Tools of the Trade

For low-budget indie developers like us, we try to do more with less. We want to use tools that are simple enough to use and are of course, free! So other than the 1500$ Macbook Pro and the 99$ Development fee that Apple charges per year, most of the tools that we use are pretty much free. Here's a rundown of some of the tools that we use:

Project Management: Google Docs

SCM: Project Locker (They offer a free 500 MB repository)

Visuals: Pen and Paper + Scanner, ZwopTex, Tile Map Editor

IDE: XCode

Development Framework: cocos2D, iPhone SDK 4

Test Device: iTouch

Sounds: Garage

Diary and Updates: This Blog!

It's amazing how much you can achieve for less! So until we earn a couple of bucks from this project, I'll be relying on these tools in completing our daily tasks!

Doodle Space Wings!

Well, This is it! Our first iPhone app is now under development - and it is called Doodle Space Wings! Let me explain: It's a 2D platformer - kind of like 1942 (for those of you who remember) - where you shoot everything in sight using really cool weapons - and of course, you get to fight big bosses at the end of each level - now how cool is that!! We do not have a graphic artist so we'll rely mostly on our mediocre (at best) drawing skills and hence, we hope to get away with the Doodle style :) Hopefully, we'll get it right and that every elements of the game will come together in the end. I am excited! I hope that we get to finish this and hopefully, earn a few bucks in the process :) I plan to track the progress of the development of Doodle Space Wings in this blog and hopefully, I will be diligent enough to post updates!

So who is Really Awesome Indie Games anyway? Well, right now, it's mostly just me and my loving wife - I do the programming, visuals, sounds, project management, and all sorts of technical stuff while she does the QA, budgeting (as in no Jim, you cannot buy an iPhone 4 - use your 1st generation iTouch instead!) and marketing-related stuff :) Apple has created a really good platform where anybody can use their talents and creativity to do something special and distribute it to the millions of people all over the world. This opportunity - which was not readily available to indie guys like us before the iPhone revolution - got us really excited and although it took us 2 years to finally get into the bandwagon, we're finally making progress and I for one am very happy with that!

I am under no illusion that this is going to be easy and me having a full time job does not make it any easier at all. But I believe that with proper planning (and spending less time visiting Facebook), we'll complete this project. But until then, gotta work work and work!!

Jim

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow

Just this evening, I gazed my eyes in the sky, looking at the falling snow. No more looking at the freezer shavings for me. This time, it's the real thing. It's a wonderful thing, really - makes me wanna sing Christmas carols to my heart's content. Oh how I wish Jen was here to share this great moment with me.

almost there.. hang on.

Tomorrow's the big day.. and I'm very nervous.. like a 10 yr-old boy seeing his crush walk down the campus. I had trouble getting a lot of sleep during the past couple of days. It's not because I didn't want to sleep but maybe because my brain just doesn't want me to. I've been reading and pushing lots of stuffs in my brain like hell up to this moment and now, it's time to put all of them into use. I've been waiting for this phone call like crazy and now that I got it, all I got to do is send this interview away from the pipeline. I've been waiting for this opportunity for a long time and now that its within my reach, I'll make sure that I nail this damn bastard down with all my that I have. Ho Yeah!! I'll nail you down for sure you big piece of ass!!

Imitation Of Life

Imitation Of Life

R.E.M.

Charades, pop skillWater hyacinth,

named by a poetImitation of life.

Like a koi in a frozen pond.

Like a goldfish in a bowl.

I don't want to hear you cry.

Thats sugarcane that tasted good.

Thats cinnamon, thats Hollywood.

C'mon, c'mon no one can see you try.

You want the greatest thing

The greatest thing since bread came sliced.

You've got it all, you've got it sized.

Like a Friday fashion show teenager

Freezing in the corner

Trying to look like you don't try.

Thats sugarcane that tasted good.

Thats cinnamon, thats Hollywood.

C'mon, c'mon no one can see you try.

No one can see you cry.

That sugar cane that tasted good.

That freezing rain, that's what you could.

