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!

Part 1 - Lessons from Amrika

This is the first in a series of posts of my learning's from this country (which will continue until they deport me) very similar to how Borat expressed his views in the movie with the longest name ever... so uhm... boratically.
First thing you will notice when you land in an airport, anywhere en route, is that it isn't India. You won't find people when you need them, you'll need to figure of things yourself, rather than just ask the nearest person. And all this will make sense when you try to call home. They charge you 1$ for 2minutes if I remember right, and at Frankfurt, it gets worse. You need to get a calling card which is the shittiest thing ever for what its worth.
Once you step out of the airport, if its your first time abroad, you'll be startled by the cleanliness and the wide roads and the size of the four-wheelers that more often than not, carry just one person. What the hell are they talking about global warming for? Shops are powered all the time, as though electricity is ubiquitous. Oh wait, in this part of the world, it is :-/
As computers love binary and excel at such computations, an Indian in Amrika will excel at multiplying by 50. But after a while, you tend to realize that it isn't all that costly for the amount you can make over here, with a part-time job, if you're lucky to get one that is.
The transportation system and the amount of planning that has gone into a city is just :-O
The number of people jogging is insane, its like some race to be fit and makes you feel completely out of shape :-x.. and every jogger has a few wires attached to some apple product.

After a few months of graduate skool (its kewl 2 type school dis way), you will figure out just why very few Amrikans choose the graduate path. With the amount of distraction they have, its quite impossible to focus on academics. The beauty that you see around during the Fall is just unbelievable. The colorful flora and the oh-so-many-hot girls make for a deadly eye straining combo. Hence, it is highly advised to bring an extra pair of spectacles or contact lenses with a higher power index when you come here. If your hostel life wasn't enough to make you miss Mummy's cooking (like atish's mess), then living abroad definitely will. I'm really glad I took some lessons in culinary before coming. Not only is my capsicum curry the talk of Madison, I've actually started to like cooking :-~~
You also learn that some guys are really good at cooking, and its good to learn new recipes now and then.
And graduate life isn't really as hard as others tell it is. At least if you're in Computer Science, where life is always easy and binary. Don't have your hopes set too high for funding before you come, like me, else you'll feel pretty bad after a while :-/ You're bound to meet some characters when you come here, and that adds to all the fun :-D
Okay, time to watch big bang theory now :D Geeky humor is something graduate students can associate to really well! More on the weather, wal-mart, etc next time around.