Gateway To Hell

The second month of the two thousand and fifth year anno domini witnessed the much awaited LAN facility to every hostel room at the BITS-Pilani Goa campus become a reality. To a reader outside India, this would seem like a joke. But sadly, most engineering colleges in India couldn't offer such luxury to their students back then, and many don't even now. BITSAA, the alumni association of BITS-Pilani, pooled in to create a state-of-the-art Internet and LAN facility in Pilani and if my memory serves me right, I think they were partly responsible for the facility at Goa as well.
Anyways (its baffling how often I start a new para with this word :x), the seven months before that, students of the very first batch of the Goa campus didn't have much to do within the campus premises. Normal time-pass activities were limited to chitchat, TT, carrom and exploring Goa's beaches. All this was about to be overhauled by 100 mega bits per second LAN!

Getting straight to the subject, gaming took over the life of a good number of the students, with the RTS marvels Age of Empires/Mythology and the FPS masterpiece Counter Strike becoming a common sight in every wing. The junior batch landed in soon enough and forming gaming clans became a necessity. A bunch of fanatics and good buddies from the 2004 batch formed a clan called Gateway to Hell aka G+H, the naming credits going to Maali aka Hulk. Many people think I exaggerate the lifestyle we had in undergrad. Clocking in at least 8 hours of gaming every damn day, with peaks of 16 to 18 hours, the virtual life seemed a million times better than reality. Actually, reality and virtuality (which apparently isn't a word.. :-/) merged in such an abstruse fashion that I couldn't differentiate them. The junior batch were equally good at Counter Strike, with BRAS and @$ featuring in some epic clashes with us. And there were other awesome clans from our batch like O2, FyF, bmp, etc (my memory is short-lived..), but unlike most of the clans which kept changing their squads, ours was a stable lineup throughout the three years we played this gem of a game.

Strangely, I'm not able to remember how it all came about. Ani (maverick), Chaitu (sc/bozo) and I (kissofdeath), being from CS (expand it as you wish..) used to play AoM and Warcraft prior to CS, and we used to hangout a lot together. VPk (gay) was no where near the terror of the player he came to be when we all started. I still remember him camping a lot in the initial stages which used to atract a lot of banter! Somehow the joom lens of a sniper changed everything. Meanwhile, Giri (thu) and Tinku also joined in the addictive fun, and we became good buddies and we had a clan!

This pic courtesy Mohan aka Orange brings back so many fond memories!
Each one of us had a different style of approaching the game.
Mave was an all-out aggressive player with insane reflexes with the colt and ak-47;
Sc used to play as though he was in a real war situation, with a lot of intelligence and caution.
I loved the nutcase style of playing which is die/kill and type wtfwtf/yoyoyo and found nades and flashes to be more fun than guns at times.  
VPk became the famed sniper who didn't need to zoom at all, with the reflexes and attention to sound of a poaching tiger.  
Giri was a class act, he could do it all, rush/defend/camp/snipe/psycho modes and a famous thu-mode as well!
Tinku had the most unbelievable strafe gameplay (and many-a-time was invincible) and the ability to flash his teammates at will.
Mojo being one of our best buddies, became the self-appointed team manager in charge of all the press interviews. What he ended up doing is another story, best left untold here.

The discussions after a night of gaming were so much fun as well. Everyone boasting about their awesofuckin' skills and having a laugh at some of the n00by moments. The walks outside BH2 towards the cafeteria/mess, oh how much I miss those days..
We had our highs and lows, eventually getting raped by ju's and subju's :D, but the best part was the fun that came out of it. Sure, losing wasn't nice and we did get pissed sometimes, but then it was just a game and more of a reason to stomp n00bs in the pub play after a bad defeat!

To all the wonderful and friendly gamers and clans in BITS, to the dedicated servers that brought all the fun, to being the elite breakfast tasters in the morning, to the thousands of de_dust2 and awp_india clashes, to being sniped as you ran towards B from the ct spawn zone in de_dust2, to the yoyooyo and wtf ckfkn mkl bc m2l2 moments, to using new nicknames and revealing them only after some pr0 play, to all the friendships that came out of it, to memories worth reliving over and over again, Counter Strike and Valve, take a bow!

Gamer to Making one

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!