C'mon, c'mon on no one can see you cry.

This sugarcane

This lemonade

This hurricane,

I'm not afraid.

C'mon, c'mon no one can see you cry.

This lightning storm

This tidal wave

This avalanche,

I'm not afraid.

C'mon, c'mon no one can see me cry.

That sugar cane that tasted good.

That's who you are, that's what you could.

C'mon, c'mon on no one can see you cry.

That sugar cane that tasted good.

That's who you are, that's what you could.

C'mon, c'mon on no one can see you cry.

Bits of KOTH

Here are some King of the Hill quotes that I find very funny :)
(from http://www.geocities.com/arlen_texas/kothquotes.htm)

HANK: So, are you Chinese or Japanese?
KAHN: I live in California last twenty years, but first come from Laos.
HANK: Huh?
KAHN: Laos. We Laotian.
BILL: The ocean? What ocean?
KAHN: We are Laotian. From Laos, stupid! It's a landlocked country in Southeast Asia. It's between Vietnam and Thailand, okay? Population 4.7 million.
HANK: So, are you Chinese or Japanese?

BILL: Even if they did serve us dog, I mean, who are we to judge other cultures?
HANK: Don't talk like that! The dog is man's best friend. You wouldn't eat your best friend, would you?
BILL: Of course not. Wait a minute, are we talking about some kind of lifeboat situation here? Because I don't want to commit myself.

LUANNE: Look, Aunt Peggy, I got my practice head! It's got real hair and everything!
PEGGY: Well, Luanne, it's a very nice hea --
LUANNE (pulls it away): DON'T TOUCH IT! Aunt Peggy, I can't let anything happen to this head before my final. This is my chance to prove it doesn't matter that I wasn't paying attention. I may not be book-smart, but I'm pretty-smart!

HANK: Just so you know, most states won't let you marry a plastic head.
BOBBY: I don't want to marry it! I just needed to practice my first kiss so I don't look like an idiot.
HANK: You're kissing a plastic head, and you're afraid of looking like an idiot?

HANK: We don't fish for the fish. Ninety percent of what I like about this sport -- and it is a sport -- is sitting in the boat doing nothing. And the icing on the cake is when God smiles on you and you hook one. And then when you're reeling it in, everything else falls away. You don't think about taxes or traffic or that pushy gal that's trying to get into the Citadel or who's going to take care of you when your mother and I are old and incapacitated. All there is is a man, a rod, a lake and a fish. And it all starts with a hand-dug American worm.
BOBBY: Uh, Dad...? Who is going to take care of me?

BOBBY: My dad says if God didn't want us to eat meat, he wouldn't have invented steak sauce. KID: Your dad says that?
BOBBY: Once.
MARIE: Bobby, did you know that the average person consumes five hundred chickens? That's enough chickens to feed an entire starving village. But they shouldn't eat them, because that's bad.

HANK: Who is calling me a liar, you or the machine? 'Cause I need to know whose ass to kick. CLERK: I'm not calling you a liar, sir.
HANK: Fine. Where's the ass on this thing?

BILL: I'm glad I'm not the only one who is disgusted by pornography. It's offensive! It's demeaning! It creates a standard of idealized beauty that your average man can't compete with. HANK: Don't worry, Bill, I'm not going to let my credit and good name be done in by a damn computer error.
DALE: Computers don't make errors. What they do, they do on purpose. By now your name and particulars have been fed into every laptop, desktop, mainframe and supermarket scanner that collectively make up the global information conspiracy, otherwise known as The Beast.
HANK: Dale, I'm having a problem with one videotape, not some high-tech boogyman.
DALE: You just be careful. Computers have already beaten the Communists at chess. Next thing you know, they'll be beating humans.

CONNIE: Parents are such a drag.
BOBBY: Yeah, they're always treating us like kids. We're not kids, we're pre-teens. Dammit.

HANK: Sounds to me like one of those pyramid schemes.
PEGGY: No, not at all. As the brochure describes it, it is not a pyramid, it is a triangle. And it is not a scheme, Hank, it is an opportunity. Good question, though.

