At the meeting, I was happy to introduce Étienne with some people I knew. Étienne is a colleague and partner in crime (we’re currently working on a secret project together, more info on that soon). It made me remember how hard it was for me when I was a newbie at the IGDA, building the courage to move up to a group of people you don’t know and introduce yourself.

Oh and also!

Given the lower turn-out, we actually had a load of uneaten sandwiches. So, after the party, we brought them over to the Maison du Père. They were very thankful.

Man, it feel good being a volunteer for such a great organisation :)

Summer really seems like my busy season. People love summer because it’s sunny, it’s hot and everything feel good. For me summer usually feel like I have to run everywhere to deliver everything on time and I can’t take a breather. That’s maybe why I prefer winter…

Anyway, summer is over. I’m back at university and most of my classes are cool. The coolest of them all is Parallel programming. Toughest class I have, but man is it interesting to see how you can take a seemingly sequential algorithm and run it in parallel on multiple processors at the same time.

I also started searching for an internship for the winter. I got an interview tomorrow. Wish me luck! Oh and if you know somebody who happen to know somebody that works in a game company searching for programmer, hook me up ^_^

I know what you’re thinking: “He’s not posting anymore, he must be dead! Or he just suffered from another of his “Oh Shinny!” moment and got into Anthropology this time”.  But you’ll think again after you’ve seen what I’ve been working on it the last month.

Share and Enjoy!

Sprites are from willowWISP: willowwisp.deviantart.com/ and they are mostly used as place-holder.

Note: AI doesn’t take decisions yet, No Menu selection (As soon as a party member is ready, his target selection pop-up). Also, no damage calculation yet. Well, hey, that’s a prototype, what did you expect?

To make combat as dynamic as possible, I’ve chosen to go with a timed base selection-action system. As you can see, everyone starts in the selection phase. Once their timer is filled they can decide what action they want to perform (for now, only attack is coded). Once you’ve picked your action and your target, you get transferred to the countdown phase. Once you’re countdown reaches zero, the selected action is performed. This give us a dynamic combat system because actions can take longer to do than other.

What do you guys think?

Changes:

• Secret Prophecy: Monster and Party formations.
• Secret Prophecy: Target Selection.
• Secret Prophecy: Ordered Timer Display
• Secret Prophecy: Action animation
• Work in progress: Target Validation (So that you can restrict selection to, say, only party members that are poisoned)

Challenge 200:

For this progress report : 15h
YTD : 15h / 200h

Subjects were very varied and with only 6 minutes each presentations, you couldn’t get bored very long.

After the presentations, I talked a lot with Michael about GDC and the IGDA scholarship. I’m really thinking of going to GDC 2009 either as a CA or apply for the IGDA scholarship. After that I talked with John about Programmer resume, portfolio and stuff that would put chances on my side when sending out internship application next summer.

This was a triumph
I’m making a note here: HUGE SUCCESS!
It’s hard to overstate my satisfaction

Portal won Game of the Year at the Game Developer Choice Award!! It also got the Best Game Design and the Innovation Award!

BioShock was also in the spotlight at the GDCA winning 3 awards (Best Writing, Best Visual Arts and Best Audio)

Congratulations to all Game Developer that were involved in any games that were nominated ! You’re all the REAL winners of the GDCA!

Congrats again to Jason Della Rocca who won the Ambassador Award

I don’t mean to sound ungrateful for this award, this is truly a wonderful honor. But, I’m just one person. What the industry needs now is for each one of you to get out there and be an ambassador for games, for game culture, for the profession of game development.

And big kudos to the Kokoromi gang for the well deserved Excellence in Visual Art IGF Award for Fez. And Fish reading his acceptance haiku with a monocle; Just awesome!

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by. - Douglas Adams

Yeah yeah, I know I’m 2 weeks late to make my Progress Report. The reason is really simple: Ugly schedule at University + Work Friday,Saturday,Sunday == Not a lot of free time && Not a lot of sleep.

And since I don’t have a lot of free time, I spend most of it playing game instead of programming them. That’s the main reason why I didn’t make it for the challenge 200 -_-;

Challenge 200:

For this progress report : 5h
Final score : 185h / 200h

I’m a bit sad that I didn’t make it to the 200 hour mark. But being short of just 15 minutes isn’t bad at all ^_^

All in all, I’m really proud of the experience. In 200h 185h, I created 3 games while building HexEngine and 1 while trying out XNA. Not to shabby eh?

I’ll be repeating the challenge 200 for 2008, but I’m still debating if I’ll continue to work on Secret Prophecy or on an idea I have for a 3D game.

What a year! This is going to be hard to decide! Just for the heck of it I’ll go with 3 predictions:

1. Best Writing goes to Portal
2. Best Game Design will also go to Portal
3. Innovation Award might go to Portal

What are your predictions?

The GDCA, presented by the IGDA, is a peer-based, open nomination awards program where honours are given by developers to developers. The awards will be handed out at the Game Developers Conference, February 20th

Changes:

• Upgraded to Visual C++ 2008 Express Edition.
• HexEngine: Some cleanup in CMap. Testing the step by step loading had introduced some crap
• Secret Prophecy: Dialog box! I take a string, split it to fit the size of the dialog box and manage word-wrapping.
• Secret Prophecy: Dialog boxes now manage carriage return.
• Secret Prophecy: Dialog boxes styles. Can use the default style or specify a callback where you’ll style your dialogs
• Secret Prophecy: Dialog boxes types. You can chose for your text to scroll on one page or your text to be presented on multiple pages.
• Secret Prophecy: I now have a data structure that allow me to manage sequence of events per maps.

For example: Load the map, when the map is loaded, the player can’t move and an NPC walks towards him. The NPC finishing is walk, fires another event that launch a dialog, telling the player something. When the player finish reading the dialog, the NPC then walks back to where he was, the player can now move.

Challenge 200:

For this progress report : 30h
YTD : 180h / 200h

I’m almost at the finish line for the Challenge 200. The challenge ends 2008-01-31. Only 31 days left and 20h to go, fortunately everything is on tracks and going according to plan. In the next 31 days, I’ll be creating a small chapter for Secret Prophecy. This is going to be fun!

Congrats Jason!