Kyle: Medieval Times + Blizzard = Awesome

If you have never been to a show at Medieval Times, I (Kyle) suggest you go there. You are able to sit at a table and order tons of meat as if you lived as a rich noble, just like they did back in medieval times. In addition to the food, their seating surrounds an arena where knights battle for your entertainment.

Kyle: Choosing a Game Engine

Kyle here.

Whether it be a personal bias, project requirement, or maybe for the sake of trying something new; choosing a game engine to use for a project or endeavor will certainly bring a lot of differing opinions from many people. In this article, I (Kyle Bardiau) will discuss some of the engines I prefer to use when I decide to work on both personal and professional projects..

1. Unity

I was introduced to Unity a few years back when it was just another engine and since then Unity have stepped up its game and is starting to become an indie favorite due to its low-cost, huge asset store, and the fact that it is more friendly to programmers than other engines.



I suggest to any one who is looking to get their hands dirty game development for the first time to start here. You will be able to make small playable prototypes by yourself in Unity far easier than other engines, such as the next two editors I'm about to bring up.

2. CryEngine

I find that CryEngine is one of the more awesome editors that has a lot of little neat tools and tricks. This editor is one of the more fun I've worked with but is very complex to bring out the true beauty and power of this engine compared to others.



If you want to learn what it's like to get down and dirty in some big boy editors and create quick,  generic first person shooter levels, you might find this editor more to your liking. If you're willing to put more work into it, you can code in your own game-play to make a game of any genre: i.e. a Tower Defense game or another genre of your fancy; but the learning curve for doing so is much steeper than other engines.

3. Unreal Development Kit aka UDK

One of the more popular, as well as a favorite of mine, is the UDK. In my experience this was one of the easier editors to pick up. Using UDK is never a bad choice as it's an industry-standard and the majority of games you may have played are developed with Epic's Unreal technology.



If you're looking to learn how those big AAA games get made or want to start on a smaller project, I suggest picking up UDK as this editor can produce projects ranging from a simple indie game to AAA within the same tool set.

Conclusion

These are the main three engines I have come to know, and in my experience if you were to give these engines a go you will start learning the similarities across all engines. Once you understand these similarities such as working with the concepts of levels, game-play, and art content, you will find that you can pick up any other editor very easily and the issue of choosing an engine to use for your next project will become obvious and you'll be one step closer to reading the Matrix, like Tank.

Return of the 403 Access Forbidden Error (Solved)

Trying to get this fixed asap, no idea why pages are returning 403.

Edit: Well, it should be fixed now. I did a lot of things I probably should have had no business messing with, and I also re-installed WordPress, and it seems like things are operational again.

Shout out to Ki Chesney for letting me know of the situation.

Antichamber Released! Go Get it!

I in no way get any kickbacks or anything of that sort, but go play Alexander Bruce's Antichamber. Buy it here: http://store.steampowered.com/app/219890/ Some might remember it as Hazard: The Journey of Life, a game prototype made with UDK a long time ago. Well, its done, and its fantastic.

403 Forbidden Access

Had some issues posting blog posts earlier this week, this blog was down with a 403 Forbidden Access error for no apparent reason. I suspect a faulty Wordpress database upgrade. Either way, its back up now, yay.

Global Game Jam 2013 - Deadbeat

Sorry for the brevity of this post, I'm still perpetually tired, we just kicked up the number of hours at the office. In any case, here was my team's entry for Global Game Jam 2013, a game called Deadbeat done in Unreal. Its a 4 player co-op game with some issues but we had an almost-complete game, so thats something.

http://globalgamejam.org/sites/default/files/2013//download/UDKInstall-Deadbeat.zip

Slaving away for Global Game Jam 2013

Been too busy Global Game Jam'ing to post the 25th, 26th, and 27th, will post a post-mortem after the event is over.

Archetyped Camera!

I put together an archetype system that allows full archetype support over cameras. Will release details some day.