DALE: Wait a minute. Every time I leave, you call John Redcorn. I know what's going on here. Your headaches are a desperate bid for my attention. But what do I do? I pawn you off on some Indian healer so I can have my Dale time at the gun club, or breeding show turtles, or on the Internet investigating unexplained phenomenona. God, I am so selfish!
NANCY: Stop blaming yourself, sug. In some ways, this is my fault too.
DALE: I don't deserve you.
NANCY: Of course you do. You are a sensitive, trusting, sweet, trusting man, and I don't deserve you.
DALE: Are you sure you're not an alien? 'Cause you just abducted my heart.

09042005

3 Years and Still Counting.. Rock On!! :)

Dead Fish

I remembered this one time when me and my girlfriend went on a date in SM North EDSA. We stumbled across this "love fortune telling machine" thingy. It was sitting just beside a Banco de Oro ATM, near the SM bakeshop, I think. This yellow love machine, well, it had many lights in it - and in the middle, decorated with some wacky font, it said that it was supposed to "judge" you on how "expert" you are with regards to the "love arena". You are supposed to place your left hand into this hole and the machine will try to predict how much of a lover are you by strange and hidden means (the whole process is entirely in a black box folks). Thinking that I could score a Love Casanova (it means that you are a love machine if you got that!) on this intriguing yet bogus machine, I immediately pulled my girlfriend's left hand just so she could see me triumph over this wacko. I was oozing with confidence back then. I even told her that I'd get the Casanova if I placed my hand there 'coz I was just so damn sweet. Well, you could say that it took me a lot of nerve from someone who understoond little about love. And so, without wasting anymore time, I reached out my pocket for a 5-peso coin, winked at her, placed my left hand into the contraption, and waited for 15 seconds while continually chanting the words "Casanova" inside my head. After 15 seconds of waiting, the machine finally replied..... well... it said that I'm a Dead Fish . Yep, that's right. And the worst part of it was that scoring a Dead Fish was the lowest score that you can get for using that machine. It was the least thing that I expected. I can understand scoring 2nd, 3rd, or even 4th to the highest.. but Dead Fish?!! man that stunk!! I mean didn't I get credit for making a lot of photo compositions of my girl at Corel? Or what about those sweet text messages that I composed myself? Or those other crazy love-related things that I made?! That would've count!! Well, surely, the machine didn't knew all of those. I mean for all I know, it probably would have just randomly selected an item from the list and then tell the person that "Okay, you are a dead fish. You are doomed for all eternity. Go home and just watch TV, loser". Anyway, the machine didn't give a clear interpretation as to what scoring a Dead Fish really meant. But also, im pretty sure that it doesn't take a rocket scientist just to figure out what scoring the lowest possible score and being tagged as Dead Fish really meant. It's pretty self explanatory... and to me, it simply means this - you just plainly suck at love. Well anyway, after a brief moment of shock, my mind returned back to Earth from its trip to "Mt. Ego" and with it were ammunitions of excuses for scoring Dead Fish that I was about to throw to my girlfriend. Well, she just laughed.. and said.. "Yuck". And what happened afterwards was history.

Back then, I really didn't accept that score and thought that the machine was just plainly bogus. But lately, I've been thinking that well, maybe the machine was right all along.. maybe I really was a Dead Fish and all this time, I've just been trying to act cool and patch things up just so I could pretend to be someone that I really am not. For someone who can't express clearly how he feels when there a lot of feelings to be told, for someone who doesn't feel a lot of anger when there are things to be angry about, for someone who forgets to care when care is needed the most, and for someone who neglects all the important things in life and blindly follows what he believes is more important.. well, that sounded a lot like Dead Fish to me.. and that surely did sounded a lot like me. Maybe the machine really did see what was beyond the me that I knew. Maybe I got more than what I invested out of the 5-peso coin that I dropped on the love machine. Maybe my girlfriend deserved more than just a Dead Fish boyfriend all along. It must have been almost like hell most of the time for her being with me - and for that, I feel really sorry. I know I can't change that now. What's gone is gone. But what I can do is just go on with my life and try to improve myself so that the next time I step on that Love Fortune Telling Machine, I'll score a Love Casanova.. errr.. maybe not that far.. maybe the 2nd to the last.. or maybe 3rd.. well, you know what, anything's good as long as its not Dead Fish! After all, I'm a hard working guy, not a genius. And just like I always say to myself, everything can be achieved with hard work.

