June 5th, I get a spammy looking email saying that I have a fed-ex package scheduled to be delivered in 5 days.
For some reason, I just couldn’t quite relegate it to the ‘delete’ folder. I did a bit of poking around and it looked like it originated from Oculus. Then other people in different dev forums said they were getting emails too. Then Oculus sent out a tease of a tweet:
Hmm. This could be interesting. I eagerly kept my eye on the tracking, waiting for the morning it said ‘On Vehicle For Delivery’ -at which point I would camp out on my front porch glider; old man style, yelling at kids to get off my lawn until the Fed Ex guy drove up and I’d start running around in circles like Calvin when he finally got his propeller beanie.
Except – that’s when I noticed it was being delivered to another state.
The address was correct, except – it was going to California.
I ran circles, except now it was in a panic. I scanned all over Oculus’ site to see if there was someone I could contact about this and see if something could be done. No one seemed to have any helpful advice on the forums, Slack channels or any other VR related site. Until I remembered an email I got asking about my t-shirt size.
I scanned through my email – I’m a digital packrat, terabytes of old data with multiple copies just lying around everywhere and my inbox is no different. And lo & behold – an Oculus email, with an actual person instead of a automated response. Frantically I fore off a message in hopes that some one can help.
their reply:
Oh my,
I’ll see what we can do on Monday AM with Fedex.
So with nervous anticipation, I waited (expecting my box to look like it had been dragged through the jungle by the time I got it) and as the days ticked down, the Fed Ex updates slowly got closer to my hearth & home. And then it came.
looks like everything got here ok
I seriously felt like a kid opening the darn thing.
Have a nice whiskey that will go in this once the game is shipped
Each little bit was better than the last.
want to try and port my game to this
And now my next phase of dev work can begin. I’m hoping I can get my game ported to the Go so I can have 2 headsets running in Sept. when I make my way back to GDEX.
So, dev work has slowed to a c r a w l now that kiddos are out for summer break. Which means instead of having to drag them out of bed, throw something akin to clothing on them, forcing breakfast-like items into them and hustling them out the door, they now gleefully awaken at the first chirp of those psychotic birds every morning.
I kid you not, on Memorial Day, having stayed up late to watch Game 7 (and admittedly having an ale or 3 too many) I was greeted by the sounds of my youngest playing with some abomination of toys that chattered obnoxiously in the tune of a British Train.
At 5:50 in the damn AM.
No amount of coaxing, cajoling, pleading or offers to pay for cars, education, stupidly expensive toys could coax the wee lad back to his bed so I dragged him to the furthest part of the house slapped a tablet loaded with games in his hands and collapsed on a couch hoping we didn’t wake any of the others. Yeah, I suck as a parent but I was exhausted and could not think straight.
and its been like that since.
My dev time is in the early hours, when the household is asleep and the cat provides a fairly quiet wake-up service by jumping on my hear (or other sensitive parts) demanding food. I’ll fire up the coffee, check emails and guzzle a cup until I can think in a somewhat logical manner and plug away on my game until people need to get up and go to school or work. Until now. Now they CAN’T WAIT to leap out of bed and demand food, entertainment, attention, and an increasing need to square off against each other in ThunderDome style matches to see who can wake up people in the furthest county possible.
So, with the advent of SUMMER VACATION, I’ve been feeling a bit stressed as I realize: no more day hours in which to dev.
So if I wanna dev – gotta lose more sleep / get up earlier.
Not the sort of thing I find particularly cheery. It also seems in those dismal grey hours, when the only time I can squeeze in any work on the game – these are the exact days that kids seem to intuit my lack of dev time and fill it with early rising, diaper changes, nightmares and sudden needs of sippy cups as if somehow the 12 gallons they drank an hour aqo had zero effect on their thirst.
It was in this dark time that I saw a couple of glimmers of hope:
Come September – BOTH kids will be in school full time, 5 days a week / 6 hours a day. I just need to bear down and get through the summer. I also happened to see this little tidbit on the GDEX Facebook page: (click to enlarge)
I’m SO humbled that I was remembered!
And right after that – I saw a mention from the Cleveland Game Co-Op leader that mentioned me and my setup from last year:
Remember that scene in “BIG” where Tom Hanks character is playing the game (as an adult) that he had struggled with since the beginning of the movie? And how he finally beats it and has all sorts of revelations about being a kid in a grownup body? Been feeling like that a lot lately.
