Update!

Hey everyone, just want to give a quick update on what I've been up too. Currently I am working as a software engineer at a laboratory, making laboratory management software, websites, and even games! Its a really sweet job, and I have been learning a lot since ove been here. I am currently working in PHP, Visual Basic, C# (silverlight), and SQL. One of the most challenging tasks I have had while here has been taking an old QuikBasic program, and converting it into Visual Basic, which is like taking a knight from the dark ages and throwing him into today's New York and telling him to work haha. I pretty much have the freedom to complete projects however I want, using the language of my choice. This is awesome because it gives me a lot of flexibility. My current project has me making a game for one of our marketing sites. WE decided on Silverlight, so I have been making a "Space Invaders" clone so i can familiarize myself with the language. Its almost finished, only a few more things to do, so I wanted to post a screen shot of what I have. Yes its Halloween themed ;)

XNA Game - FIGHT!

So after years of wanting to do this, but not knowing how to start, me and my friend are finaly going to be building our super secret XNA puzzle game. Problem before was I didnt know how to build the puzzle board but using the awesome info from:

http://www.packtpub.com/article/building-complete-board-based-puzzle-game-microsoft-xna-40

By the way the author of that article also made a really good XNA 4.0 book, you should check it out. I was able to use bits and pieces and tailor it to give me a great starting point to the game. As of now its just gonna be a prototype to get the basic gameplay mechanics working. No pretty graphics yet.

Graduation Coming!

Well Its been a long road, but my time at Devry is ending. Ill be graduation on December 17th 2010 with my Bachelors of Science and Game and Computer Simulation! However even though my time at school is over im still building up my knowledge in software engineering and game design. Companys usually want more than just college smarts as their requirements for postions so I have been working on stuff like ASP.NET, Android, PHP, XHTML, CSS, XML, and many other technical skills.

I think this is something that everyone should practice while they are in and out of school! Do your own research outside of homework, it really pays off! Also for anyone who is also doing the GSP program understand that it really tough to land a game industry job outside of college other than maybe interships. If you have the chance to intern do it! As for me im looking into software engineering postions, web programming positions using C#, ASP.NET etc, as well as internships.

Adjacency Matrix

Last lab was a little tough but with some pointers from the professor I finished it. I had to write a new member function "degree" for the Wtgraph C++ class given. The "degree" function should determine and output how many even degree vertices there are and how many odd degree vertices, and then calculate the weight of them all. The trouble I was having was that instead of my for loop adding up each row and doing the odd/even check it did the check for each vertex. All I had to do though was move the check outside of the for loop for "j" and add a row/column counter. Doh!

Discrete Mathmatics

-Ask the user for the required number of initial values.

-Determine the next 19 values according to the given recurrence relation.

-Output the resulting 19 values along with the values for the two representative functions provided

Recursive functions are useful when you cannot decide which route to take with a particular problem, you can save time by testing different results with recursive functions. Although they can be memory hogs becuase they call themselves until the problem is solved.

This took a lot of planning out on paper in order to visualize correctly on how the program would flow. What i had a real hard time grasping was how i would take the user input which was in an array, and plug it into my function that executed the recursive algorithm. From there i also had to print out the appropiate number to the screen, which was another toughy. I used a for loop and incremented the number n to 18. Each cycle would print out and execute the algorithms.

Comming along

Just finished Calculus, and now I am taking Discrete Mathmatics. Sounds like something you could get arrested for right? It actually a pretty cool class where you solve logic based math puzzles, and put them into C++ form. First ILab had me make a C++ console app that ran through a truth table. There were two problems that were kinda like this:


A says B is lying
B says A is telling the truth

User put in input whether or not A and Bare telling the truth using "T" or "F".

They way i checked for consistancy though could of been more effecient though:

//Checking for true and false values. Probably not the most efficient way
if (p == "T" && q == "T")
{
varA = "FALSE";
varB = "FALSE";
}
if (p == "T" && q == "F")
{
varA = "TRUE";
varB = "FALSE";
}
if (p == "F" && q == "T")
{
varA = "TRUE";
varB = "TRUE";
}
if (p == "F" && q == "F")
{
varA = "FALSE";
varB = "FALSE";
}

But it works!

MeteorX

Ive got a new XNA game in the works! Its a planet defence game, in the year 30XX, where you defend planet X from meteors and other space like things in via "Weapon X". Notice a trend? My cousin josh has made some badass music for it already, and ive been writting out the requirements and some concept art. This will be the official spot for the game and updates as time passes. So...audience...stay tuned for screen shots and such!