWar Studios.  I plan to stay in game development, but also concentrate on my last year of school and look into different ventures in the future.

It is official that I graduate in December of 2011.  I’m very excited that it worked out.  Other than that, my internship is going well and it looks like a lot of future job opportunities are ahead in my future.

It’s weird to think how great of a change this is, but I know it’s the right decision.  Just the other month I was interviewed for id tech camps and mentioned MassiveWar Studios.  Now it will be a site that is obsolete in the internet.

Battlefield 3 looks awesome though!  Yeah, e3expo had a lot of great stuff, like the PS3 3D technology to allow full screen for two people.

Let’s see where this blog goes.  I’ve considered doing more of a tech blog instead of personal, so not sure how long I’ll keep it up.

Change

A lot has been happening in the last month.

MassiveWar was officially established last month.  We are now working towards our first beta cycle and polishing up everything.  It is exciting to see the game come together towards a polished look.  It really adds to the game play experience.

The car programming eventually didn’t work!  Two of the 3 drivers decided to take some crazy roads which caused car sickness :(.  Desperate for time.. I’m not desperate enough to ruin my day with sickness =}.

I’ve been utilizing a lot of my free time towards other things other than programming.  It’s nice to obtain more information about everything in general.  I feel it’s truly impacting me to make better decisions for the future to come.

I’ve done two hiking trips in the past three weeks.  Great fun in Yosemite and Bidwel park.  Amazing the conversations that come out of people during hikes :).  One person in particular talked soo much about poop, I was surprised it wasn’t his major.

Work has gotten a lot better.  The flexible hours, time to go out and learn outside of the work environment and new projects I’ve been assigned to have really given me a great experience.  Lots of fun problems to solve :).  Still doesn’t beat game development, but is for sure a great backup plan or part time plan due to how flexible the workplace is.  Not to mention, I recently got a couch in my office!

Anyways, a lot of things have been changing lately the more I read and do other things other than programming.  I’ve been working on projects for the last 6 years, limiting my scope of critical thinking.  Lot’s to come from Joseph in the next few years with all these new doors opening.

~DisTurBinG

Driven or Driven?

A great weekend ahead!

Finally, starting off with some relaxation in a hot tub and soon to come, some steak and artichoke.

This weekend, I will be doing some coding, coding… maybe a little gaming, and coding.  Dinner plans with some co-workers on SAT as well.

I will be working on implementing some 2D sprites into Unity.  Should be an interesting task.  Probably beautiful as well as the artist and his 2D work is fairly amazing.

Work is going really well.  I had a new task in the last few weeks which has kept me extremely busy.  Challenging and milestone pressures sure are helping me with my skill-set.

Monkey Escape finished Alpha 3 with a Crash… Crash… Crash… (Infinite loop), MEMORY ERROR!

There was a chance that when you dropped the cage, it continued to re-spawn on itself and break until your web browser crashed or you pressed back or you sat back, ate some popcorn and watched your memory tick up in the task manager.

We received some great feedback and now know more of what we want for level 1 and the type of game play that is required to fulfill both casual and hardcore gamers.

We are projecting Alpha 4 in 2 weeks.  After that we will be pumping out some tests and information through the Unity forms.

MassiveWar made a recent purchase of a nice little library known as PlayMaker

We are now merging our tool set into PlayMaker to make an even better tool set!  PlayMaker is a Visual State Machine. Unity allows the ability to map scripts to objects, but tedious tasks in control flow between scripts allow PlayMaker to clean up some cash out of our wallets.

So we moved on to Event Driven Programming which will help out a lot in most standard games.  We do not plan to make entire AI schemes out of PlayMaker, but for example, the tool will host events which calls actions, and that action may be an AI desire/event in our AI tool set.

So I’m excited to move those tools over and continue working on Monkey Escape this weekend.

I’ve also had a horrible cough in the past two weeks which seems to be finally getting better!  Thank you cough drops and drugs.

So, The title means something.  Let’s bring you down to my film life and think about this movie title:

House Of Games (1987)

It’s about a woman named Margaret Ford who has her life strait, rich with a published book and all.  She decides to spice up life from the work-a-holic style and check out a place called House Of Games for reasons that the film would tell you.

To not spoil the story, the film is about her driving her life or being driven by others.  Throughout the film there are some good signs of this and especially the reference of her driving a ‘ford’ car, being her last name is ford.

