doqunbop's adventures in real and virtual life and in between

College

2010-09-13T13:54:00.001+02:00

Here I am again - writing an entry into the blog after quite some time of silence. Many things have happened and changed during this time - including my game projects.

As you may already know, I started my college education two weeks ago. My education is 5 years Master of Sciences in Computer Game and Program Development. For that, I have moved to a whole new city.

The Side World project therefore has been put to a stop, hence my teammate is now 400km away from me. The project wasn't really moving on either - I got the physics working, but didn't find the inspiration to fix anything more than that since then. Unless I find some inspiration to continue Side World and/or find a convenient way for working in a team of two over internet - the project remains frozen.

Ok, this was the boring part of the post, I guess. Now comes the more fun part: as a part of a course at the college, we've made a game as an exercise and last night I created another game for my examination (we have small examinations each 3 weeks, so expect more games to be documented ^^).

The exercise was to create an aquarium - a simple game containing a background, a few non-animated fishes, a simple auto-pilot and a score-counting. On top of it, we added special score options: double-bite, tripple-bite and awesome multi-bite. It's as simple as eating up more than one fish within like 0.5 seconds to get these special scores ^^

The examination game is a WhackTheRabbit - a simple WhackTheMole clone, simplified to only 3 holes in a row. Yeah, guess it was that simple to explain it :D

I might upload some screenshots and maybe even the games themselves later on. ;)

Collisions, collisions...

2010-07-22T20:47:00.001+02:00

Have been struggling with collision detection for the past few weeks now, it's beginning to get on my nerves. Luckily I found a ready-to-use 2D physics engine for XNA - just what I need! The engine includes not only basic collisions, but a whole realistic physics including friction, forces, edge normals etc.

Well, now the problem lies in understanding how the engine works and implementing it in the existing code. So far it's not been working as expected :D Oh well, let's hope I manage to solve it :P

Added support for an Xbox 360 controller

2010-07-07T08:39:00.001+02:00

Tab had loaned me his XNA book and his Xbox 360 controller here for me to play with a bit. So, what is it I'm doing first when I decide to code something more on the game? Of course, I add the support for the controller to the game :)

It was not hard at all, generally only these few lines:

GamePadState gamePad = GamePad.GetState(PlayerIndex.One);
bool moveLeft = Keyboard.GetState().IsKeyDown(Keys.Left)
    || gamePad.IsButtonDown(Buttons.DPadLeft);
bool moveRight = Keyboard.GetState().IsKeyDown(Keys.Right)
    || gamePad.IsButtonDown(Buttons.DPadRight);
bool run = Keyboard.GetState().IsKeyDown(Keys.LeftControl)
    || gamePad.IsButtonDown(Buttons.X);
bool jump = Keyboard.GetState().IsKeyDown(Keys.Up)
    || Keyboard.GetState().IsKeyDown(Keys.Space)
    || gamePad.IsButtonDown(Buttons.DPadUp)
    || gamePad.IsButtonDown(Buttons.A);

This and poof, the controller is now working with the game :) The rewriting of collision detection still remains -_-'

P.S. Yes, the controller works with Windows without any weird unofficial drivers or adapters. In fact, the controller is designed with a USB contact and has official Windows drivers for full support on Windows.

New game project - Side World

2010-07-06T16:58:00.000+02:00

Hello again! I've not been very active here on my blog, I know. Despite that it's summer holidays for me, I've had pretty much to do anyway.

Many hours of my precious time took the Order of the Stick webcomic (Warning: Do not begin to read the webcomic if you can't afford to loose many hours reading it!). Also, I've not caught up with the webcomics The Phoenix Requiem, Dreamless and Ctrl+Alt+Del comic; I've in fact not read any of these three for like 2 months, I'll have to find some time to catch up with them.

