Appsguild Games

What do you do?

Many people, particularly men, have their personal identity defined by what they do for a living.

At a recent church picnic, there was the usual small talk, which eventually leads to the question, “What do you do?”. And, even though people mean well, they may feel better about you or themselves, or even evaluate you differently, based on your response.

One of the guys was embarassed and avoided the question. Later, he said that he used to have a prominent job with a big office and large salary. But he got laid off. Now he is working at UPS and is waiting for his 6 month anniversary so that he can eligible for full-time work.

In American society, our jobs are treated as a defining point of our identities. Maybe it is appropriate since we spend more waking hours working than doing any other activity.

I have always found the response “I work at XYZ company” to be almost a statement of “I am owned by XYZ company”. According to an article in Fast Company magazine a couple of years ago, they apparently agree. It was recommended that the correct answer to the question should be : “I am currently employed at… and I do xyz there”. This is supposed to show that you are not defined by your current job, that you are not “owned” by the job/company, and it also supposedly shows that you are open (and available) to other opportunities, especially since the best job leads are from contacts.

What do you do? (geek style)

As geeks, the “What do you do?” question takes on even more levels of meaning - with the usual tech posturing and questions like “what tools do you use?”, etc. Someone in this group of preening peacocks will always feel better about themselves after this exchange.

Who am I? I am a …

I updated my resume this week. This inevitably leads to the question of “Who am I?”, which is not much better than “What do you do?”.

I am a Business Analyst, Project Leader, and Project Manager. And when I say that, you will filter that based on your personal and professional experience. I have had technical people immediately avert their eyes and mumble, “Oh…”. I know. I saw you. Some have even quoted The Dilbert Principle - stating that companies tend to systematically promote their least-competent employees to management. Such BS…

I used to primarily be a developer. I worked on some cool projects - but it was always someone else’s ideas or directions. I am now more interested in IT strategy.

Oh no, I’m doing it again. “I am”…”I do”…

The funny thing is that I am much greater than the sum of my parts. And my potential is much greater than the “trail” I have left professionally, as evidenced in my resume. God knows I am under-utilized at my current employer!

Maybe it is more

Maybe we are not supposed to be defined by our jobs. So many of the GeeksWithBlogs bloggers are much greater than the sum of their parts also, and most are defined more by what they do outside of their current job.

D’Arcy, consultant by day, is an aspiring motivational speaker with his Ignite Your Life series.

Chris Williams, while being a Microsoft MVP, is just as known for his blogging, tattoos, and XNA presentations.

And George Clingerman is not defined by where he works, but by his XNA game development.

And really, my most enduring memories of the last two years have nothing to do with work, but are parts of life - bike rides, rock climbing, sunsets, vacations, bunnies (ok, I made that last one up). They make the other BS with the job seem pretty unimportant by comparison.

In my previous post, I was focused on making One Game per Month. Well, that only works if you continue to work on it. I, on the other hand, got distracted on doing something else. Which is a problem, because when it stops being fun and I’m in the bowels of coding and debugging, it seems more like work.

This brought to my mind the nature of epiphany. We all want to get that lightning bolt from the sky that gives us the great idea. In fact, epiphany used to mean that you got the idea from God.

I am reading The Myths of Innovation, by Scott Berkun. In the book, he covers the myth of epiphany, that great ideas seldom come as epiphanies, unlike the story of an apple dropping on Newton’s head yielding insight into gravity, which is likely a myth of story anyway (the apple, not gravity…).

Instead, ideas come *surprise* through hard work, practice, and failure. Often what is attributed as a true epiphany is really the ability to put two disparate thoughts together, noticing the possible connection. Discovering penicillin through mold could be an example.

I have a book on song writing and lyric writing that basically says that you only get better through practice and working at it. Getting that flash of a great song idea doesn’t happen very often, which is also why most of the songs on the radio sound the same, because it is easier, and yea even advisable, to follow a formula.

Berkun’s book on Innovation also has a funny story of a group of business people touring Google, and marveling at the amount of toys, games, bean bag chairs, etc. And they wondered how anyone can get that next great idea if the staff is sitting around in bean bag chairs playing games and talking to each other.

I read an interesting article on MSN about indie game-makers challenging themselves by creating one game a week/month for an entire year. Some are gems and some are crap.

One of the games was the super popular Tower of Goo.

They also have an article on Gamasutra about How to Prototype a Game in 7 Days. Their article is interesting and basically challenges the game designer to do the equivalent of random word association - develop a theme in a short period of time, and do small mini-game that may experiment with one idea, like a certain type of physics, or using the microphone as a controller. Interesting stuff.

