Posterous isn't bad (I'm still using it for my music blog), but I've decided that the time has come to transition to a full-fledged website. Therefore, for just about everything relating to me, go check out http://alfredofreak.com (I've even started putting up my music).

See you there!

I have actually started game development again since the break has started! :D

Piecing together a bunch of tutorials, I am slowly developing a reusable game engine. Actually, this is the first game engine I'm developing period, so I'm pretty psyched. Seeing as this is the first game engine I've created (and because it uses lots of code available around the web), I will probably keep this one private for my own use.

Also, I'm actively developing this as I work towards getting a dungeon crawler up and running with ccGD (the game dev group at the U of U that I help with).

Progress!!! :D

My brain has suddenly decided that now is the time for sleep, so I'll chat more later.

PERFECT! I just finished up the last bit of schoolwork I have before fall break starts. Finally, I'll be able to get caught up on a few things and tackle some projects that don't have anything to do with homework.

Now I can think. Over the next few days, I'll establish my game plan (both as a figure of speech and literally) for the break.

Tonight, I started my Mac Mini back up.

For those of you who don't know, my Mac Mini serves as my local SVN server.

Anyway, this is a long post about how I'm getting back in the flow of both school and game development at the much-needed cost of a few other things. It is far more verbose and personal than the majority of people really care to read about and I actually ended up in a sort of rant / apology towards the end. If you're interested in hearing what's up, hit the break. If not, just know that I AM back on track now.

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Alright, I'm done. I'm tired of wasting time. I WANT TO GET ON WITH MY LIFE!!!!

I am 20 and still living at home. While this isn't the worst case scenario, it is very infuriating. I love my family and I love living here but I hate feeling like I can't get on with the rest of my life.

My immediate goal is to start buidling credit so I can actually get a decent payment on a house or apartment or whatever I decide to pursue when I leave my house.

My next immediate goal revolves around the use of the Pomodoro technique in order to stay focus on the task at hand while still managing to get everything done and avoid feeling totally stressed out in the process. Case in point: I am giving myself only five minutes to write this, less than 2 of which remain.

Finally, I'm going to try to be as independent as possible while under this roof. This means that in all but very few cases, I want to be the one taking care of my stuff in this house.

No, this isn't a game development post but it sure as hell affects my GD stuff.

Next post when I've started to figure things out (8 seconds to spare).

As very few of you know, I had a video game discussion class back in spring where the final project consisted of making a design document for a game from scratch. Suffice to say I absolutely LOVE the idea I came up with.

I don't want to share too many details, but I will say it is going to be a rhythm game. If you're a fan of Beat Hazard, you'll LOVE IT! :D

As with any game that relies on sound to determine gameplay, this is going to require a hefty amount of frequency analysis. This is new but utterly fascinating territory for me so I'm going to start development for this by making a program I can use to easily analyze songs and figure out how each song would work best in the game. I still don't think it has clicked just how big of a project this is for me, but I'm still going to give it a shot. My vile summer class ends not this Friday but the next and I plan on utilizing the most of the time I'll have left in summer.

The best case scenario I'm hoping for is that this tool can be used for people to make their own stages for the game. However, I think I need to actually start the project before I can say whether or not that is possible :]

Yeah, I've been away from here for a while. Something utterly bizarre convinced me that it would be a good idea to take Calculus 3 this summer. As a result, that is pretty much all I've been doing. Well, that, and just enjoying an otherwise lazy summer (sometimes a bit more than I should).

The aforementioned practice project with my friends is still making progress, just a blt slower than I'd like thanks to our laziness (I speak for everyone but Dalton because he has been the primary one capable of keeping us on task -.-).

As for every other project, I haven't worked on them at ALL. Thanks to updates like this making me feel like a lazy SOB who is never going to get anything worthwhile accomplished, I'm going to bust out as much coding as I can between the end of my summer class (two weeks) and the beginning of fall (about four weeks).

I don't suck at software engineering and game development; I just haven't balanced everything in my life as well as I should.

After a ridiculous amount of time was wasted with Eclipse yesterday, I finally got up and running again. My first goal for the collaboration application is to prototype the GUI, so I decided to give NetBeans a shot. So far, it looks promising :]

In addition, I decided tonight that I'm going to tackle a smaller project as well. I had the privilege of using ScrumWorks for my final CS 3505 project, but it doesn't quite cover the more simplistic stuff I need to do for my group game project. Therefore, I'm going to develop a simple little program that makes managing our tasks much easier. I'm envisioning this one taking a lot less time since I will be utilizing lots of built-in Java functionality.

April was nuts along with the first week of May and I didn't participate in LD last month, but my experiences in one of my software engineering classes have inspired me to tackle my first non-academic project.

My final group in CS 3505 was AWESOME and I can definitely see myself working with those guys for future projects (we're actually in the midst of planning something for this summer, but that's a topic for another post). The only negative part came with pair programming. Pair programming was effective, but we didn't have any means of modifying the same code file without having to go through messy SVN merges. My goal with this project is to fix that issue. At the same time, I want to extend the scope of project so that people outside the realm of software engineering can benefit from a more productive means of collaboration through simultaneous desktop document editing.

That is all I have decided thus far, so the scope of the project will be determined over the course of development instead of up front. As a result, this may just be a simple programming exercise or it may blossom into an utterly massive and useful project.

Stay tuned!

March is looking to be a fairly busy month. I'm probably going to opt out of this month's Mini LD in favor of the real LD next month. Regardless, I'm still peckin' away at a practice project my friends and I are working on right now. A demo will be posted whenever we get that far.