Apart from that, I've done some upgrades to the FireSquare website, so it looks more professional now :) Last night I was fixing a glitch that took me 2 hours to fix (when I had finally found the most likely cause), because of another glitch with the webserver's configuration -_-'

Also, during this time, I've met a hobby game developer, just like me, living in the same city! ^_^ (Which is quite surprising, imo :P) You can call him Tab ^^

So, we've met a few times and began working on a new game project together - for fun, for experience and for making a good game :)

Well, generally speaking, my browser-based game project is still on a freeze and will be so for the whole summer, and probably longer. But there's another game project going on that I will try to document in this very blog as well, as the project progresses. So, here goes the introduction of the project itself.

As you can read in the title, the current game's title is Side World. The game is going to be a 2D platform-like game with elements of RPG in it. Other than that, we both have many ideas that we've not yet decided whether to include or not, so we will decide on them as we go. ^^

The game is being developed in C# with help of XNA, which means that it could be ported to Xbox 360 without much trouble. Cool, isn't it? :)

We've done some basic graphics and some basic physics (basic for me, advanced for Tab :D), but the collision detection has to be reworked, as it's a bit buggy now when united with the movement, and is even more buggy if applying some advanced things (which are always cool to have in games ^^). So, there's nothing more than a basic map and movement implemented at the moment.

We've used some random sprites from the internet, and we chose MegaMan sprites as a temporary solution while testing the game. Of course, we'll replace them with proper and original sprites later on. The clouds in the background were quickly made by me.

Here are two screenshots of how the game looks at the moment:

There's still much to do, so stay in touch, as I will be posting more about the game as it progresses ;)

Yay for the summer holidays!

2010-06-12T18:55:00.005+02:00

It's been like three months since my last post. (No, I'm still alive =P) I've been very busy during this time with other things, school taking the most of my time. However, now I've finished the gymnasium and have summer holidays, yay! ^_^

Well, it's been a week since the beginning of the summer holidays. I've been looking for a summer job to secure some income for me so that I'd have some money in the pocket when I move to another city to study. I have to move because it's the only city that offers the education of Master of Sciences in Game and Software Development, which is exactly what I want to do. Yes, I'm serious about becoming a game developer (as you can notice by the blog I made solely for sharing my game developing experiences.

Anyways, I've not found any summer jobs (yet, at least), so I have a bit more of the free time. During the past week, besides seeking a summer job, I've been reworking FireSquare's website (FireSquare is my friend's private World of Warcraft server), hence the current website is pretty slow, unoptimized and some parts of the current websystem don't work due to the database being constantly updated. Anyway, now I'm integrating a forum system with a new website, though some issues have already appeared during the development, that I'm trying to solve.
Here's the current website of FireSquare: www.firesquare.net
Here's the site in development: www.firesquare.net/test.php

I hope to be done with the FireSquare website until the end of the next week and finally continue my browser-based game by then. I just hope I won't get lost in my own code again =D

Well, that's my current situation in short ^_^ Going to play some WoW with a friend now, I guess =)

Programming a computer game

2010-03-23T18:10:00.003+01:00

It has been a week since I wrote into this blog the last time. I have been busy, and therefore thought I have nothing more to write about yet... but then I remembered that I haven't written about my game that I am developing yet - and that's one of the main reasons I began writing this blog!

Ever since I began learning programming, I've tried to make my own computer game. There've been various attempts, simple games, big games, working alone and working in team.

The first game I remember programming all by myself was a Snake. A simple Snake game programmed with Pascal in the DOS console. It was a part of my programming course, the only I've taken in whole my life (if not counting the programming lessons at school, where I don't really learn much new).

Then there was a 3D application I made just to be able to draw lines and polygons in the 3D-space. I didn't know of any 3D API back then, so I wrote my own Pascal library that would have functions to take in 3D coordinates and translate them to 2D coordinates to be shown on the screen. Also, I wrote my own class for storing these coordinates for objects, and methods for storing them to a file, and reading them.

