2nd Place Ain't Too bad Honey

Hey everyone :).
Now I feel slightly more rested than the last time I posted here (but only slightly ;P). I'm working part time over at 7 Studios www.sevenstudios.com as an Engineering Intern and going to class on every other day. They're in big-time crunch right now and I'm trying to help out but it's hard with school, haha. Still, I am super excited to be working at a real (fairly large) game company, livin' the dream.

--The cherry on top--
Tuesday was the pitch / presentation for the Second Annual Westwood Game Competition. I think we delivered a pretty good pitch, and the judges asked me to demo the game afterwards. I think that because of lack of tutorial menus / proper documentation they really were at a loss beforehand. However, they seemed really impressed after the demo, not only with the dynamic (original!) music that was presented, but also the vast amount of work that went into creating unique AIs that interacted with each other.

It's always cool to be in a competition and see other teams of people who've been working on games as well. I really enjoy interacting with people who have the same passions as I do.

Anyways, around 7pm the presentation started. The judges were Justin Lloyd, Voldi Way, Dave Kosak, and David Perry. All very cool people, and coincidentally I've had some sort of strange involvement with all of them in the past. xD
So the awards thing was rather long at around 2 hours, and many of the games won awards. My game: Harmony, was actually the first to win an award which was for "Best Use of Flash". I'm really proud of it because they went on to tell me what they meant by the award, which is that they were impressed by all of the RTS elements and all the music going dynamically. I really take that award to be sort of a Programmer's award, and it makes me proud to be recognized in such a way :).

More awards were given out: Best Pitch, Best Concept, and then a sort of reflective bit where the judges talked about their impressions of every game.

As the ceremony neared a close, it was revealed that there was to be 3 placing awards. My personal favorite game (other than my own) called 'Awesome' won 3rd place, Harmony won 2nd, and a game called 'Glide with the Wind' won 1st.

In my opinion, glide with the wind was actually fun and addictive, but also very simple and not very innovative (not that innovation is a rubric for greatness). Not exactly my kind of game, but I respect the judges choosing it.

In the end- I came back with a lot of feedback on how to make Harmony better, and quite a few people told me they loved the designs (which is a credit to Cameron!) and several people also told me they loved the music (which is a credit to Vincent!). Together, we made a really cool game that I want to continue to make better. I think we could have a chance of making something big out of it, but it's going to take a bit more work ;D.

Talk at you guys soon.

The wonders of crunch

Hey guys. I'm running on about 3 hours accumulative sleep for the past couple of days. I worked all last night in order to get my game as done as could be for the Second Annual Westwood Game Competition.

How do I feel?

Really freakin' tired. As for the game goes, I'm actually really proud of myself, and everyone who worked on the game. I think for 2 and a half months in a new language / development environment we did pretty freaking well.

My only real concerns at this point are with the path finding the game. Right now it's a bit glitchy and it actually really hinders gameplay. While I think the game is pretty fun, it needs a little bit more polish time to work out the movement code. One solution I came up with while working on the code was that I should use some sort of a graph / node system to determine which positions on the screen are occupied and handle collision response.

This is probably the opportune solution but I came up with it too late. It would probably take me about a week at least to gut all of my movement code, implement a graph system, and implement all new movement code based on the new system.

So here's the brightside-- While the game is finalized for the judges tomorrow at 4pm (and I'll be at my first day at work at a new company! :D), I don't see or talk to the judges for another week. I'm going to try and use this time to implement a new system. I'm really hoping that the path finding issues that are there won't inhibit players' (and the judges) ability to enjoy the game, but I intend on fixing it soon anyway so we'll see.

Alright, I've gone on for long enough. Here's the link to my page on the competition site!

http://2dgames08.westwood-anaheim.com/Harmony/Harmony.html