The day started off with me travelling to Pinewood Studios in Buckinghamshire, a 40 minute journey for me by car along the motorways. I parked the car and walked to the studio where the Game Hack was taking place. I registered my name and went and found a seat. Since I was on my own and required a team I did a bit of mingling. There were of course way too many programmers/developers to go around, but I was lucky to get in a team that knew what they were doing and required my skills.

The first thing of the day was to go to a different studio within Pinewood and listen to guest speakers from each of the sponsoring companies of the event including the likes of facebook, Sony Entertainment, Papaya, Marmalade, Mozilla, BlueVia, and more. There was also a quick motion picture on Pinewood itself and the history of it and why it is so popular with some of the biggest Hollywood directors. It was all very interesting to listen to.

Afterwards everyone went back and got straight to work on their games!

During the event there has been food and drink, lunch, dinner, snacks, all served at no cost whatsoever. There has even been Beer!

Ever so often during the day I would take a break and speak with my family. The children got on the phone to tell me about their day swimming, what they ate, and said goodnight at their bedtime.

It’s now early hours of the morning and I have learnt loads about facebook and how to implement a game within it’s pages using API’s. The other members of the team have been creating the game itself, a simple idea of the player hoping from island to island vertically attempting to escape the rising water, collecting fruit as they go. The longer the player hangs around for fruit, the more risk they are at becoming drowned!

Well, I’m going to have a quick lay down before I begin coding again getting ready for the pitch to the judges.

I’m still waiting for the feedback from my Portfolio Projects 01 and 02 that I submitted.

Now on to Section 3 and all about 3D!

The looks and feel of the game remind me very much of Aion. The artwork during loads and intro sequences looks very similar, mainly concept arts! But they are attractive and add to setting the feel of the game, background history and such like.
The graphics in game are also a lot similar to other games and don’t appear anything new, just a bit more polished to some of the other Free2Play games.
The character designs are great. A lot of customisation at character creation. Classes are pretty standard but do focus on the melee class type and mages/priest seem to be a secondary thought.
The game play is probably the main interest in this game since it is something very unique to this type of game. It has the usual keyboard input but you can also control your character via xbox or ps3 controller connected to your PC. This gives you a bit of a better feeling of action control during play. You can move your character around with the analogue stick, rotate the view with the other analogue stick, and the buttons give you access to learnt skills/abilities. And then by pressing the shoulder buttons on the controller (LT / L2) you get to interact with items and NPCs.

I think I’ll continue to play during Beta, but since it is on a subscription base I will not be continuing after the official release. There just doesn’t seem to be enough new and exciting things to keep me interested.

We do a lot of things during a week, some typical and some not so typical. Playgroup is the one day of the week we know the mornings are going to be busy, fun and tiring (for them and for me). The Team at the playgroup have certainly welcomed me as a Dad amongst the other Mum’s and it makes me stand out a bit and feel special, but then it’s all about the children and getting them to play, learn and interact with others. It has helped greatly that both Clare and myself have kept in touch with the Mum’s from anti-natal so I at least have people to talk to and meet up with that we both know.
Another activity that has been introduced is a days play over at Nanny’s. This just gives me a chance to get a days worth of studying or web work done. Samuel and Maisie also love going to see Nanny and playing.
Sleeping is getting better too. They are now in their big beds. Samuel has a double futon to sleep on(!) and Maisie has my old single bed with bed guards. So far they have slept well in them and not fallen out! Getting them to stay in bed has also not been too hard. Maisie goes straight down as long as there are Sheep Bears in with her. Samuel on the other hand needs a bit more persuading. He needs drinks, blue bear, pink bear, maybe a car, and if he keeps getting up they all get taken away until we deem it necessary to give one or two of the items back. The “process” is pretty quick and he’s usually down within 30 mins.
Eating is also not much of a problem. They have a variety of foods they like and don’t like. Samuel is more of a meat man and won’t eat veggies unless persuaded. Maisie loves vegetables and savoury but not much of a meat girl. Between them we get all the food eaten.

The next challenge we are going to be taking up is … potty training!

The questions that confused me most on the examination were on Binary, lots of 0′s and 1′s! Shifting places was a bit tricky and having to re-read the questions to get an idea on what type of answer was required. I went back to most of these after I completed all 60 questions within the 75 minutes. Other areas of knowledge I need to brush up on are audio channels, certain strncmp commands and such like, and resolutions and ratios but I think I was just having a dumb moment because reading the supplied answers to choose from made it clearer how to work out the calculation for how many pixels are displayed in a 4:3 ratio.