These were two of my greatest programs I have ever written. The code and the programs are now lost, I suppose (well, the only place they could still be at right now is the very old '95 laptop we still might have at our place in Latvia).

As I got better at programming, I twice tried to recruit groups of interested people for making our own computer game. The first time I tried to inspire my friends to join me and to learn programming, with my help, but then I found that their inspiration and will to make their own computer games wasn't sufficient to keep them interested to learn programming.

The second time I recruited volunteery experienced programmers with interest into making a computer game during one month and then I hoped them to be as engaged into making the game from a scratch. However, I found out that these programming "professionals" couldn't work without a fixed programming design (it's a document showing all the parts of the game as objects, their attributes and actions, as well as relations between each other). Of course, I didn't have one, and I couldn't make it because I want all the team to be involved into decision making and do these decisions on the run.

So, a team won't work until I have a solid base for the game, at least.

During this time I had improved my web-developing skills greatly, which is why I decided to give a browser-based game a try.

Two years ago I made a simple persistent browser-based role playing game (PBBRPG) called Next Planet - where players each have one character with 6 different stats (strength, precision, percepcion, defence, evasion and deflection) that would increase during the combats. If you're attacked, and the attacker misses, for example, you gain some experience in evasion. If you've blocked an attack, you gain some exp. in deflection, and have a chance to gain an additional attack (chance increases with higher percepcion). Strength, precision, defence and evasion are pretty straight-forward skills, I guess, so I won't explain them in detail as I did with deflection and percepcion.

The combat itself, though, was just as simple as - click "Attack a monster" button and just spamming the "Attack" button to kill the random enemy.

Not much for a game, so I tried to add more things, like inventory. However, as I tried to program it, the code got all more like a spaghetti and wouldn't work. Finally, I gave it up.

After some time I made several other attempts to make a new game with the same ideas as for the previous game and even the same title, but this time one of them was as a school project (I love when you can decide what you want to work with!) and two were simple experiments of 3D graphical engines, trying to make something game-like from them.
None of them got any further than moving around in a 3D world.

During this school year, I began working on a new computer game again, and again as a school project. It was a browser-based game, intended to be a PBBRPG again, but never got to that stage. Again, it was only moving around the world, which was 2D this time. Also, we would show our projects in an exhibition in the school at the end of February. A few days before the exhibition, I realised there'd be nothing much to show (who would be fascinated by moving around in a 3D world without being able to do anything else?), so I remembered the game I made two years ago, found it on my D:\ (the partition I use to store all the files I might ever need in the future), repaired it (hadn't exported the databases, so had to make new ones based on the code) and had it with me on the exhibition together with my newest game.

My best friend, Jenny, would find my game very interesting (more interesting than anything else on the exhibition), so she'd just sit there and play it ^_^ Some of my classmates also showed interest in that old game and tried it, and they liked it, even though it was very simple for a game (the only thing that kept it interesting to play, I guess, was the Top15 board, where players would compete one to each other). So this gave me the inspiration to continue with my old game.

When analyzing all the code I had written two years ago, I realized how spaghetti it was and knew I had to organize it before I can work on with the game. Since then I've been rewriting big portions of the game, reorganizing some objects (classes) and databases, as well as structurizing the client-server communication, which was the biggest spaghetti of everything. Well, this far I'm done already, but there were some more improvements I decided to make on the way instead of simply fixing the old, boring functionality, the biggest of the changes being moving the profile page to the side instead of having it in a seperate page (to always see your HP, even if you load another page while in combat), and the combat itself, where I'm trying to implement a few different attack skills for better control over how the character stats grow. Also, the visual layout of the combat needed some changes.

While I feel I'm close to finishing the changes, I haven't had much time during these two last weeks to spend on programming this game. And when I had time, I have been tired or simply didn't have the inspiration to program anything at all. Besides, there is some programming work waiting for me, some bug-fixes and additions to a websystem I've developted for a company.

