What's Next?

Ask anyone who knows me, what my priorities are in life. And you're likely to hear three things. Family, Video Games, and Computers.

My love for computers dates back to 1988 when I started with the Commodore 64. My interest was driven through video games on the C64 that I wanted to modify and learn to create my own games.

My entire life I have been moving forward on that path, learning about everything that I could get my hands on. To date, I have taught myself programming in over 20 languages for a variety of platforms.

I've been a professional senior software engineer consultant for the last 2 years and it has been a life-changing experience. I finally found a way to provide for my family and I've never been happier.

With my current contract expiring at the end of this month, I've been on the hunt for what's next?.

I am seeking remote development jobs to be able to provide for my family and be with my wife and kids on a daily basis. Cubicles are not the place for this guy. I was recommended to check out https://www.toptal.com and I think that it should be a great opportunity for me.

Get Binary Assist Today!

I just published my first paid app on the android marketplace!

Please check it out!



https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bangbangattackstudios.apps.binary_assist

This app was created from concept to release in under 36 hours with 30 of those going just to the publishing process itself.

I used create-react-app to scaffold the initial project, and then proceeded to delete the pre-made .js and .css files and added the files for my app. I built the functionality of the React components first, and then I styled them using flexbox CSS. Thanks to autoprefixer, the css styling works on android!

That brings me to how I got my app on android.

I used cordova and created a new project based on their helloworld app, and then I tediously went through and edited all the configs and files that I needed to update, as well as dump my webpack-optimized build files from react-create-app into the cordova project.

Using cordova-icon and cordova-splash I was able to take my rushed GIMP icon and splash imagery and generate all the necessary files.

I had to build the pesky google marketplace feature and promo images myself in GIMP though.

Once I had things in cordova, I tested on my android device and then proceeded to build release apk and going through the whole tedious and overly complicated signing process.

Now armed with a signed apk and all the promotional graphics I needed, I added a new app on the google developer dashboard and filled out all the infos and dragged in my images and uploaded my apk. The usual...

Then I decided to make this thing a paid app. Why you ask? Well, there are no advertisements, there are no in-app purchases, nothing to bug you, and no extra permissions. It's a premium app if there was ever one. Yeah it is simple, and doesn't have tons of features and awesome animations. But what it does, it does well and I felt that warrants a price.

Please show your support of this indie developer and buy a copy of Binary Assist today!

ImageMagick Sprite Resizing

convert -interpolate Nearest -filter point '*.png[64x64]' sprite_%03d.png

I needed to resize a folder full of images to create an animated sprite sheet, and ImageMagick saved my arse once again. :D

Oh, hi. Hello 2016! I've been rather busy in 2015, and I'm afraid I haven't had the time to post here. Long long story short, I'm working full-time as a senior software engineer in the game industry, and doing my own little side projects on my days off. My wife and I are building a casual game for mobile devices. I am using ECMAScript 6, and CreateJS, along with my own custom ES6 game engine to build the game. I will have a more thoroughly detailed explanation later when it comes closer to release time. For now I must get back to it.

Simply Magic

I've just put my first T-shirt design on teespring today. You can get it here http://teespring.com/simplymagic

Tell your friends! Tell your family! Tell the world! :D

Blender Barrel Complete

I am happy to announce that I achieved my goal for the day by completing my barrel project in blender. :)

Below you can see the high poly mesh which consists of a whopping 4 million plus polygons! Each part was modeled separately, sculpted, and manipulated into position before being used in the baking process.

The high poly was originally much higher polygon count, but my computer crashed when I tried to perform a Remove Duplicates vertices operation, so I went in and manually removed a ton of the vertices and faces from the inside of the barrel. Below you can see some of the barrel "gutted" on the inside.

The low poly mesh is pretty basic, which is why a lot of the shape from the high poly mesh does not translate too well to the lower poly mesh, but since this was my first attempt at such a process and as a learning experience, I think I didn't do too badly. Right?

The UV layout for the low poly is not too bad, but I know that it could be better. I just need more practice and hopefully I will get some useful advice from the cool people on the art forums I've shown this on.

Well that's all for now. I'll have more cool stuff to show later I'm sure. :)

Blender Barrel Beginnings

Well, my learning of Blender has definitely been going well I think. I wanted to model something and learn more about Blender along the way, so I asked my wife for a subject, and she said "a wooden barrel", and so I got to work. I have spent about 14 hours on this high poly model so far.

Most of that time was spent learning how to create my own sculpting brushes for Blender, learning what the sculpting tools do, and how they can be used, learning how to create my own custom UI components and tools using Python to speed up my workflow, and learning how to make use of the super-powerful modifier stack and multiple scenes.