-fin-

A Symphony of Light and Sound: Project Genesis

Well, first things first. I've ditched the entire zombie killing game. I've shifted my interest into something more interesting - towards interpreting sound through fine demonstration of computer graphics. It'll be like those media player visualizations - only that mine will be sequential. The concept that the CG will portray will be about the creation of earth - from the Archean to Phanerozoic eon (that is, from bacterias to end of Ice Age). Hence, it is absolutely essential for me to grasp some of the advanced rendering techniques OpenGL has to offer in order to produce breath-taking but non-photo realistic scene.. and as a preparation for this, I've enrolled myself in a CG class in BCIT and have dumped my two Java courses. This was a huge risk that I have to take in order to accelerate the development of my portfolio.

Getting back to the project, I'll probably have to mix a number of techno / rave sounds in order to produce an impression of the earth in the process of being created. And in line with this, I've already laid down the tracks for the portal scene (1st scene). I've selected the Shumacher track by DJ Visage. The 1st scene will last for 1.21 minutes and will portray our hero entering the portal and travelling back through time. This scene's gonna be good! I've gotta lot of good stuffs running in my head right now but the question is.. can I implement it? Well, only time will tell.

Anyway, here's some of the practice work that I've been doing lately. Here's a Gouraud-shaded scene, with dynamic lighting, environment mapping, and multitexturing applied to it.

14 x 7

That game programming summer class was a tough one.. I only had 6 weeks to do a whole lot of of things and boy, it sure kept me sitting in front of the computer 14 hours a day, 7 days a week. If I think about it again, it's really up to the learner to make the subject as tough as hell. If you want to gain more, then you'll have to work even harder. I'm kinda sad that its over but hey, I really enjoyed that summer class. Here are some of my creations within the class. I worked really hard on these reels so I hope that you'll enjoy it:

The tools used for these are the following:

Graphics Engine: OpenGL
Programming Platform: VC7 ++, Win32
2D Visuals (Textures, Splash Screens, etc.): Adobe Photoshop 7.0, Terragen
3D Model: 3DS Max Model and Quake 2 Model (via MilkShape)
3D Audio: OpenAL

Cybershrine

Easter Egg Hunt

Stream Valley

Underground Volcano

Spider Infestation

Going under water in Easter Egg Hunt

This fall, i'm gonna start making my portfolio. If everything goes well, then I'll be able to submit my demo reel in one of 'em big gaming companies and hopefully, they'll be generous enough to offer me a job ;) This will be a 3-month effort so it'll really be a tough one. I was initially planning to do a game on Naruto but I realized that my 3D modeling skills just plainly sucked so I decided to just go to a 1st or 3rd person shooting game whose plot isn't really that grand. It's like this: You're in charge of manning a gun tower and your task is to prevent the horde of zombies from getting inside the fallout camp and have a picnic out of the flesh of the town's last survivors during a virus outbreak. You'll have various weapons at your disposal but be wary that as the level increases, the zombies exponentially increases in number.. oh, and did I mention that they also become tougher? So, what do you think?

Anyway, just this afternoon, I borrowed Physics, Trigonometry and Geometry books from the library. I'll be using them as a reference as I go one with the project. I also bought this game by Microsoft called Dungeon Siege 2. I planned on gaining some more insights as to how I can apply real-game concepts into my portfolio but it turned out that I'm enjoying playing it more than just doing an observation on the game. Well, whatever happens, I'll see through this until the end and make sure that the job gets done even if it takes me 24x7.. uh.. well maybe not that far ;)