Next week will be the Easter Holidays for me, so I hope to be able to finish off these changes and finally publish my updated (pre-)alpha version of the game on the internet.

The old games I'm working on are still on my hard drive and I intend to resume working on them when I'm done with this game, so I had to rename Next Planet to something other, as all the games I've been working since then share the same name. For now, I've named it Next Realm, but if you have any better suggestion for a medieval fantasy game title (with parts indicating the beginning of the industrial times), then do let me know!

Now back to seeing some Xena episodes :)

My nickname, doqunbop

2010-03-16T23:04:00.006+01:00

A friend of mine, Põkk, by his nickname in World of Warcraft, asked me where is my nickname from. Well, here's the conversation we had on MSN:

17:50:18	Põkk	a question to you
17:50:26	Põkk	from where comes the name (or nickname) doqunbop?
17:51:05	Martin	I made it up
17:52:02	Martin	I wanted to keep the "d" at the beginning from my previous nicknames
17:52:19	Martin	and I wanted the name be in the style of illuminati - if you turn it 180°, it's still the same
17:52:33	Põkk	oooo
17:52:34	Põkk	it is :D
17:52:39	Martin	so, I added some random letters and got a nickname
17:52:43	Põkk	it's illuminati!!!!!!!
17:52:51	Põkk	breakthrough!
17:53:08	Põkk	lol it is
17:53:13	Põkk	good job with this one mate
17:53:15	Põkk	(Y)
17:53:17	Martin	random - as letters that have opposing letters, if turned 180°
17:53:20	Põkk	i wouldnt've come to it
17:53:24	Martin	heh
17:53:24	Põkk	:(
17:53:29	Põkk	make one for me too :D:D
17:53:34	Põkk	starts with M
17:53:36	Põkk	:)
17:54:06	Martin	Mofjow xD
17:54:24	Põkk	O_o
17:54:29	Martin	not as the same when turned around 180°, but can be stylized to be so
17:54:37	Põkk	Moqunbow :P
17:54:48	Põkk	kinda lame
17:55:04	Martin	MunW
17:55:04	Põkk	wannabe rainbow
17:55:16	Martin	MuonW
17:56:13	Martin	MososoW
17:56:20	Martin	or MossoW
17:56:54	Põkk	oo

Though of writing more about today, but then decided not to. I created this blog to be interesting, to write about the stuff that many people would be interested to hear about, such as the progress with my game, such as my memories, my experience as being a foreigner in Sweden - and not the boring days when I have no time left to do what I want to do.

Well, now that I've said it, I guess that's all I wanted to tell. I'll be watching an episode of Xena, the warrior princess and then will be going to sleep.

Goodnight!

Monday evening, feeling the lack of time

2010-03-16T00:29:00.003+01:00

Monday is at the end. School, visiting an exhibition of many Youth Business ideas (youth having made companies with some unique business ideas) where I met a few classmates, and then an evening with queer youth, where we always have some fun through simply playing some games or talking.

I'm tired and feel like I'm lacking words to describe my day more than this. I also feel that I'm lacking the time to do what I need and want to do.

Firstly, the short term works include writing the excercise for the Environment-friendly Development project at school, and fixing different languages for my mother's company's website (which shouldn't be very hard). Also, I have to prepare a speech exercise for my Swedish lesson until thursday.

The longer term work includes some fixes and some bigger improvements for a websystem I have developed and sold to a company, as well as programming my own game.
Apart from these works I have to accomplish, I wish I had more time to sit by the computer to watch some movies, more time to play piano, more time for my friends, more time for playing games, as well as more time for just taking it easy.

I feel like I might have done some of these things already, if I had prioritized them above my friends and other stuff, like my birthday, which I had on saturday. Anyway, I hope I can get most of these things done by friday, because this and the next weekend I'll be having a programming competition through the internet, which I have to be prepared for, if I want to win and possibly move onwards to the international competitions. I begin to doubt if I even want to try, of if it'd be best to skip it to do the other things I will eventually have to get done.

