So much to do..

I was under the assumption that I would be making Flash Games all summer (like I wanted to), but now I find that it is expected that I work full time for EPSCoR all summer (40 hours a week). While this may lead to more money in the end for me and possibly more skills acquired and job experience, I don't feel a passion for this kind of work as I do for game development.
And even if I do not work for EPSCoR full time, I have so many flash games to work on! I will definitely be  finishing NOVA because I feel it needs to released so I can get it out of the way, and it should be an awesome release when done.
ARrrgh

gconfucking brilliant

You know whats fucking brilliant, gconf-editor
I was trying to figure out for the longest time how to edit the power settings on my Ubuntu netbook. While there are limited options in the default power manager, after asking around my Linux savey friends recommended writing some shell scripts etc.
After much trouble and no progress, I finally found someone talking of this gconf-editor and how they changed some setting. I thought, maybe this might have the settings I am looking for, so I fire up my terminal and type
gconf-editor
in seconds I am overwhelmed with an awesome amount of options. gconf is like windows regedit on performance steroids. So, the lesson in this story is, if you have any settings you want to change in ubuntu and cant find them in the default managers, look to gconf-editor, it holds the answers to all your setting related questions.
Alas, I would use Linux more seriously if it was not being held back by the lack of game support and flash development support. Makes me sad
goodnight

Current Projects

I thought it would be nice to update this blog with my project schedule, so as to keep the comments like "WHERES MORE GAMES!?!?!" down.
-Organized by importance-
1) College classes
I have tons of homework & classwork to do always


2) Computer Science Programming Team
Time consuming events and programming competitions to participate in


3) Student Activities Council
I am employed as the Publicist for the SAC at my college, so I have to attend all the events and meetings and such... sigh


4) Student Academic Game Designer
Recently I have been hired for the Student Academic Aid center to make games to assist teachers in teaching their students difficult subjects to conceptualize...


5) All that other crap life requires you to do... eat/sleep/social life, I fit this stuff in wherever I can

I wish I could spend 24/7 making games... but alas..

September 22 - 2010 Update

I have done some major updates to the blog, in both theme and location.
The domain of the blog is now http://blog.lonewolfproductions.us/ and all traffic to lonewolfjournal.blogspot.com will be redirected here.

Operation BlackKnife has been released to the public for almost two months now and has been received well. While it has not been loved by casual gamers, pro gamers all over the board love it.
However, I am disappointed with its release due to the major bugs that only became apparent when hundreds of thousands of people started to play it. I tried to patch as many as possible, and now the game is on a mostly stable release version. My only regret is not spending another few weeks developing the game to polish out those last few bugs and add a tiny bit more content (although to be fair the final 2 weeks of dev time was spent debugging)

Given all that, I see the game as a success & progress made in a better direction, as well as a learning experience.

Another bonus to BlackKnifes release was the flood of new beta testers I got for my future games. I hope with their help my future publications will be more bug free.

Currently, 2 games are in development, PointResistance 2 & an unnamed black project. I will be posting screenshots soon, and if you would like to be a part of the development process, help out, and give some of your input, head over to the forum and sign up to be a beta tester!

Operation BlackKnife

No updates for awhile, this is because Operation BlackKnife has been in development, and is now released!

Play Here!

Now starting production on PointResistance 2

Anarchy Artificial Intelligence Engine

You may have realized by now that I have not made a game like Planet Wars before, with 2 defense games in my portfolio, which means I have to create a new method of dealing with computer AI. When I first approached this new obstacle I noticed that I had no idea had to start, RealTime strategy actually needs some kind of mass intelligence rather then a assortment of stupid suicidal planes or soldiers. Then I thought of a way to manage the computers actions... however, if I posted it, everyone would use this means of controlling artificial intelligence. I will say though, that it is a basic breakdown of decisions based on fuzzy logic randomness.

The games AI will have a few different attitudes to choose from. These will range from a warbent Nuclear happy nation, to a Colonizing Conquerer. I believe so far I have programmed 6 different kinds of AI, all of which will be choosable by the player when setting up a skirmish map. (Note, I just announced a skirmish mode)

Planet Forge(r)

When first developing Planet Wars I started drawing out little custom planets in photoshop, this was taking too long and I didnt like the idea of non-dynamic objects in my game. So, I started work on an automatic planet generator, and I quickly came up with a system that will generate an unlimited ammount of geologically diverse worlds with differing weather, oceans, and continenants. Its a pretty simple cool system, I hope to integrate better atmospheric effects and cities soon, along with Satellites and moons.

Currently the planets do not rotate, I choose not to do this because of the extra processing that would take and one of my main goals with planetwars is to keep the FPS high. Although I beleive in the final version I will add some super high quality options =D

Enjoy the pictures