Unreal UT Player Size

A frequent question I'm tired of getting asked is how big is the default player. Well, here is a handy guide for you:

Zero Dark Thirty... I Don't Get The Hype

Watched Zero Dark Thirty tonight after everyone in the media freaking out about it. I went in expecting it to be some over-played and over-written movie based loosely on real facts, and that is pretty much what it was. I deeply enjoyed the movie, but at no point did I grow some racial hatred from the movie nor did its torture scenes seem controversial. Sitcoms had worse examples of water-boarding than this movie but I don't see the frenzy about those shows. So again, I very much enjoyed the movie and its telling of its story but I don't see why there is so much fuss about it, as it is just a story.

Blogging Every Single Day... And, Meh

Day 22 of blogging every day, and I think its becoming quite clear I do very little worth actually writing about. Today though I crushed quite a few Marine teams as an Alien Commander in Natural Selection 2.

Preparing for Global Game Jam 2013

For this upcoming Global Game Jam 2013, I want to come armed with a functional prototype of ForecourseUI and my web service platform to make whatever my team makes even more awesome.  So far a lot of work has to be done, but its looking good.

More Scaleform Experiments

I found a way to do some random XML parsing and some image grabbing in Scaleform. If it turns out to be fruitful, I'll post some details.

Dreamed Game Plot

I just dreamed a plot line that was so dark and twisted involving amusement parks, brain surgery, the human condition, ethics regarding consumerism, and redemption. Maybe I'll write it down.

2x Caffine Rockstar Energy Drink

Them 2x Caffine Rockstar Energy Drinks... I drink many energy drinks, but half of one of these got me WIRED. 12 hour work day, still twitchy. Daaaammn.

Past Week In Summation

Not being able to write decent blog posts due to bad time management, given the time now I'd like to give some sort of wrap up to my week because this is my blog and I do what I want, ya know.

Exactly a week ago I found myself coming home from CES after staying up to the last-minute of our Venetian Suite's checkout time, then getting home to do a lot of nothing except a bunch of Natural Selection 2 and a lot of sleeping. Commanding in Natural Selection 2 feels so good, especially on the Aliens side of things because it's so easy if you have even a moderately decent team to work with. I like commanding on Marines as well, but only when my Marines can shoot worth a damn.

The next few days returned to normalcy pretty quickly, with the added nicety of being able to work on documentation for a project I'm excited about. Can't discuss this very much though.

Thursday though was my first day of teaching Game Engine Scripting over at the Art Institute of North Hollywood, so that was cool. Have 9 students this time who seem somewhat eager to learn. If my students have anything worth sharing then you'll see their work here on my blog, otherwise I'm not going to report too much about my class. I am making video tutorials that go along with my class however, and you might start seeing a few of them this week. Basically the plan is to remake all the tutorials already available on my site, but better, and more dense and modular.

Friday was another big push for project documentation at work. Nothing too special.

During I did a lot more Natural Selection 2, even a little Blacklight Retribution, but I went back to developing the new incarnation of what will be the next ForecourseUI, as well as some other stuff I experimented with. Sundays are the same as Saturdays to me, my sleep schedule doesn't really allow me to define a specific chunk of the weekend.

Monday I finished up an internal milestone on schedule for our project documentation. Meeting deadlines always feels good.

Tuesday and Wednesday (the day of this post) I've shifted over back to Rekoil, working on some bug fixes, some feature additions, some UI layout, just things in general. Trying to get Search and Destroy out to the beta players as soon as possible. Also still toying around with my NeuroSky Mindset but at the moment it still is just a toy.

Hoping to get my blog design up tonight or tomorrow morning, would be quite nice.

Progress With NeuroSky

So if you are to venture in the world of NeuroSky's products, be sure to have your bluetooth dongle as exposed to the world as possible. Having mine directly in my computer under my desk has caused a number of very annoying connection issues, heh.

NeuroSky MindSet

Got a NeuroSky Mindset today... so far a little underwhelmed... lets hope it gets better.

Got Some Funky Bink Background Going On

During some work on my UI shenanigans, I got some stuff working like the separation of a components library from the main .swf and some other memory optimized things. Everything was looking a bit bland though and I wanted a menu background that would look alright and be generic across anything I'd want to use it for. Ended up today with the following screenshot. It's not final but I thought it was interesting, given that I created the background wave field art in After Effects CS6 and its got a looping fluctuating effect to it.

