The weekend before the one before the last might have witnessed the wisest thing I've done in a long, long time.
I've said it time and again that I'm interested in making computer games, but that is all I have ever done. Talk, blabber, give gyaan and preach on why I wanna make games.. but apart from a tic-tac-toe back in school, I've never done anything close to a game. Who am I kidding, I suck at coding. The very thought of coding makes me feel low. I don't know where it all went wrong. I loved to code back in school. Watching your code do even the simplest thing brought a great deal of happiness and amazement!
But, somehow, undergrad changed it all. I love to brag about my sucky coding skills, I don't know why :-/ Its so easy to prove the whole thing. The first time I encountered a Segmentation fault was in my internship at Cisco, which would be the 7th semester in an undergrad curriculum. Yeah, true story. They even hired me after that. If you don't know stuff, use humor to fake your way out or get a good looking number as your gpa. The latter is the most over-rated shit ever.
Anyways, coding isn't a big deal. Its just like anything else in life.. if you wanna get better at it, keep doing it more often! As usual, I've blabbered enough unnecessary content. I'll try to stop digressing from the topic for once. I signed up for this Global Game Jam thingy, which is a 48 hour marathon during which the participants (form teams) and attempt to make a game on a theme that is unveiled at the start of the event. It was to start Friday 1700 hours and go on till Sunday 1700. I knew I would be a misfit there among the artists and coders, and given that Friday night had a DJ with a huge ABCD gathering, there were definitely much better things to do in life!
But no, not this time.. I couldn't let go of this rare opportunity. So, I reached the venue and it had the most amazing facilities ever. After all, it was a research center for Educational Games and any department in Madison would offer better facilities than the Computer Science building.
Just 8 participants. That was kinda lame, but then I didn't really care. Soon, teams were formed and various suggestions around the theme 'deception' were offered. I hated almost all of them :-/.
Four hours passed quickly and I was like WTF, mebbe I should have just gone to the DJ. The organizers made me feel a lot better though and I was still searching for an innovative game theme. Nothing good yet :(
I've never really brain-stormed in a group ever before.. well actually, I take that back. I've brainstormed hell a lot, and with a lot of people as well, but its always been about making cool strategies in those addictive computer games. And thus, the white board has always been more of an can-you-draw board for me. Its amazing what ideas come out if you just attempt to write your thoughts out.
In 15 minutes, the whole scenario changed. Some random stream of thoughts were manipulated into what I felt was an awesome game idea. There was consensus in the team, and with two artists, two programmers and one joker (yours truly), things were looking good! After a good nights sleep and a sumptuous breakfast of bagels and donuts, we got to work. The next twelve hours were just fantastic. The artists Raffi and James were coming up with brilliant stuff and Ryan, Will and I were getting some chunks of code to do stuff with the art. It wasn't complicated at all, but then C# and XNA were alien to me a day back. There were lots of design changes as some of the initial ideas were just too complicated to implement in such a short time. We settled for something simpler and with the artists coming up with neat lookin' stuff, we just needed a working game. At 1500 hours on Sunday, we were finally done and pretty satisfied with the outcome. A very very simple game, that looked kinda nice coz of the neat art, called Hare-y Care-y (harey = rabbit, carey = carrot).
If you're so jobless, you can check out the game here. (there is a problem with the source code zip though..)
Looking back at some of the games made at GGJ 2010, ours is nothing. Just check out this and also this. You'll be shocked with the creativity people possess. This is the icing on the cake for me (so far), though this wasn't made at the GGJ.
I've been postponing both this post and a link to the installer version of the game for a while.
Hopefully, I'll do the latter by the next weekend. Sionara!
Feb 21, 2010
Feb 12, 2010
The real meaning of Bazzinga
I've finally accomplished something in life, however fleeting it might be. To be ranked 1 against the billions of web pages google indexes for 'The meaning of Bazzinga' is quite shocking and flattering, more so, because the post it appeared on had only the individual words in a completely different context.
The attention seems to stem from the Latin/South American countries and from Southern Europe. I guess those who searched for it were interested in knowing the etymology of Bazzinga.
Poor souls, redirected by the wise sage Google to this blog containing kilotons of crap.