So I am trying something similar, although I may not limit myself to one week or month. Now that I have a basic game framework to duplicate my XNA efforts (I call it my Bloink game engine), I am ready to begin.

My game is called MOO. It consists of a mini-game with a cow or multiple cows. (I know, the cow head looks like a deer). A farmer has to milk the cow and walk over to the vat and dump the milk, racing the clock and the ever increasing udders of the cow, which may explode. The cow has sprites of the ever-increasing udders and gradually larger eyes. The graphics are rudimentary, similar to George Clingerman’s tutorials.

Here is the cow:

For the last six weeks I have been working on a Master of Orion clone called Sovereign - all in XNA.

Main screen

Intro screen

Menu screen

Planet info screen

All of these graphics were created with Paint.Net. All graphics, such as the logo, menu screen background, and planets, were created from tutorials on the Paint.Net forums.

Current Features:
• Intro screen has a gear animation that moves across the screen, cracks like an egg, and an Appsguild logo flies out, complete with Fade.
• Menu screen has a menu manager
• Main screen has planets that are dynamically loaded from an XML file.
• When right clicking on planets, a planet info screen appears with an enlarged graphic and planet info numbers

Download my current code from: sov06012008.zip

Still alot of work to go. I used example code for Fade and Screen Manager from George Clingerman’s XNA Development, and some Screen Manager ideas from Domination by Focused Games.

I continue to mess around with XNA 2.0. I have been using George Clingerman’s tutorial on selecting a sprite with a selection box. The tutorial is also on his XNADevelopment.com site here.

Basically, there are two sprites that you can select by left clicking on them:

or you can drag a selection box around them to select them:

You can then select one sprite in this manner and right click somewhere on the screen to move it, similar to a RTS game. Very handy. But I want something more.

I want to click on a sprite and have a selection cursor appear around the sprite.

And when I click somwhere else, I want the selection cursor to go to that sprite, or not appear at all if I don’t click on a sprite.

And I want to be able to reference the sprite that I clicked on.

And I want to be able to reference the sprite that I clicked on.

So this is how I did it:
I created a sprite manager class with a collection to store all of my sprites. It has lookup code so that I can drill down to the sprite that was clicked on.

Here is the init code in the game:

Here is the LoadContent in the game:

And the Update code in the game:

Here is the source code (spriteselection.zip).

And here are some of the planet sprites (planetsprites.zip).

These planet sprites were created with Paint.Net.

How to make planets with Paint.Net

How to make starscapes and nebulae with Paint.Net

In my previous post I talked about making my first RPG tutorial in XNA 2.0. One of the challenges was finding a sprite with all the animation movements in different directions.

I came across Charas RPG Maker site. Once you register, you can create sprites in all their cheesy, 8-bit glory. The sprite options are very comprehensive, and include hundreds of options for body, face, hair, dress.

Each animation cell is 72 x 97. To get the background to be blank in dotnet, I changed the background to magenta (R: 255, G: 0, B: 255).

Here are some of my samples:

Knight:

Wizard:

Zombie:

Medusa:

Greedo:

Wolverine:

After long last, I have started to mess around with XNA 2.0.

I really like George Clingerman’s tutorials here on GWB, as well as George’s XNADevelopment.com site.

If I make a game, what kind of game would I like to make? As I have said before, I spend more time playing old Nintendo games downloaded on the Virtual Console on my Wii - old Zelda and Metroid. So I think I will try to make an RPG.

I have messed around with RPG’s before, using Microsoft’s Crusader RPG starter kit, on the Coding4Fun part of the site, from the time before XNA. An RPG with ugly graphics.

Although the graphics are ugly, the game code does have a good tutorial and code on creating tile maps loaded from files (in this case they are csv and text files).

So I am on my way. Using George’s sprite code from his tutorials, I want to create an animated sprite of a typical walking RPG avatar. I used Charas RPG Maker site to create my animated sprites (more on this site in my next post).

The resulting sprite has three frames of animation walking in all directions.

I quickly figured out that it is difficult to animate a walking sprite. If you have one frame per touch of the arrow key it is not too bad, but otherwise he flails wildly. I tried to use code from Crusader to add walking frame rates but Crusader treats each tile as an individual “hex”, something that I was not doing. I finally found some sample code - Animating Sprite Sheets and Sprite Movement, which adds in a variable framerate that keeps the walking smooth, slow, and non-jerky. I put this code together with George’s stuff and came up with this:

In the above frame, I have an animated, walking avatar knight (which responds to arrow keys) and an animated zombie that walks in place.

Here is the source code: rpgTutorial1.zip.

Also in my travels, I came across an excellent set of RPG tutorials by Nick on nick.gravelyn.com that include tile engines, sprites, NPC dialog windows, etc.