I realized after I read over my last entry that that wasn’t what I intended to write about at all. I intended to write about my activities over the summer, back when there were three two of us. I wound up simply waxing rhapsodic about how wonderful it was. Well, we wonderfulled up four complete motion-based casual games, and a demo, showing off my most awesome accelerometer-based gesture recognition system (eight independently recognizable gestures). They’re fairly short games, but, like all good casual games, have a high degree of replayability.
Since the summer’s end, or, rather, the end of the internship, I’ve been working on my own, making shells of games, creating the mechanics and a simple graphical representation, and have done that for a further three games. Also, in the ‘not really anything exceptionally useful to do’ category, I found that I was in the mood to do some tools work, as well, and whipped up a nifty little program that watches movement of the motion controller and builds a gesture signature that can be stored (for the moment) as an XML file.
So, basically, I’m hopping from project to project, doing what I consider the fun part, and then moving on to the next one, and, because my boss has been gone much of the time (some spent showing off my work to rather important people) I have had lots of time to go back and do follow-up and refinement passes on just about everything, so the next round of engines that come out of my ‘shop’ will be a good chunk better than the for the most part single- or one-and-a-half-pass stuff that we banged out during the summer.
That’s pretty much the whole story, I’m working hard, but having a blast. I’ve been purposefully vague to avoid violating any NDAs, especially those that we might choose to create in the future, as much of the stuff I’m working on is still very much in the planning stages, ’cause it turns out the game industry is very secretive (who knew?).