Looking back I can see that it has taken quite a varied time to get to the stage where I am. A breakdown shows it took 2 months to complete Section 1 of the course including taking the exam. For Section 2 it has taken just over 2 months to complete the parts A, B and C of Section 2, and it has then taken 12 months to complete Portfolio Projects 1 and 2. I think it took so long because I took a while getting an understanding on what was required, then I put too much detail in to the technical document to an over sized idea of a game. Once I had that document in a state of completion I went on to the 5 tasks of Portfolio Project 2 and I really got in to these and sped up towards the end.

With self studying you really have to be disciplined and be able to find the time to really get stuck in to the tasks. I feel I have managed to balance the studying, family, and personal life pretty well since September 2010 when I started the course.

Now to get these projects marked and then the Section 2 exam out the way before getting section 3 completed and off I go looking for work along with my updated and completed Portfolio of games I’m creating.

This has also helped with debugging purposes since the application will need to be distributed to the memory management PC for checking and verifying the memory leaks are not too bad!

I hope that things change and I’ll be logging back in soon on a regular basis and levelling up my skills and advancements.

I have been working on Portfolio Project 2 which has proven to be a little trickier than originally thought. Since September 2011 I have come to a finishing point for two of the five tasks. Sprite Blitting and Pathfinding.

I tackled Sprite Blitting to start with and really had to get my head around what it was that was being asked of me. I decided that it was to create a class that could take one image of sprites all various sizes and split them up as required, for example the image would be 100 pixels wide and 20 pixels high and within that would be 20 by 20 pixels of character animating making 5 animations. The code would split the big image up and put the smaller images in to an animation sprite. I had about three attempts at getting the starting point right, but in the end I managed to identify the necessary classes that needed to be created and the files I needed to make the sprite blit animations work successfully. I guess this means a cut down on the number of separate images that need to be supplied for an animation, and the amount of processing required to access the files and store them in memory each time. But I got the code to function and run and now I have four images appearing on screen where only half that amount is image files. The documentation still needs fleshing out a bit, but I felt it was time to move on to the next task.

Pathfinding was the harder of the two so far. I had an understanding first off of what was required, it was how to get the desired result that was the problem. I created a map file that would be loaded and then displayed. At points on that map were start and end positions along with obstacles in the way, and then the player character would be loaded and go from start to end positions avoiding obstacles. Easy!? hahaha.
Getting the Tiles mapped out in to a text file and then having them load to appear on screen was easy enough. The start and end position images were loaded correctly, the player character was loaded and animated just fine. Getting the player character to move from start to end checking for collisions and avoiding obstacles was also fine without any path checking, just trying to go the .x+1 and .y+1 route. What was tricky was implementing the A* algorithm to then work out which tiles the character was best to use to get to the start and end with the least cost involved and avoiding obstacles. I don’t think I had thought hard enough in to the tiles and how they are stored/referenced so I had to do addition workings within the A* code to figure it out. At first I managed to get the character to work out the route, but that was a simple go down three tiles and right 5 tiles. Anything more complex seemed to make the character wander off in all sorts of directions without stopping! I eventually worked out that the heuristics were causing problems and working things out the wrong way round. Values were lower when they should have been higher. So I changed from a Manhattan heuristic to a Euclidian heuristic and managed to get the right result, the character would go from start to end avoiding obstacles perfectly on a semi-complex map. But when you add in major path finding obstacles and paths then the character just seemed to go up and down until it got stuck and then jumped to the goal over everything. Since I had spent a long time getting to this stage I put it on hold with comments in the document of all the improvements I want to make if there is more time, but the overall algorithm works fine.

I’m now on to the third task of Data Serialisation. At first I thought this would just be a case of using the example code supplied and getting it to save as binary, but there seems to be a lot more involved with creating a serialiser and a serialise aspect to the whole thing. It gives examples of XML, YAML and JSON as file type examples that are read and written. I understand what it is saying with regards to these files but I need to research a bit more in to what it is I am to create.

That’s it for now on my studies. The Portfolio Project 2 is coming along (somewhat slower than I’d have liked) but at least I have a schedule in place to help get me back in to the flow of studying more and more. Usually 2 days a week uninterrupted as well as a few evenings.