For the uninitiated, anything that sounds like Bazzinga (or Bazinga or the most recent mod, BUZZinga..) had its roots in the awesome sitcom 'The Big Bang Theory' wherein Sheldon Cooper uses it to add the icing on the cake to his 'pranks' or 'successful attempts at fooling others'. I wonder how the last sentence will translate into other languages, with all the added complications. It might sound like a cake recipe. Oh well :-/
Apart from cementing my place as the world's renowned scholar on this post's title, its just unbelievable where we're headed to. Information at the click of a mouse, at the touch of a screen, available to anyone. Its been there for almost a decade now, but it struck me only recently on how different things are. The web has changed everything, EVERYTHING! 15 years back, having those hefty encyclopedia's at home was the ultimate knowledge base. Anything you wanted to know back then was surely listed in those limited books and I used to be quite shocked on how almost everything could be condensed into a bookshelf. Cisco's Viking Router advertisement strikes me as I typed that. Quoting from their site, "400 gigabits capability that is akin to sustain a flow of 20 Niagara Falls passing through it every second or downloading a digital library of every book ever written in any language in a single hour." Sure, it makes a great advertisement, but then the magnitude is VERY shocking!
We have all the entertainment we need at the push of a few buttons, access to anything we'd like to know more about via a simple Internet connection. Where do we go from here? I remember an article in Gamasutra that listed the top entries for 'What games would be like in 10 years' which just blew me away. There were such insane stories, so out-of-this-world, brilliantly creative to say the very least.
Though the question has been posed several times, I never bothered to think about it. I seemed to have lost my 'thinking cap' and a lot of hair with it when the dot-com bubble burst :x
I'm sure there are many others, who'd agree that they've almost stopped thinking after the advent of the search engine. What could be more easier than typing a query and allowing electrons to figure out everything for you? If within a decade of web explosion, this is the state, I wonder what it would be like in the future. May be, the future isn't far away or in other words, the end is near. December 2012. The End.
The attention seems to stem from the Latin/South American countries and from Southern Europe. I guess those who searched for it were interested in knowing the etymology of Bazzinga.
Poor souls, redirected by the wise sage Google to this blog containing kilotons of crap.
For the uninitiated, anything that sounds like Bazzinga (or Bazinga or the most recent mod, BUZZinga..) had its roots in the awesome sitcom 'The Big Bang Theory' wherein Sheldon Cooper uses it to add the icing on the cake to his 'pranks' or 'successful attempts at fooling others'. I wonder how the last sentence will translate into other languages, with all the added complications. It might sound like a cake recipe. Oh well :-/
Apart from cementing my place as the world's renowned scholar on this post's title, its just unbelievable where we're headed to. Information at the click of a mouse, at the touch of a screen, available to anyone. Its been there for almost a decade now, but it struck me only recently on how different things are. The web has changed everything, EVERYTHING! 15 years back, having those hefty encyclopedia's at home was the ultimate knowledge base. Anything you wanted to know back then was surely listed in those limited books and I used to be quite shocked on how almost everything could be condensed into a bookshelf. Cisco's Viking Router advertisement strikes me as I typed that. Quoting from their site, "400 gigabits capability that is akin to sustain a flow of 20 Niagara Falls passing through it every second or downloading a digital library of every book ever written in any language in a single hour." Sure, it makes a great advertisement, but then the magnitude is VERY shocking!
We have all the entertainment we need at the push of a few buttons, access to anything we'd like to know more about via a simple Internet connection. Where do we go from here? I remember an article in Gamasutra that listed the top entries for 'What games would be like in 10 years' which just blew me away. There were such insane stories, so out-of-this-world, brilliantly creative to say the very least.
Though the question has been posed several times, I never bothered to think about it. I seemed to have lost my 'thinking cap' and a lot of hair with it when the dot-com bubble burst :x
I'm sure there are many others, who'd agree that they've almost stopped thinking after the advent of the search engine. What could be more easier than typing a query and allowing electrons to figure out everything for you? If within a decade of web explosion, this is the state, I wonder what it would be like in the future. May be, the future isn't far away or in other words, the end is near. December 2012. The End.
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