After that my big news is the coming of a little one. That’s right I’m going to be a father! While the thought is a bit daunting, I remain happy and excited. We’re still trying to figure out the logistics for the pregnancy and birth, but we’re confident all will go well. *Side note, these announcements are made in order of occurrence, not importance.*

Finally, my big professional game dev news: I’m writing a book, on Unity game development on Android, for Packt Publishing! Wow! I’m writing a book. I’ve been wanting to do something to give back to the game dev community, here’s my opportunity. I was originally planning to record webcast tutorials, but if a publishing compant wants me to do it for them instead, I’m game!

Thats about it from me for now. I’ll do what I can to update more often, but who knows. I’m not known as the blogger type.

For those of you who recently visited my website, I strongly suggest you run a virus scan on your computer. Last night (January 28, 2011) I found out that my website had a virus. The website was recently paid visit by the spam fairy. It looks like one of the spam comments came with a little gift. I don’t know how long the virus has been there, but the spams started appearing this past week. I was able to locate and eliminate the virus, but I felt it important to notify you all about this incident.

I’m sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused. Thank you for understanding.

Sincerely,
Ernesto Rojo Jr

Updates since October:

I started my own game studio, Firebeard Studios. So far it’s just me and possibly Kemp Lyons. We’re both still doing our own stuff, since the company doesn’t really have money. I did get some help from some artist friends, and I’m currently developing a Solitaire game for Windows Phone 7. It’s nothing big, obviously, just a little something to us started. This should be a fun endeavor.

I’m immediately available for work! Hire me! I’m willing to relocate, so I don’t care where the job is. My career goal is to get into engine development, but since I have experience in gameplay programming, I’ll start there. My main coding language is C++ and I also have experience working with C# using the XNA framework and Unity 3D.

Speaking of Unity 3D, I was kind of bored yesterday, so I made a demo of a camera pathing system. It’s a simple implementation of a Catmull-Rom spline. The camera bounces around a little when approaching the control points, but I’m not really concerned about that. You can find the playable demo here.

Alright, that’s all for now. I hope every has a safe and enjoyable holiday season.

Technology Used: Unity 3D using C# for scripting

Summary:

This demo shows my implementation of a Catmull-Rom spline. A Catmull-Rom spline is a variation of a cubic Hermite spline, where the tangents for a control point is calculated using half the distance from the previous point to the next point. At first I was going to implement a standard cubic Hermite spline, but decided that a Catmull-Rom was a simple enough variation that would save time in calculating the proper tangents. This demo was partially inspired by a presentation I saw by Squirrel Eiserloh at GDC in 2009.

There is a known bug, which causes the camera to bounce a little when reaching the target control point. That could simply be caused the placement of the control points. The pathing works just fine, so I’m not concerned with how smooth the transition is. I’m sure a bit of tweaking would fix it.

Playable Demo:

Please view the full post to see the Unity content.

Source Code:

Click here for the source code (zip 38.1MB)

I know I’m really bad at posting updates, but I’ve mostly been busy for one reason or another. It’s time for some news updates:

I’m finally married! WooHoo! Here’s an interesting fact, which Amanda will enjoy. So I was married on October 10, 2010, or 10/10/10 in shorthand. If we remove the slashes and say 101010 in binary, the decimal representation is 42. As all Hitchhikers will know, 42 is the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything.

Firebeard Studios, LLC should be complete soon. I’m planning on filing the papers at lunchtime. Should be fun! I’m planning starting off by making a couple of Windows Phone 7 games. We’ll see how things go after that.

Speaking of Windows Phone 7, Charles Petzold just finished his latest book: “Programming Windows Phone 7″. He was awesome enough to provide it for free. Microsoft changed the XNA creators club website. It’s now known as the App Hub. It’s the same website, they just changed it’s look and name. At least I haven’t seen any difference. But they do have some really really nice tutorials on programming for Windows Phone 7 or XNA 4.0.

That’s all the news I have for now.

Anyway, I’m amazed by how quickly spam comments build up, even when my website is just a small site for my portfolio. The silly part is that the spammers aren’t even posting to my latest blog entry. They’re commenting on an old portfolio post. They don’t even make sense. Most of them are the same comment, and they’re all like “Oh hey, that was a great post! It was very informative and you answered a lot of great questions I’ve had for a long time.” So I’m sitting here wondering, “Really? Because that post was just a bunch of pictures.”

Anyway, I don’t want to drag this post on. I just felt like commenting about the silliness of spammers. In fact, I wish to challenge spammers. I don’t care if you continue to spam my website, as I’ve got plenty of filters that will catch them. So, I challenge you to post comments on my website that are relavent to the post you are commenting on. Make me think twice about your comment. “Is this really spam? Or should I approve it?” Those are the questions you need to get me to think. *slaps spammers with gauntlet*

I think the challenge for me is not the actual making of a Solitaire or Euchre game, it’s learning Silverlight well enough to pull it off. Since Solitiare and Euchre are both card games, I felt that Silverlight for Windows Phone was a better fit than XNA.

Well, without further ado, you can go here to see the logo animation. Please keep in mind, this is my first attempt at video editing. If you have any constructive comments or criticisms, please let me know. I’m all for changing it. I’m open to suggestions on logo style, font, shape, color, etc. Also, Pixel Rawr is a working title, so I’m open to suggestions on that as well. I’m not really thrilled about that name. Interestingly enough, I just read an interview with Ken Levine from Irrational Games, whom said that that name was the one they hated least. So fun times.

Software Used: After Effects CS3 & Soundbooth CS3

Summary:

This is a logo animation I created for my game studio. It’s my first attempt at video creation. This was done in After Effects CS3 in about 4 hours. One of those hours was finding and modifying audio for the video. Audio was modified in Soundbooth CS3. This animation was made before the company name was finalized and is not currently used. Overall, I had fun working on this.

So in the spirit of learning new things, I found a Visual Studio Template for making an XNA game already with game state management and an asynchronous loading screen. It’s really nice, except it doesn’t work on XNA GS 4.0. Perhaps it might work on 3.1, but I’m trying to make games for Windows Phone 7, so that’s kinda useless. So, I ended up making a new template. You can follow the same steps used in the linked site.

Here’s the new template: GameStateManagementWindows.zip
All of the credit for code included in the zip goes to Nazeeh and Microsoft. I did modify some code so that it can compile, but it was a grand total of 2 lines that were changed. Other than that, I repackaged the project so it will open in Visual Studio 2010 using XNA GS 4.0.

Platform: iPad

Development Time: 1.5 Months

Team Size: One Programmer, One Artist

Technology Used: Proprietary framework written in C++

Summary:

Pencil-Pal: Kindergarten is an app for the iPad that was ported over from the PC and Mac. There are several sections that help kids learn things like the alphabet, numbers, and patterns. My responsibilities included adjusting gameplay to be intuitive for the iPad. I also worked closely with the quality assurance department to make sure it retained its educational integrity while being fun for kids. Pencil-Pal: Kindergarten can be found on the iTunes App Store.

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