I learned how to not cripple my system working with millions and millions of polygons in real-time with zero lag, I learned how to effectively make and use a "library" of objects for reuse, I learned that I can swap objects from layer to layer with ease in order to get them out of the way while working on another to reduce the polygon load on my system.

This is my progress so far.

Today I plan to unwrap my low-poly mesh and then bake the normal and ambient occlusion maps of my high-poly mesh to bring them in to GIMP for creating the albedo map and then finally taking all of the maps and my low-poly mesh into Unity for some production testing.

Level Up!

It's been awhile since I posted last, and I'm sorry about that. I've been a bit busy with far too much. From choosing what direction that I want to go in with the studio, to working out details on my project, to finding freelance work, and to the reason for this update...I have finally jumped in the deep end and committed myself to learning blender, and it's going quite well much to my surprise.

Anyone who has known me for a really long time knows that I have always been a hater against blender for numerous reasons, mostly the unconventional UI, and the crazy usage of keyboard shortcuts for just about everything, and because it was "limited" in it's capabilities.

I WAS WRONG. SO WRONG. SO DAMNED WRONG I WISH I COULD GO BACK IN TIME TO SLAP MYSELF AND LEARN HOW WRONG I WAS.

Blender is by far the easiest to use 3d package I have ever touched. It is also the most comprehensive and complete package, and the best part about it is that it is 100% fully and totally legally F. R. E. E., that's right, I said FREE! And it's available for all major operating systems, so that means whether you use Windows, Linux, or Mac, you have access to this incredible software.

Now, the UI is indeed unconventional, yes, but this is actually a good thing. I wish more software worked the way that blender does. The manner in which the panels and controls are interacted with is far superior to anything I have ever used before. Take the hour or so that it takes to learn how to use the UI in blender and you will no longer think it to be a hindrance to the use of the software.

The keyboard shortcuts are indeed there, and some are downright crazy. I'm looking at you, you W-Key Specials menu! But it's actually pretty easy to use them once you learn them. It's worth the hour it will take you to learn the shortcuts. Here are a few of them to get you started.

In the 3D view in Object Mode:

Press the A key to select or de-select all objects in the scene.

Press the X key to delete the selected objects.

Press the G key to grab the selected objects allowing you to freely translate (move) them. Use this in addition to the X, Y, and Z keys to restrict translation to a specific axis.

Press the R key to rotate the selected objects freely. You can use the same axis restriction keys to your advantage here as well.

Press the S key to scale the selected objects freely. Same as the grab and rotate tools, use the restriction keys to have sensible scaling on an axis.

Press Shift+A key to bring up the Add menu. From here you can add things to your scene.

Press the Tab key to switch to Edit Mode.

That's all that I have time to list. Learn more by checking out blender for yourself! Below are some things I made with blender (the tree I modeled with Wings3D before learning blender) and have put into Unity for a quick turntable.

Toxic Sewer on GameDev Market

So I was surprised with some great news today. My tiles just got accepted on GameDev Market, please show your support and pick up a copy if you like them, or tell others about it if you don't need them.

In addition to that, Degica finally got back to me and told me that they have accepted the tiles as well, so they will soon be available on gamedevfort.com as soon as their art team puts together the promotional materials for the marketplace.

In other news, all my side-projects and smaller projects which have been in the works have just been shelved in order to free up time to focus strictly on a single project. The large RPG which we started four years ago is finally taking the front seat and will be the sole focus of Bang Bang Attack Studios from here on, until the release day.

Lots to do, and lots to learn to get this project rolling in the right direction. I will be posting more about the development soon.

Redbubble

It's been quite some time now since I last posted anything. Mostly because I have been using a different computer and haven't had blogger open 24/7 like I had on my main computer.

Anyway, some updates are in order. For starters, I created an account on redbubble which you can check out here

You will find my digital art creations that I have selected for publishing on products. Theres some really neat shit there. If you have some spare cash and want to support my developments, please buy something!

In other news, I am working on a 2D top-down action RPG in Unity. No story in place at this time, but the game will heavily revolve around one of my favorite mechanics -- BLOWING SHIT UP! I love being able to destroy just about everything in a game, like in the Ratchet & Clank game series where you smash things to collect bolts. I want to also have non-perma-death for the things that get destroyed, so like you can walk into a town and burn everything in sight, leave, and when you return, it's back new to be burned again! >:D It's gonna be a hell of a lot of fun. I'm mostly in the early prototyping stages right now, with no final visuals and lots of ripped and shoddy art at the moment. Once I have something that isn't copyright infringing to work up some screenshots & gifs, I'll show off the project.