Other than the fact the quite a few of our best and brightest continue to cross the causeway to work for big MNC’s doling out huge salaries, finding good game artists in Malaysia is hard. There are plenty of artist, and a fair amount of good artists but really good game artists..well..

In my opinion good game artists

1) Go out and find out how people do stuff in games, compare themselves to their peers internationally and seek to improve themselves. Mike seems to think that’s a rarity in Malaysia with most artists being inward looking. I am not sure because maybe I haven’t met any yet or just ignored them (I tend to ignor people now adays who are full of themselves).

2) Understand to a degree how games are put together, the mechanics behind it. I heard that at least some of it is being taught in schools. I think all people involved in the game industry should at least have the skills of a junior designer (i.e. understand mechanics, understand game balance).

3) Learn technical techniques, explore and discuss them with their peers. Sorta like 1but more of trying to engage. Alot of people shy away from asking questions in Malaysia in lieu of being to be ignorant. Maybe cultural, but very bad

4) Fizzling passion..at first you are excited and then you find out making games are hard..

Can we figure all this stuff out? or are we stuck back-biting each other?

While we wrap up the single player version of Honor and Money, I’ve been working on the Honor and Money Multiplayer. We have decided to make it a different product because alot of the single player concepts just don’t gel well with a multiplayer game. Looking at getting a first proper playable by this monday, if all goes well.

Finished the character and team selection, and I am working on building a basic arena plus setting game objectives and respawning character upon death. I was a bit boggled with how to get thing up and running but decided to not bother with too much planning instead focusing on getting gameplay up and running ASAP. Many good developers get caught in the ‘tweaking’ of small things that stops the big picture, sure i’m going to pay price later by having to clean up things later but the benefit of driving out the fun in gameplay is worth the mess.

On a side note, I found out I become the Simon Cowell local Game Development from some of the guys at MDeC.. don’t know what was said…and frankly don’t care.

I have been working on a java side project for the last few weeks and thought i would share something I learnt..

First of all, get ant right away for building ant (http://ant.apache.org) your java makefiles. It makes life so much easier. Even netbeans uses as a build tool, i’ve been using programmers notepad just because i already have so many other ‘editors’ i’m try to keep it down.

Next since I am working on an applet, a good thing to do is to set your java.policy located in your home directory as a .java.policy file:

grant codeBase “file:c/projects”

{
permission java.security.AllPermission;
};

is usually good so you don’t have to keep signing your apps right away and can test them..you can try adding local host and if you don’t want a huge web server like apache use a SImpleWebServer ..you can find a few java ones on the web

Yes, Wendys is back in Malaysia…

Those of us old enough to remember the one that openned up in Sungai Wang Plaza but shutdown…but now it’s back with it’s trademark square burgers..funny I didn’t see the girl in pigtails anywhere…

I remember the ads in US about Wendys and the owner saying he was always trying to keep the price of the food down…Not true here in Malaysia..a burger will setup ou back at least RM10 for a set…

Still..you get the square burgers plus they sell Chilli…

People who want overseas can now get their Wendys I suppose…I only went there cause I remember going to Wendy’s with my nephew once…so..well..it was alot of fun..

It’s all the way in Jaya One…which is a strange wierd collection of empty buildings…with the recession on the way and higher inflation..I am unsure how long that place is going to be empty….

PS where is my Bacon Cheddar Cheese Burger

My stand on violent games is I don’t make them or play them..Our technology is coming to a state where games are quickly becoming more and more realistic and the line can be either blurred for a 7 year old between what is socially accepted in games versus what isn’t.

Jin was watching a 7 year beatup and blow away people in GTA. He complain to the manager of the store (unfortunately one of the many pirate stores) and he was told to leave the store. The father of the kid had no qualms in letting his son play the game without thinking what consequences they have on a child.

Malaysian in general are becoming worse parents. Irregardless of social standing (I think the richer the parents get, the worse they parenting skills as kids are often thrown to their keepers, paid off to NOT bother the parents). Kids that way grow up with a moral compass that even goes unchecked by religion. Malaysia has some of the worse parents in the world for passing on family values. Noise bratty kids who litter, yell and scream in public places. The worst of it is parents don’t see anything wrong. They are too rich…too good for you…smarter than anybody.

So other than blame the game industry…parent need to be responsible for kids..understand the child mechanism on consoles that lock out games…

Contrary to what people tell you, unless you have some experience in working a game company…I can recommend enough to fresh graduates not to start a game company. The thing is starting a game company is alot of work and it isn’t where you get the money from..it’s if you can deliver what you promise plus keep within budget. You need to be able to :

1) Keep track of cash flow, and have a fair knowledge of project costing

2) Be able to keep on top of the project and management

3) Be able to hire/fire/grow staff

4) Market and do business development of your company

Sure if you have a rich Dad and want to start one go ahead…but I would rather you just the money to me..and sit in the corner and learn. Too many rich kids who think money makes a company run well plus make them experts in game development.

New week, more financial to finish and If I’m good maybe I sneak in some 3D programming…or networking…

Doing a live game demo of Honor and Money and so far everything seems to be going well…Just did some cleanup of the game scripts and making sure everything is working well.

Last minute check and we should be ready for the demo…Come see us at Mid Valley Convention Centre at 11:30 to 12:30 this Saturday 12th, 2008.

Once again, I never should have left things this long with Torque. I set about trying to figure out how I would pack up and ultimately encrypted resources with Torque and so far haven’t got it to work yet. The default behaviour is a regular zip file, with the option of adding encryption later on. Packing up resources for me is more to keep things neat then to prevent people from stealing resources. Anybody who wants really wants to steal resources is going to get it anyways…keeping the casual person out will be good enough…

One way is obviously to obfuscate the zip file after it has been created with header data…which is the simplest as encryption comes with a performance hit.

I need to play around with it alot more on a standard build, then try figure out what is wrong with my our game build. A ton of other technical things to look at over the weekend plus have finalize our finances for next project…looks like another semi working week.

We are getting ready to show our game off to a publisher and we prepping things so that we get everything where it should be. There are a few outstanding bugs, but if we don’t start getting the word out about the game we will never get published.

We were also told we are being the opportunity to give a talk soon, so I suggested a live demonstration of the game.

Back to the build process…We current have a development source directory under svn which I run build script that copies the relevant files over to the build directory. It delete any unnecessary files that may have left around (i.e. text files, psd files just to be sure). It then precomplies the scripts. This gives us a debug build which is ready for internal testing/viewing.

A release build means only copying over the compiled scripts, copying the predone lighting files over. That is handled by another script. It goes through replacing files, making sure to delete any cheats, debug scripts etc..

Next is the demo build which will basically strip down the release build so that it can be given to the publisher and/or timed lock release (i.e. for giving a public demo). I might do more than 1 type of demo build as the first kind I am working on might strip away some levels so that the download isn’t that big.

Soo…it’s Development->Debug Build->Release->Demo.

Next for me is researching packing our assets into a single encrypted files system.. I have tested some installation packages, and need to check up on those as well.

Woke up today to find out my 19 inch LG LCD monitor was dead…Only 4 months old too..I had to drive all the way down to Low Yat Plaza where the LG rep said that they were not accepting this model of monitors and I had to take it back to the supplier….

So I had to take it back to the supplier who will hopefully fix it…It seemed fine last night, but sounds like something shorted out and it refuses to turn on…Thing was supposed to have a 3 year warranty as well..

My old Sony CRT lasted me over 8 years without any problems….quality