I started being interested in game dev back in 1979, when a buddy of mine got an Atari 800, and eagerly demoed it for us geeky wretches who didn’t have parents rich enough for such toys. What little I knew about computers was relegated to snippets of code I had gleaned from magazines such as:
10 Print Hello
20 goto 10
Which I was eager to show off; and was met with less enthusiasm than one might expect. After being shown all kinds of cool tricks with PEEK and POKE statements, we were shown the latest and greatest games modern computing had to offer (freshly loaded off cassette tape, of course!) And of course I’m blown away by how much better the graphics are over our Atari 2600. I’m completely sucked in by how much better looking everything is – even on a Magnavox 15 inch TV. Sadly the demo was over far too soon, (and I wouldn’t touch a computer again for a couple of years) I raced home and grabbed some grid paper and started drawing sprites in anticipation of my game designing future.
Man, I wish I had those sketches now.
Anyway – the next time I’d seriously delve into anything like that (other than programming a BASIC version of draw in my high school computer lab on a TRS 80 Model III) would be when my dad got a AT&T clone of the IBM PC AT – and a copy of BASIC. I dove into trying to draw stuff on the screen in 320×240 resolution and managed to get some interesting things on screen by using a few calculations and simple plotting of what my math spit out. My dad took my program to his job and showed it off; his boss told me as soon as I graduated MIT or Cal-Tech, I’d have a job. I had gotten to a point where I couldn’t quite get what I was looking for unless I started using a high & mighty concept called ‘arrays’. The BASIC manual that came with our computer only touched on it, referring me to the all knowing BASIC compendium, which I begged my dad to find, but no one at his job seemed to know anything about.
Well, it’d be another decade before I touched a computer again.
After various jobs, misadventures in Atlantic City and tragic love affairs, I fled the doomed NJ coast for the wilds of NYC and dreams of becoming an artist, starting with attending Parson’s School of Design. And with it, came access to the brand new computer lab, and the Mac & Photoshop. I only got the barest amount of time on the computer, because the entire school (faculty & staff included) wanted time on these wondrous new machines and then my money ran out and I had to (again) put aside my dreams of graphics and games.
ahh, the good ol’ days
It wasn’t until ’97 when I FINALLY got my hands on my own computer: a 66mhz, 40MB hard drive PC clone running Windows 3.1. My good buddy David D. hooked me up with a copies of Photoshop and a 3D modeling / animation program called Truespace. I dove into both programs and read whatever books I could on both. I found out fairly quickly that Photoshop could easily get me jobs, whereas 3D stuff was a harder nut to crack. I also re-discovered video games and LOVED Quake LAN matches over parallel port connections.
Then I discovered a program that allowed me to modify the game (in CompUSA of all places)
Since I was already making money off of Photoshop and knew the program pretty well, I thought I’d try combining my love of art and games and try to become a truly ‘hand-painted’ texture artist. While I had some mixed successes – I still wanted more and started tinkering with other game engines:
Doom 3 art city
So I played with different things, tried different approaches and it wasn’t until I got my DK2 and picked up Unity that i truly started to find my calling. And it was Playmaker that saved me, because any attempt at coding completely befuddled my right-brained thinking, and having something not work because of a mis-placed semicolon was beyond frustrating.
And now we’ve come full circle – as I contemplate adding random elements in a structured format (like distributing my coins for the money quest) I’m trying to find a way of organizing them in logical sequences. It wasn’t until I started describing my problem on the Playmaker Slack channel that it hit me: I need an array. I FINALLY UNDERSTAND WHAT AN ARRAY IS.
So, in my long term goals of getting a wet bar put in the office, kids that behave, and a wife that gives unsolicited foot rubs; there IS the small matter of having a full fledged, 3 level demo done by the time GDEX rolls around in September.
I have come to realize that constantly polishing the same level I have made is making what I have smoother and shinier, but doesn’t do much to get to that end goal of having s o m e t h i n g done. And for that, I need something more than just bouncing around my flower level until the player gets to the top. And as serendipity seems to just flow from my child’s fingertips (I wonder if that’s his mutant superpower) he drew the whole range of coins, pennies, dimes – he even got a Half Dollar, too!
fun with pennies and kaboings
So, now the fun part of it: making things; pasting them around the level and playing it until I think its kinda fun. My neighbors have a couple of kids who are willing playtesters, so I’ll have the dads over for some home brewed ales while we watch the kids play and wait for their verdict.
And as always, my art director / inspiration is finding it equally fun to make assets and asks daily to ‘do some animation’ – this is one of his latest entries. Now its up to me to figure out how I can use it.