Monday evening - a time of doubt and tirement. I can only hope that tomorrow morning will bring me a brighter mood and more power.

Goodnight!

Who am I?

2010-03-15T09:38:00.003+01:00

As promised, I would tell you about myself in this second post.

My name is Mārtiņš, or simply Martin for international use. I was born in a city called Jūrmala, in Latvia on Tuesday, 13th March 1990. My natural hair color is a bit dark blonde, though I have had it colored red, and now it's colored brown (though the color is fading).

I am about 1.75m tall (haven't measured my height in like two years), weight about 62kg, and the size of my cock is... wait, you really thought I'd be writing this in my blog? xD

Throughout my life so far, I've lived 9 years in Jūrmala, 7 years in Rīga and now I am living in the city of Örebro, in Sweden. As for what happened during this time, that's another bunch of memories I will write about some time later.

So, I guess you still want to know more about me. So, how about my interests?
Since long ago, I got interested in video games, much like everyone else who tried them, and after some time decided that I'd want to try to make my own game. Just like many of the others, I tried game making tools, which make the work much easier, but I was not satisfied - that was not the kind of game I wanted to make. It was not unique at all. So, I decided to learn programming.
This interest, this goal has given me the inspiration for me to learn everything I know in programming nowadays. I have more than 6 years of experience in programming now.

Video games and programming... what else?... Music! I have been music-interested quite a long time in my life, but was never able to take any music courses or be able to get my hands on a musical instrument, as my mother simply couldn't afford it. Though now, after I moved to Sweden, I was able to get my hands on a synthisizer, and later on - a piano. It has been more than two years now, and I'm still training to play it. I have learned to play more than 10 full songs on it.

There are more small things that catch my interest, such as sometimes I like drawing or taking photographs, sewing or knitting. Generally I am a jack of all trades, but master of none... wait, no, I am a master at programming - well, kind of ^^

One more thing I want to share about my interests is that I am interested in the universe, the space-travel etc. I would love to be a part of the team of establishing colonies on other planets, and even travel there myself.

Hmm... before finishing off this post, I guess I could also write some of my dislikes. There are not many, but well... I dislike reading most of the time, as books take long time to read and I can never sit down comfortably with one in my hands. I also dislike people who can't accept other people's points of view, but try to persuade that their point of view is the only correct one. I dislike wars. And I dislike the abuse of animals - when animals are grown within four walls, they never get to see the daylight and run in the wild nature.

These are the most important interests and dislikes I have, the general information about where I've lived and how I look. If you feel that something is missing, feel free to leave a comment, so I can complement this post with that information ;)

Now I'll be on my way to school, so I wish you a nice day and will be writing again this evening, I suppose.

The very first entry: Starting this blog

2010-03-14T23:21:00.004+01:00

Hello there.

Well, a few days - maybe even more than a week - ago a friend of mine, Janina, asked me if I was blogging (as she already knew I'm computer interested, I guess she assumed I'd be blogging as well). That brought me back some memories.

I have tried blogging before, when I was learning web-programming - a typical work is to make a blog engine. Back then I didn't have much to talk about. My life was pretty much a routine of waking up, going to school, then coming home directly afterwards and playing computer games. The same routine all the time - and nothing of interest to talk about.

But now - now it has changed. My life is as it has never been before - unpredictable, exciting and fun. Sometimes it's a bit tough, sad and depressive, but that's still much better than having the life I had before... before I moved to Sweden.

So, thanks to Janina's question, I have decided to start blogging and share my life's experiences with everyone who is interested in it. :)

For those of you who don't know who I am, or knows me only partially, I'll be presenting myself in the next post.

As for the content of this blog, I intend to write my real life, gaming, programming experiences as well as memories to this blog.

I wish you a pleasant time reading this blog ;)