I thought of this film today because I continue to kill myself over not getting a dream job position I interviewed for last October. (Which was an epic disappointment because I have never been rejected from a job to this day) I failed a simple coding test due to a few pre-interview factorsthat totally jumbled my brain (lack of sleep, excitement, and expecting a harder test, etc..) and of course the pressure of actually getting the position!  Fortunately, with my current internship, I think I can take on some real life pressures now!

So all of these things I’ve been doing lately, I’m not sure if I’m driving myself or if the possibility of redeeming myself when I graduate is driving me.  I’d hope that it’s my own driven self pushing towards the many projects I plan to start and complete by the end of my undergraduate studies.

I only have a few more months left!  December is right around the corner when it comes to the speed of life.

I’m excited to get that expensive paper and see what happens with MassiveWar Studios.

Also the background image on the massivewar.com website is fairly nice!  Each has a little personality.  Guess which one is me?

~DisTurBinG

Networking

I must love every aspect of networking because it is one of my favorite things to program AND my strong suites in business.

After a few text messages, skype calls and a talk over dinner, I am fortunate enough to get a free server hosting, website design competition for a side project of mine and plenty of advice for a new business I will be working on.

Best part, is that I plan on ONLY working on it in the car while I commute!  That’s right, coding on a laptop 80 minutes a day for an entire month!  Let’s see what happens.  After the idea comes to a close at the end of april, I will give further details.

Fun fact I recently found.. You know life is flying by when you realize you need to cut your nails again, even though it feels like you did it a couple of days ago…

My brother noticed my monsterous toe nail that I missed for a few … _____s

Alpha 3 for Monkey Escape is well on its way!

~DisTurBinG

Burned!

All has been going well as usual.

I am gaining great experience at my job and it looks that I will be there until August.

I finally went to my first Dubstep show last Saturday.  It was awesome.  A few of my brothers and I saw Excision’s tour.  It was loud, bassy and we actually started a mash pit!

It all happened when they had a remix of a Metallica remix and I yelled at my friend, “DUDE WE SHOULD MOSH”, Of course he couldn’t hear me as I pushed him which he took offensively and pushed back.  Next thing you know everyone was pushing and I ran out of there 2 minutes later with a deep gash on my shoulder and a messed up leg.

Other than that, Massive War Studios will be launching a game website in the next month and more tests!  The title will be called Monkey Escape.  It’s about a monkey in a cage trying to escape a lab with a platform.

Our first alpha test got owned with problems, but a lot of great feedback.  People see the potential!

Here’s a screen shot of Alpha 1.

Hopefully I will be posting more soon :).

~DisTurBinG

He’s Alive

Yeah!

Work has been extremely busy but I am finally use to the schedule.

Work has settled to show me the corporate ways of things, making me anxious to get something started on my own or find a company that shares my standards (somewhat mentioned in the ‘about me’ section).

Our artist previously mentioned for a game has yet to jump ship or disappear on us.  Not sure how to describe the absence, but with a combination of this and work was the catalyst to hunt artist(s) for an even smaller scope game.

We found some talented people and the game is already coming together. A lot of art assets have been made with a great artist we have on the team… Now we can only hope that he sticks!

DJ also believes MassiveWar Studios may not fit casual game titles, but it is still yet to be debated in where I would only want to see a postfix change.  MassiveWar is just too damn cool and attached to me.

My website work has come to a halt temporarily but has a lot of development.  Multiple pages work, ajax features are gorgeous and a position for a web designer has yet to be fulfilled.

Working full time truly impacted my perspective about weekends.  Weekends seem to be much more precious compared to school and vacation.  During school, there are no such things as weekend because you are still going to be doing a load of work!  During vacation, weekend ‘characteristic’ days are pretty much every day!  But work… 40 hours a week, plus the 5 hours of commuting, truly emphasized the beauty of free time.

Another interesting fact is that one of the artists is married with 3 kids.  EVERYONE I’ve worked with in the last 5 years have failed at being a true committable person after or when they are married.  People have literally disappear from the net, fall asleep at the keyboard or just don’t have time.

Growing up working in projects, I have always had the mindset of.. When I get married… It’s over.. I need to get something going NOW!  But meeting this guy, who has worked out for the last few days at least, has given me another perspective of maybe.. just maybe, I will continue my after-work passion in programming at a reasonable level when that transition in my life comes. 

~DisTurBinG