Wwise Setup Tutorial – This Week

Aight, quick update! I have finished all the code for the Wwise tutorial and everything seems to be working smoothly. What’s left is testing on other PCs, cleaning and commenting of code and writing the tutorial.

I have one person who will be testing the tutorial and code for comprehension. If anyone else wants to help out with testing then let me know. After that feedback, I will happily inform you that it is available and will be downloadable from this site.

As always, I’ll keep you posted on the progress.

Wwise Tutorial Update

I haven’t talked about Wwise for awhile because of my prototype work. I’m happy to say that I am close to releasing a basic setup tutorial for Windows. It is mainly for my students but anyone who wants to use Wwise could use it. Don’t completely rip me to shreds since this is my first tutorial but I do welcome feedback. It should be ready by next week.

The tutorial includes initial setup, loading/unloading sound banks, 3D sound and listener setup and Ogg Vorbis plug-in setup. Stay tuned!

Cornerstone Prototype

So I dropped the ball here folks. I claimed that I would have a prototype for you. The truth is that while I do have a prototype where I am proud of the work I have done, I cannot release it for you to play. My pride won’t allow it. While I do want people to come and visit this blog, I’m not going to have you play something that bad. Yes, I know I said that I was proud of the work but I’m also proud to maintain my dignity!

Sorry all for this but there is some good that came out of it. I have another deadline to meet between me and my friend. This time it will be on July 11. It is not a prototype, therefore, it will have an actual designed architecture. I am working hard on it and I will make it downloadable for a short amount of time. I really hope you enjoy it as much as enjoy working on it. I’ll keep you posted.

Manifesto becomes Cornerstone

Originally, Project Manifesto was a RPG. The main reason I changed the game was because with me being the sole programmer would take too long. So I figured that it would work if I changed it to an action adventure. The story still works with the game genre but the mechanics had to change, and they did.

I happened to talk to a game developer who owns his own company and is coming out with an iPhone game. I was curious about the RPG game design I had in the past and had him look at the document. He thought it was a good design and wanted to play a prototype.

And that’s where I am now. I have decided to take this project off the shelf to make a prototype to see if people like the idea. It will be a plain old console app (yes, lots of reading) that will only show off the battle system that I designed. Hopefully, people have fun playing it. If people enjoy it then I will continue development. In two weeks time the prototype should be finished and I will have it available for download here. As always, I am looking for feedback. I will keep you posted on the progress.

Does that mean I am abandoning Manifesto? Absolutely not! I believe that Manifesto is a good idea and just needs more time under the design incubator. Both of these projects have tremendous potential. I believe that I am the problem with these projects becoming a reality. I just need to stay focused and see each one through, one at a time.

Expected completion – May 24, 2011

Wwise Adventure

For the past two weeks I have been working with the Wwise sound API. It has been such a wild adventure.

I set out on this adventure because one of my students, who was the Wwise guru, was going to graduate in two weeks. He was responsible for helping so many students in setting up Wwise and that skill will be needed in the future. So I figured I’ll be the one that will take up the Wwise torch and run with it. What exciting things awaited me?
My first instinct was to read the documentation. I noticed that there was a setup walkthrough guide. “Wonder if the students saw this or tried to follow the guide before asking for help,” was my first thought as I saw the topic. I clicked on the link just as if I had opened large double doors of a forbidden temple. And as the doors slowly opened, I take notice of the different topics within the guide. I’m immediately hit with confusion. Why are the student programmers having issues? Little did I know the horror that awaited me as I delve deeper into the abyss of that documentation.

The walkthrough seems straight forward. Write this function, write that function. And so I did, even copying the comments they had written. “Okay, lets compile this. I’m sure something is not correct,” I thought.
The code compiled and revealed errors that no programmer ever wants to get, linker errors. Man, that’s like fighting a level 50 dragon when you just start a game and the game expects you to win.

Trying to remain patient, I look at the error and figured that I needed to just link to the proper library files but….. I already did that.

Irritated but not defeated, I look at the errors more closely and see that it had something to do with a Direct Sound function.I would have to say that it took me 2 hours to figure out that I needed to include another .lib file.

“Problem solved! Now its time to run this bad bo….what?! Another linker error?!”

Let me tell you, I’m already going bald and after dealing with all the setup woes, I might be missing part of my head!

All in all, I managed to get the engine running and tested it on different machines successfully. However, there are still some things that I have to add and I need to clean up the code before writing the tutorial.

I truly hope this tutorial helps everyone who is curious about using Wwise. Though the documentation is subpar (sorry Audiokinetic but it really is…), it is an awesome API! I should have the tutorial written in two weeks. Stay tuned.

An Easy Approach to Game Analysis and Deconstruction

I have noticed that students want to really design a great game. I believe that anything we want to do, we want to make it great. However, anyone would agree that the knowledge and foundation behind any project is absolutely necessary. It is okay for things to be missing but only to the detriment of the said project. Some games’ design that I have seen seem to lack a essential component and that is game analysis and deconstruction.

There are many of us who know how to do this and it’s not really brain surgery. I didn’t even know what deconstruction was as a child (or heard of it). When I played games (before I ever heard of C++), I would always ask questions about the game I was playing. “I could barely reach that star. Why can’t I reach it?” Or, “why is that the way to get around this wall? How would I have ever been able to figure that out?” I believe that it is as easy as asking questions about games and why things are done. Some of them might be issues with bugs and what the developers did was a solution for the player to avoid something detrimental. However, those same workarounds contribute not only to stability but also to a better gameplay experience.

