End Of Hiatus Celebration!

It's June now and the last time I've made a post was in April. There are a few reasons why I've been away and they all pretty much point to university and honestly not much going on in the past few months worth mentioning. This blog marks an important time though, I am finished with my first year of university and I'm set for either a 2:1 or First grade for my first year, not too bad.

What I should mention is I managed to make a functioning game in less than a week and with no more than 24 hours spent on it. I'm an idiot for this being necessary in the first place as this game was my coursework. I'm lucky that in my free time I spent doing things very similar to the coursework and working in the game jams so far has made me a much faster programmer. I wouldn't recommend anyone else making themselves the same challenge by mistake!

Summer has began and I'm going to set myself a series of projects:

1. Finish and publish SAMS (I'm going to redo a lot of code but isn't really too much work)
2. Polish the coursework game and publish it
3. GameMaker project 
4. RPG Maker project "Galadon"
5. Unity project Station 9
6. Website

I'll go over the projects in detail but first a small announcement that I'm going to my second TTG next Thursday. Three Thing Game is what really made me post here again and I'm excited to go once again. I'll be working in a small team of myself and colleague in my year. Between us I'm hoping to make something great. Realistically I'm happy to make anything better than the game made in the first TTG because that was programmed by a second year and a really good one at that. Honestly though I want to make something brilliant and fun to really end this first year of university really well.

Anyway, back to the summer.

I have until the end of September to go through this list but from all the things I've learned so far in college and university I think I can do this. 

1. SAMS

Super Awesome Multidimensional Speedboat was an important project to me. It was something to give me the drive to learn as I'm not really an academic person, I need a functional reason to learn. I haven't worked on the game for months now because coursework and exams are a big deal. Fortunately, any time I have a moment to think it's usually about ideas for games or projects and I have a pretty clear idea what I want the finished game to look like. I'm pretty excited to hopefully show you what I mean in the next few weeks. 

2. Coursework Game

The coursework for my programming 2 module in university was to create a very simple version of Galaga. It's a good example of how to learn basic game programming and also object oriented programming. Right now the game I made is terrible but I can see some potential to make a decent enough game. I could have done much better if I put more time into the game but I didn't and I see this as a kind of opportunity of redemption. After this I should have two games finished and published to the Windows Phone store and I think that's my fix of Windows Phone for this year in terms of large projects.

3. GameMaker Project

One thing that always surprises me is that Hotline Miami was made in GameMaker. Don't let anyone fool you, this little engine is capable of making some pretty awesome things. I'd like to experiment with it for a week or so and make a little game from it to add to my portfolio. Could be fun!

4. RPG Maker Project "Galadon"

RPG Maker isn't really my style of game development or even my style of games. I've had in my head an idea for an RPG for some time though (as in close to 10 years) and I think this engine is the perfect tool to create a simple prototype to test character development and story. Making this will require a lot of research and for that I'm lucky enough to have plenty of decent looking games made from the engine. I'm going to see what does and doesn't work first and then work from there.

5. Station 9

If you've went onto some of my first posts here on my blog you'll notice I tried to keep myself busy last summer and, well, I failed, completely. This summer will be different though, I have my sights set on industry placements in November and I'm going for my dream jobs in studios I absolutely love the work from. It's going to be hard enough getting a placement in a game studio but something AAA will be super hard. I'm going to use this to keep me going each day during the summer for this project. I'll see what I have the time to create but I'm hoping to create an automated space station you can interact with, hack into and try to break :D. More of a prototype of a AAA game and will require every inch of my experience and dedication this summer.

6.  Website

I need to website to present all of this after everything is finished. I'm going to use this to learn a new language, or at the very least a markup language(HTML) so I can make something important and also learn. Once I have the website set up, my business cards printed and my studio name labelled on every game I should be ready to finally seriously interacting with the game industry.