Trying Out Some Scaleform Stuff

Messing around with the powers of run-time resource sharing between Flash/Scaleform documents with UDK. Liking the results so far. Hoping to create a themeable UI framework.

Finally, Some Time...

Now that its the weekend, I'll have some time to do some cool things...

Where Does All The Time Go?

After work and teaching my first day of my class entitled Game Engine Scripting at The Art Institute of North Hollywood, its now 11:32PM. Where did all that time go? Crazy.

Long Day, Finally Home

Finally home from my CES trip. Turned $100 to $600 on the craps table on the last day.

Gotta go to work and then starting a class today.

Aww yeah.

First, and Last, Day of CES

Although I've been keeping up with my blog post a day resolution, the last few days a lot of very awesome stuff has happened but due to doing such awesome stuff I haven't had time to post a solid blog post about it. Same goes for today, but after I return home and things go back to normal I will write about this weekend, or, well, most of it.

I went to the CES floor today and walked around and really... just wasn't impressed. I tweeted a bit about it over at http://twitter.com/MichaelAllar , but in a nutshell it was just a lot of LED Displays   and one awesome robot that is basically a Roomba but for glass windows.

Also met Sandra from http://sexnerdsandra.com/ on the way back from CES, unfortunately I was just too damn tired and in a state of wtf-is-going-on carried over from the past two days that I didn't converse much. Seemed pretty cool though.

Also I believe there is some sort of Miss Hanna Minx clone or something that does stock photography for Korean headphone companies, I saw a lot of that.

In the end, I don't think CES is worth going to but going to Vegas definitely is.

Las Vegas Ballin'

Elevator from top floor suite to the Panda in the hotel for breakfast after late night blackjack.

Morel's Steakhouse for dinner.

So cray cray.

Staying at the Venetian for CES, Check out StreamTV Booth

Got upgraded at the Venetian to a suite on the top floor. So legit.

If you're going to be at CES be sure to stop by the StreamTV booth and check out the glassesless 3D displays. They look excellent, especially with Rekoil (the game I'm working on) being displayed on em.

Sunday, Sunday, Sunday!

I spent all day sleeping and trying to prepare for getting up at 5AM tomorrow. Yeah. Meh.

Meetings, Fridays, and the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show

Today I participated in a meeting that was a brief summary of how the company I work for is planning to do doing business in 2013 and what projects are underway, which is great reason to have a meeting, but I still despise meetings. To me, meetings are something that can be automated using things like card walls, project planning systems, and just production tools in general no matter if you are involved in an Agile / Scrum development cycle or a waterfall approach. In any case the meeting killed my morning and part of the rest of the day because meetings have a knack for making me tired. So there's that.

Got to carry out some more game design documentation though today, that is always interesting.

Good thing it is Friday though, I always look forward to the weekends so I can take a break from work and... work... on my own personal projects since I don't really have a life. I have made some good progress on my new Forecourse Platform and want to keep chipping away at it.

This weekend is cut short though because very early Sunday morning I'll be taking a trip with some co-workers to Las Vegas to attend the 2013 Consumer Electronic Show, a.k.a. the convention every year where big tech companies show cool products that aren't mass marketable for at least another year or two. The novelty of traveling for conventions and events is starting to wear off on me though but I've never been to Las Vegas so this will be interesting. Definitely bringing my laptop to work on my stuff while in the hotel room though if I'm not too busy wasting money Vegas style.

Time to take an early nap, get up at some ungodly hour, and slam through a bunch of my web service stuff now. Huzzah.

Cooking, Documentation, and Wordpress Themes

Early this morning I had to cook and upload a build of a project for work which hogged a few hours of potential sleep time this morning, so I decided to work today from home.

For those who don't know, "cooking" refers to a process of the Unreal Engine / UDK that strips away a bunch of useless data and creates a set of files representing a compressed minimum to run your Unreal project, and is what you do should do you want to distribute a build of your project. Depending on the project and the cooking process, this could take some time, especially for uploading.