Using my first example above when I asked a question about not being able to reach a star, I really felt that I should just be able to reach it. As I continued to play that game, I really just wanted the game to allow me to jump and get that star. I finally was able to reach it the way that the developers wanted me to reach it. That particular path was an experience that the player needed to go through and increased the gameplay and immersion of the player. I had to use a new mechanic to reach the star and would have never experienced that had 2 ft. been added to my jump.

This is a really basic example (once again, I was a 12 year old kid) of how I was able to do this and still continue to do it. Playing games is fun… it’s supposed to be but don’t forget that we are a part of an industry to provide that fun on our projects and having that ability really helps. I am not a pro in this department but I still use the same tactic with other things that I have learned throughout the years. Ask questions about the game you are playing. You’ll be surprised at how things work when you yourself try to analyze and break them down.

This Engine is Dusty…

Either this engine is dusty or is it just my mind. As I started to integrate a camera into my engine, I had to surf through the folder hierarchy that I set up about a year ago to find the exact files I was searching for. “Where is this file, where is that file” were the questions that kept plaguing me. While I had fun enhancing this project, I was kicking myself for the extreme lack of comments. What in the world was I thinking when I was writing this!? Little to no comments!?

All I wanted to do is integrate a ready-built camera, however, my crappy camera was everywhere and I spent majority of my time looking for it and removing it from code. Learning my folder structure took some time as well. It was one of those moments where you want to blame the author… yeah.

Aside from the troubles, it was fun to look and fix my old project. It has a new breath of life and I plan to make it better than it was. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t plan on making this the next big engine but its fun to work on something that I have very little experience on and it also helps my programming skills. I did manage to get the camera working but it gave birth to other issues. It is very true that when you fix and/or integrate code, you introduce new bugs and exploits that need to be fixed. This is no different for me currently.

So I’ll still be working toward integrating this camera. We’ll see what new adventures await me in doing so. Later.

Withdrawal Leads to Engine Resurrection

You know that scripting is programming on a different level. While I enjoy doing scripting, I tend to miss writing C++. Good ‘ol C++, the language that I have struggled to learn throughout my schooling and is probably a factor of my pie-baldness. I don’t know what it is about it that I miss when I am involved with another programming language or doing some scripting.

So with that being said I decided to dust off the engine that I was making and add some functionality to it. Currently, it is an engine using DirectX. I have PhysX integrated into the engine (it’s not that robust because I’m still novice to PhysX) and some functionality of loading 3D static meshes (.X format) and Direct3D primitives. The camera that I have in there stinks at the moment and there is no 2D graphics support (except for texturing meshes). I think that’s where I’m going to start. I’ll stay up to date here.

Project Manifesto

This is the project that I am working on. This follows a story that I am writing and thought that it would make for a nice game. So the premise for this game is that I wanted to create a game tells people about God. However, the difference in this is that I wanted to create a different world than Earth with different people. I am looking to God to guide this project and to make sure that I do not misconstrue anything that is in the Bible or about God.

The game is a top-down adventure game similar to Legend of Zelda III. It will have a fighting style mix between any of the old Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles games you might have played and Zelda III. As the player, you can perform 3-hit combos with the 3rd hit of the combo being a finisher. I haven’t decided if the combos will be specific to different weapons or having them as a type of item that you will have to equip…. dunno!

To also teach a little about my faith, another feature that I will flesh out is called the Faith System. When you defeat enemies, you collect faith. The player will have abilities that they can perform but will cost faith. Therefore, if you perform an ability that costs 50 faith and you have the amount, you can perform that ability. The unique element of this system is that the player can perform an ability without the amount of faith required but at a cost. For instance, if the player performs a spin attack with his weapon that hits surrounding enemies and performs this ability without the required faith, the player may wind up dizzy and vulnerable to attack for several seconds (a la ‘Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker spin attack’). The high the level of the ability, the more harm you could potentially bring to yourself. Also, there is a chance that if you perform an ability and do not have the faith requirements, nothing detrimental will happen to you.

The Faith System is based off of the faith that we must have as Christians. No, we don’t go around bashing people in the head in hopes of building our faith in Jesus. When we have faith Christ moves in our lives and guides us. Because I do not want to create a huge dialog tree (for making decisions that affects the world) for this game, I decided to make faith something you pick up. In life, we have to have faith in the decisions we make in hopes that Christ is behind those decisions. The best way that I thought I could show that in the game is through performing abilities.

That’s about as much as I will divulge right now but we think the idea is solid but won’t know until we can create a prototype and get some people to play it. At this point, I would like to thank God for the ability to glorify Him. I would also like to thank my friends for helping me in this process. A special thanks to the TornadoTwins who have an extremely helpful series of tutorials on Unity3D which has helped tremendously.

I will keep you posted on the development of this project. If you have any thoughts or feedback, please leave a comment. I look forward to hearing from anyone, hehe. God bless.

Changes and Updates

So I just did a complete overhaul of this blog. Well, kinda. I changed the background and remove all the posts I had except one. If you have been here before, I was talking a lot about a project that I was working on. While that project still exists, it has changed drastically and I have just done such a poor job keeping up with this blog.

The project was going to be an RPG is now a top-down adventure game (similar to Legend of Zelda III). We are going to create it using Unity3d and looking to release it on PC and in the future, Android and iPhone. The feature set has changed along with some of the story.

Along with projects, I will post about my faith, games, random thoughts and anything else interesting enough to post about. Please feel free to comment on anything, however, I ask that you keep it clean and respectful.

So there you have it. I hope to see more people reading and I also hope to keep up to date with posts, hehe. God bless.