Tag / gam

by augustk

New Classes – Winter Quarter

Alright so I’m finally going to discuss the new courses I’m taking now.

CSC 395 – Research Colloquium – I’m pretty excited about this course. It’s completely online and every week there will be a lecture by a guest speaker on new work in areas of computing. Hopefully there are some talks relevant to my interests, but nonetheless I love TED talks, so this should be similar.

GAM 341 – Introduction to Level Design – Since I’m majoring in Computer Game Development and focusing on the programming portion of it, I figured I should also get a little more experience in the non-programming parts. We’re going to be using Unreal Engine 4, which I’m pretty stoked about!

GAM 376 – AI for Computer Games – I’ve always been interested in artificial intelligence. Actually, in the class I’ll describe next we’re discussing AI through a philosophical perspective. I’ll probably post more on this later. As for this course, I hope we don’t just use some already-implemented AI algorithms and we can actually write our own. I doubt it though.

PHL 242 – Philosophy & Technology – We’re discussing what technology actually is. Admittedly, when asked this question I thought it was going to be easy to define. I was horribly wrong. While it isn’t required, I may read the recommended material, “War in the Age of Intelligent Machines” by Manuel De Landa. We read the first chapter and thinking about how a robot historian would describe its history is something that made me extremely intrigued.

SOC 281 – Sociology of Rock Music – This is kind of weird, yes, and I know that. It fulfills some requirement that I needed to complete, so hey why not? We’re going to trace Rock Music from the beginning to now, and I’m thinking I’ll learn a lot. The professor asked in the first day of class what we knew about rock. While I do know some stuff, and I listen to rock all the time, I wrote that I had no knowledge of rock. I think this will benefit me because starting with a blank-ish slate should be fun.

Anyhow, I wasn’t going to take these classes and considered switching majors. I’ll explain why in the next post.

by augustk

Finished with GAM 374

Well, I chose to turn in exactly what you see in that last blog post. Everything that was required for the assignment was there and it earned me a 95%.

I am now focusing my efforts into work with a near-full-time schedule of 38 hours a week. I will be posting stuff about happenings relating to that from here on out.

I’m also working on an Android app, so there will be some Java tossed in.

And last but not least, my love for C++ is growing as I discover C++11 features. There’s a little code I wrote to test out the functionality of some of the new stuff if you read on.

Continue reading →
by augustk

Player Tank!

I’ve finally done some work on this and got the player tank working. Azul doesn’t handle mouse input very well (I’m spoiled by Unity), so it’s all keyboard controls.

WASD controls the tank movement

LEFT/RIGHT control the turret

I’m thinking the up arrow will fire a shell and the down arrow will lay a landmine.

DePaul Azul Engine - Tanks!
DePaul Azul Engine – Tanks!

Screenshot taken with Greenshot.

by augustk

First Day of Final Project

Today marks the first day I’ve started working on the final project for my GAM 374: Fundamentals of Game Programming I class. I’ve decided to recreate Tank – well actually, the Wii Play version called “Tanks!“.

We’re using the DePaul game engine called Azul – which I think could definitely use an engine overhaul since it’s based on the singleton design pattern. Gross.

Click to learn about Game Programming Patterns