But lots and lots is new, so hopefully everyone can find something to entry in tonight's action packed episode of: The Midnight Update (EST).
Membrane Massacre
Tonight I hit a whirlwind of progress on Membrane Massacre, which has done a fantastic job of making the game feel more and more like a professional endeavor. Here's the spiel:
Boom!
Explosions are simply a bundle of joy. Previously an 'explosion' was just an effect created by the Missile weapon, which was just a wanky little spurt of particles. Very boring.
Now explosions are a set of additive-blended explosion/smoke particles that look utterly awesome. Explosions radiate outwards for a variable amount of time, destroying chunks of terrain, knocking away enemies (even El Mucho Membrano!), and giving a fun screen-shake effect when the player is too close to an explosion. Explosions can also damage the player now, too. Let's just say it makes it much more satisfying to use Missiles (not to mention the smoke trails!). [smile]
(Die, die, die!)
(Kudos to Draffurd for helping me make the end-game screen spiffer, too!)
(Let's not forget all of the wonderful new weapon icons Draffurd also created [grin])
(And yes, there will be multiple ships :P)
As you can see, I'm getting closer and closer to my goal of having a near-professional quality game. I'm extremely pleased with MM thus far, and I absolutely can't wait to release the finished product. Hopefully I'll be able to keep my goal of finishing by the end of the month.
UW GameCamp (XNA)
Microsoft visited our campus today! They chose the worst possible spot/time (middle of our student life centre at lunchtime), and overall it was pretty disappointing. They showed us a bunch of promotional XNA stuff, including the incredibly boring Space War demo and some Grade 10-calibre games that the presenters themselves had been working on. And Visual C# Express crashed once, hehe. [grin]
On the upside, the usual Microsoft tactic of giving out mounds of free stuff improved my mood pretty well. I got a free T-Shirt (saying "Remember that one time at game camp.." [grin]), free lunch, free fortified soy milk (WTF?!), a free Visual Studio Express CD, and got to chat a bit with the XNA guy afterwards. I still don't think I'll be touching XNA seriously anytime soon, as it seems too much like the goal is to build a developer community, rather than actually having feasible methods for game distribution. [sad]
Co-Op
So this evening was the night I logged onto our university's 'JobMine' and started checking out the offerings for my co-op term this summer.
Wow! Just shy of 300 jobs in my field; awesome! I found a handful that really spoke out to me and applied. I can't wait to see what kind of replies I'll get back. There were some neat ones, like one where I'd be working on some NASA-related programs used for measuring/analyzing worldwide snowfall/snow-melting, a couple of fall-back tutor jobs (for CS) right at the university, some programming jobs at reputable places such as Royal Bank of Canada and McAffee. Very cool stuff, if I do say so myself. [smile]
Sick!
And as of today I think I'm coming down with something nasty. Not cool. I wish I had my own microscopic ship. [sad]
