That was a long break

What is this? A new blog post? Craaaaazy!

So yeah, I guess I'm going to try and start up the old blogaroonie again. It's been so long since I last did one of these (almost 2 years!) and quite a lot has happened since then. So this first blog is just going to be a sort of recap of what I've been doing recently. First of all, I'm in my third year of uni now, which means I'm doing my third year Major Project. It's a subject that goes over the whole year and by the end of it, we're meant to have a finished product that we can show off at the trade show. Also, the best product at the trade show, wins $1000. Of course that gets split amongst the team, that's still $200 each WHEN we win. We of course being my team, which consists of 5 people (if you're not very good at maths). We're going to be making a game for ours, specifially, a dungeon crawler-esque game. We're still mostly in the planning stages, but I've got a good feeling about it.

The other super awesome thing that I've done is at the start of this year I participated in the Global Game Jam. I think the website describes it best but I'll give it a shot. Basically, you get given a "theme" for the Game Jam and then have to make a game in 48 hours based off said theme. I went to the Wollongong Jam, organised by the wonderful people from Convict Interactive. The theme for this years jam was:



This was a great theme, not only does having a picture as a theme make it much easier for people all over the world to get the same theme, but I also really like the picture. I was in a team with my buddy Jarrad. It was the first time Jarrad and I had worked together on a game and I was amazed at what we managed to do. There are some things we wanted to add that we couldn't, either because of time or because I had no idea how to get it to work, but overall, it was a great success. In the end we produced what is probably the GREATEST GAME IN THE WORLD. It might have just been our opinion though, because we didn't win any of the prizes, but that's not what the game jam is about. I met so many people at the jam and got to see so many different interpretations of the theme and so many games made in such a small period of time, I'm really looking forward to next years.

Lots of other things have happened since my last post and I just can't remember all of them. The only other thing I can think of is I joined the Pokemon Universe balance team last year, but I'm going to make that into it's own seperate blog post.

I also went through a bunch of games too, Bioshock, Borderlands, Skyrim, Magicka, Dota 2, RIFT, Lord of the Rings Online, Mass Effect, Dragon Age, The Binding of Isacc and heaps more that I can't be bothered listing. Hopefully I'll make some posts about my impressions of some of them soon, and some other topics I've been meaning to make posts about for a while now.