After that I spent my work hours today documenting some things I can't publicly discuss for a few months but I am quite excited about, however documenting sometimes is a tedious and mundane task, although always great to do.

I've decided to put some personal time into my new web platform I want to launch, which is pretty much a revamp of forecourse.com and of this blog as a launching point for new tutorial content I want to make as well as a rapid game prototyping framework I'd like to build as well. A main part of this new web platform is, obviously, the web side of it, and while I know a little about Python, PHP, and other web languages, I am definitely not experienced enough to easily build what I need. I've decided to struggle through it though and am now in the process of building a WordPress Theme based on an HTML-only based template I bought and getting it ready for dynamically displaying content. After trying to make a set of PHP files from the template myself from scratch, I've decided that first converting it to a WordPress Theme would speed things up as it would give me a framework to step into one part at a time.

I started off with the default WordPress Theme and tried figuring out how to port my template to its style, but then I started googling blank HTML5 WordPress Themes. The first one I found was Bones but after more digging I decided to first tackle the task with the Roots WordPress Theme. Roots looked like it would solve many of my problems but after trying to work with it, it was clearly too overly complex for me to grasp and I needed something simpler and more non-web-programmer-or-designer friendly.

I decided to go back to Bones and it turned out that it is exactly what I'm looking for. I randomly found a tutorial for Bones that I can't seem to relocate that really only went over basic HTML5/CSS3 properties that for the most part I already knew, but it mentioned that Bones also supports CSS3 via LESS and that WinLess is a pretty good Windows GUI client for compiling LESS style sheets. I've used LESS in the past before and was greatly pleased at how it transformed CSS into a more programmer-friendly pseudo-inheritance style system but I've always used a JavaScript script that would compile LESS client-side on pages that used LESS style sheets.

After looking at the Bones LESS style sheets and seeing how they are split into many smaller pieces, I decided that WinLess might be the easier way to go and it would cut the amount of scripts my page would have to load as well. WinLess was a very pleasant surprise and after its set up I'm able to rapidly work with my LESS style sheets and have WinLess auto-magically compile them in the background fast enough so that by the time I make a change and save it to the LESS file, I can alt+tab to my browser and hit F5 and instantly see the newly compiled LESS without relying on a LESS JavaScript include.

After working more with the Bones theme, I pretty much established that to do my WP theme creation and to make this HTML template I bought ready for dynamic content, I would have to re-do all the HTML5/CSS markup myself and just use the bought template more for reference than for source code. It seems like it is working out pretty well as the Bones theme is very easy to follow once you learn how to navigate it and for the first time I have faith I'll be able to complete this endeavor myself.

The same article that introduced me to WinLess also introduced me to Sublime Text 2, a multipurpose text editor like Notepad++. I'm a big fan of Notepad++ but out of curiosity I decided to give Sublime Text 2 a go and so far I am absolutely loving it. I don't know about its feasibility to replace Notepad++ for my UnrealScript and other generic script-based editing, but it is definitely my go-to text editor for HTML5 and CSS now when not using Adobe Dreamweaver. Sublime Text 2 is just so very slick and it has this feature called Project Folders which has been amazing.

Lastly, I found myself excited about having to write a blog post today, something I didn't expect. Maybe a post every day will be easier than I thought.

My Return To Work Is Kicking My Ass

After a generous time of working from home and somewhat of a break of my usual day job during the Christmas and New Year holidays, Wednesday is proving a difficult day to return to work, especially after that late night Natural Selection 2 and code session last night. That and some blog hosting mix-up stuff and some other projects I wanted to concept out.

Doing some refreshing work though today at the office, just can't keep my eyes open. Mistakenly left that set of 10 Rockstar energy drinks at home as well as my wallet, trying to not spend any needless money eating out for lunch when at the office.

Soon as I'm getting home I'm going to load up some random Netflix show on my newly set up faux home theater and if I find myself with some extra energy, I'll do some more work on a backend service I want to prototype.

Blog A Day 2013

I have decided that I am going to put up a blog post every day of 2013 in an effort to better myself.

Even if that post is only a few words long.

Let us see how this works out.