Hello again my fellow readers!! (Hi Mom!)
It’s been a long time since my last post and I just wanted to post a little update on what’s going on with my life and this blog.
First of all, I’ve bought a new domain (torresmateo.com) and moved the blog here (you can still use the old url though, but it will just redirect here). This means that all those hundreds of thousands of facebook comments (for a total sum of 10 through all posts) are gone and comments are disabled until I come across a system that I like and it’s not so JavaScript related.
Secondly, a brief update on what I’ve been doing since August. I decided to organise this a little bit.
#College and Work Related Stuff
I’ve been working on my thesis and it seems I’m on the last mile of that road. I’ve published a paper in the process, which I’ll link in a future post. It’s about solving multi-dimensional optimisation problems using algorithms based on a particle swarm meta-heuristic. Cool right?
I’ve also been working in web development as always, it’s still fun, thanks for asking :D
#Game Related Stuff
Now to the important business
IGDA Paraguay
Here in Paraguay the game development industry is almost nonexistent. I mean, there are many game developers and a lot of them are incredibly capable, but sadly there is almost no market here and we have some serious limitations like not being able to sell in Google Play (unless we partner with someone from another country).
The IGDA (International Game Developers Association) is the largest non-profit membership organization serving individuals that create games and now Paraguay is a proud member with its own chapter. We are starting making some noise here and for the first time (that I know of) we’re getting some serious attention from a lot of people. The videogame market is growing and a lot of developers, designers and artists are getting to know each other and it seems to me that very soon we’ll see Paraguayan games shining out there. You can get updates on our chapter here.
I’ve been given the honor of collaborating on this amazing project as secretary!
My Personal Projects
While not writing this blog, or writing my thesis, or working, or doing survival related things like eating or sleeping…. I’ve been programming some games (kind of).
Wolfenstein 3D Clone
This project started as a way to teach myself “proper” 3D and OpenGL. I though “I should start with the very basic”. I know an infinite number of clones of this game are already out there, but I don’t care, the process was unbelievably fun and I learned a lot. I’m not sure about releasing this because there’s nothing really exciting about the game itself. Also, I didn’t make a lot of effort in the assets of the game and it doesn’t look very pretty. I’m not sure… maybe I’ll do it in the future. Who knows?
Mini Engine
After finishing the Wolf3D clone, I wanted to keep learning OpenGL and I came across this YouTube Channel (which I then realised contains a tutorial on how to do a Wolf3D clone, kudos to me for not googling before coding!). It really is an invaluable source of knowledge for beginners who want to build a 3D game engine from scratch.
Mobile Project
The latest project is a mobile (or rather multi-platform) game. I’m using Cocos2d-x, which is an open source 2D (and now 3D) game engine written in C++. So far it’s been amazingly easy and it lets me focus on the game mechanics rather than deal with the rendering and technical issues.
The main idea is to make a simple game but actually finish it and release it as a commercial product this year, or maybe in 2016. We’ll see. I’ll probably make a dev blog starting in march, when I expect to be working at least half time on this.
This Blog
The original idea remains (except the “one post every two weeks” part to be realistic). But there are some changes:
I’ll be writing some tutorials on some topics that I had a very difficult time to come across or had to read from several unrelated sources to understand. I think of it as a remainder and hopefully it’ll help someone else. They will mainly be about how to program this or that using Cocos2d-x or how to do specific things using OpenGL and GLSL, but there will also be tutorials on asset generation. So far, I’ve decided to start with these:
- Blender Tutorial: How to setup a fully automated Isometric tile generation Scene (a tutorial for absolute Blender newbies like me). This is mostly a Python tutorial.
- How to automate a tilesheet generation in Photoshop and Gimp for Tiled (using scripts).
- How to easily make an isometric scene in Cocos2d-x.
I don’t know when I’ll be releasing these tutorials, but the first one is already started, so it certainly wont be six months (I think).
What’s 100% true is the next post will be about the last complete game Fer and I made in College. I’ll try my best to post it by the end of January, but so far my schedule projections for this blogs are nothing but lies. If you like to give some feedback on this, feel free to e-mail me. Please refer tho the post you’re talking about.
Aaaaaaaaand I think that’s all for now, see you next time!