cardinal

It took me about a minute to load (seems too long).

I also struggled to find how to start the game until I found out the space bar is the confirmation button (I highly recommend some sort of button callouts as I almost gave up much like jms bc did).

I played two games, the first as maniac slime, and the second as super slime (VS invisible slime). Playing against invisible slime was terrible. He just made me invisible for almost the entire match, so I was essentially guessing at what to do rather than using any sort of strategy. I highly recommend changing the invisible power to be quick bursts of invisibility that can be strategically launched rather than just letting the player be invisible for 90% of the match. Perhaps cutting out a bunch of the slimes would be beneficial to creating a fun experience, or maybe locking some slimes to be unlocked through playing the game (as it stands it's overwhelming seeing about 20+ slimes to choose from just jumping into the game).

Other than that the game was pretty cute. I liked the feel of hitting the ball and the ball hitting the post was satisfying.

You should also initialize the pointer to NULL. Pointers aren't NULL by default.

In general you need to initialize all your variables (they aren't defaulted on their own in release mode), otherwise they can create hard to track down bugs (especially in networked games).

If you really want to make a PSP game you could google PSP homebrew. It's not exactly legal though so I doubt there are any books about it. I don't really follow the homebrew scene, so I'm not sure how easy/possible it is to hack the current PSP firmware to allow you to boot programs (Sony keeps updating the firmware to prevent this, but it keeps getting hacked).

Is there a reason you really want to make games for closed platforms? Why not first focus on just making games (i.e. for PC) and then when you have a game (or more) finished you can worry about porting it to a console or portable device?

Porting from PC to PSP or vice versa mainly requires changing libraries you link to, which compilers to use, any OS specific calls, and maybe even platform specific rendering code, even endianness (depending on CPU architecture). That doesn't even account for menu issues (the PSP has different requirements than television based consoles or PC screens in terms of screen size and resolution), or optimizations (in terms of code AND assets).

I've worked in the industry for about 7 years now. I started out as a generalist doing everything from UI work to databases, to tools, to rendering to gameplay, and now I'm specializing in animation.

You don't need to specialize. Being a really good generalist can be beneficial as well, it really comes down to what you want to do.

The real key, as ApochPiQ stated is to never stop learning. You don't need to be an expert when you start your career, but you need to have an ambition to work towards it. And once you are an expert, you need to work even harder to keep advancing the field.

I probably was roughly as knowledgeable as you when I got hired (although it's hard to make that statement based on only one post). There are lots of entry level positions that don't require years of experience.

As a former Teaching assistant at my University, that code would probably rank as some of the better code I've seen from University students.

While a bit unfair to poke fun at student code, it's always good to have a good laugh at yourself once in a while.

When I was a student I'd always have a bunch of "well it worked yesterday" moments due to late night coding gaffs.

I'm skeptical of the benefit of your site versus a game's own forums (or public gaming forums that already have critical mass).

The reason I say this is that fans of a game are already going to the game's forums to make suggestions, complaints, and discuss your game. These fans ARE the community for the game, not some generic community that is interested in ranking game suggestions and may or not be interested (or have a vested interest) in actually improving the game in question.

Also, after working in the industry for a lot of years and experiencing tons of what I guess would be called focus tests (and surfing forums for years and years), in general the average gamers' ideas for improving games are 99% of the time absolute garbage. There are very few gamers out there who actually have good ideas that are well thought through and realistic.

With that said, smaller companies that can't afford to hire community managers or host their own sites might find the service useful. But if your site doesn't have a large number of gamers interested in their game, how useful is the service?

It must be nice living in a world where HDDs have essentially an unlimited amount of space. At work I have 3 HDDs (one of which is a terabyte) and am constantly struggling to find space anytime a lot of assets are added. Anyways, on to something actually relevant... In my personal experience with the PSP (I worked on several PSP games years ago) the disk seek times are slow (as others have said). The main trick in dealing with this is to layout your data on the disk in a way that reduces these seek times. To do that you want data that is loaded together to be together on the disk so the UMD doesn't have to seek back and forth to read data. Another trick is to duplicate data in multiple places on the disk if it is loaded in different places. This allows you to seek less to read the same data. The problem with that approach is that UMD capacity is limited, so it only works if you have the space to play around with. Some games are easier to handle than others (for instance games that load on a per-level basis would be easier to manage than something that stream loads or loads when entering new areas (provided the areas are non-linear).

81 doesn't seem like it would hurt your chances (other than maybe for a huge scholarship). It was a bit different when I enrolled, Universities just got our entire transcript from our high school and Ontario still had grade 13, but my average was definitely below 80% (not by much, but it was below nevertheless). I got accepted to all the programs I applied for (Computer Science at Carleton and Ottawa Universities, and Computer Engineering at one of those two (can't remember which)), and even got a bit of a bursary. I would think 81 is better than most kids you are competing with.

Yep, subdivide the problem!!!

It's a little more complicated that JUST dividing into regions (i.e. players on the boundaries of two different regions might be able to collide, or a bullet/player might cross from one region into another in one time-step). You'll need to handle these edge cases in addition to what ultramailman suggests.

Octrees/quadtrees are common ways to hierarchically subdivide your world although depending on your requirements you can optimize this in different ways.

Tom answered most (if not all) of the questions already, but I felt that I should add:

Most undergraduate projects require approval by a professor (I don't know what your school's rules are), each with their own idea of what is and isn't acceptible. You will likely need to present what you intend to build for your project in order to gain approval. Perhaps it would be best to run ideas by your favourite professors ahead of time. Some professors won't like game projects and some won't mind (they tend to steer students towards projects in their personal areas of interest).

The professor grading my project was reluctant to allow me to build a basic 3D modeling program, but he ended up liking the final product. Your professors might be able to suggest a reasonable scope to target for your project (although you coming up with a detailed schedule with some buffer room will help your do the same).

Having a single impressive project is much better than having a thousand mediocre projects.

No one is going to be impressed with your work if your work is not impressive, no matter how much work you do. It's better to focus on making each project as good as you can within reason, and make sure you finish your projects.

As for putting work experience and past projects on your resume, you should describe what role/position you held (if applicable), and a brief summary of what you worked on (or at least the most important items). Being concise is best. If you coded and built all the assets for a project, don't list each thing you worked on, simply mention that you were the only developer on the project.