Doubtless my fans (all three of you!) have been worried about my 2+ month absence from the interwebs. Since about mid-May I’ve been swamped with work — homework, tests, obligations from my student group, etc — and have had very little time to log in and read Iris’s forums, much less the time to write any posts of substance (or even lack of substance).

Where I’ve been

The big project I completed recently was making a DS game. Like, a real one and not just a “Look at the pretty collision detection!” homework assignment. Well, I consider it to be a completed alpha version. There are a couple bugs and the interface is crappy, but the main game runs properly. It’s a Tower Defense genre game called “Flower Defense”, in which the towers are flowers and the enemies are bugs. I don’t have any screen shots but if I ever burn it onto a ROM I’ll take some shots of it running from my DS. I intend to continue working on it over the next few years because I would like to use it in my portfolio.

I also submitted a “beta” version of an arkanoid game for my DirectX class and have to submit a “finished” version (with scores, sounds, and animations) by Thursday, but it’s actually a lot more rough than my DS game. Of course, the expectations were different and I spent a lot less time on this than I did on my DS. I’ll be glad to get it over with, because it really is crap.

Where I’m going

Today we decided the groups for this year’s Hal Event Week (HEW) project, which for us is to make a DS game. Our class is 32 people, which divided into 6 groups (4 five-people groups and 2 six-people groups). When deciding who would become the leaders, Masuda-sensei (our teacher) asked for volunteers and we ended up with exactly 6 people volunteering, myself included. So, I’m the leader of a five-person team for HEW.

I’m excited because, despite not getting all my first choices, I have a solid group of smart, dependable people and as long as I don’t drop the ball I think we’ll end up with a good end product. I really, really want to place in the competition this year, especially since I didn’t last year. Winning the gold would rock, but I’ll be happy as long as we win something. Of course, if we can make a really good game, we’ll get a chance to enter it in the Tokyo Game Show competition next June, which would just make me die of happiness.

So, what all that means is that my life for the next 6+ months is going to be devoted to working with my team to make the best damned game ever. We have our first official meeting on Wednesday, where I need to have the tentative Coding Guidelines written up as well as a tentative schedule worked out. This, of course, with me still having to finish my DirectX game and Flash game, as well as write up a one page report on the DS game I finished.

In summary, it’s probably going to be a long time before I update again. But I’ll try to keep a presence on the forums and not let e-mails pile up too badly. Wish me luck!