The Curse Begins!

So, as hinted to before, welcome to my blog, v. 3.0...at least, I think this is its third incarnation. Anyway, since my life is fairly boring, this place will serve more as a convenient place for more to randomly throw out updates, pictures, rants, etc. on what I've been working on. In the past, this has happened more sporadically with my posts on music, etc. But this will be much more frequent, as this site is much too convenient a place for accumulating interest and showing the internal workings of such projects.

And now, without further adieu, my new current project:
Codenamed "Curse" until a final title is set in tone, "Curse" is a fledgling project whose aim is to morph into a small video game. It will be a role-playing game, played through a 2D top-down perspective, set in a fantasy universe. With this project, my goals are simple:
- Deliver a game based on a popular, classic genre (and one of my favorites) but with a significant twist on genre standards
- Increase my knowledge in experience in the various areas of game development
- Through story, dialog, and gameplay, explore a theme that is central to all of our lives
- Release a game on both the PC and XBox360 platforms

To achieve these goals, I'll be working with a very small, poor, and inexperienced development team....me. I am no programmer nor artist, just a student with a passion for making games in his free time. While I'd love to work with one or two others on this project, I don't see that being a reality. However, at the least, I would very much like to acquire an artist to produce 2d art assets for the game....someone is willing to do so for free  =)  I'll be using the FlatRedBall engine for development, based on the XNA framework.

Development has just recently started (as I have just finished a few nagging projects), so more details will be trickling in very soon.

Animation Appreciation

Title has a nice ring to it, I'll admit. Anyway, our first project for our animation class was to pick an animator and present him/her to the class via any form of media: a paper, presentation, etc. The goal of this project was simple: to show our appreciation for animation and to educate the rest of the class on a particular animator.

As such, I chose David Hellman, who is the artist that did all the graphical work for an indie game called 'Braid', which I may or may not have ranted about before on here. Anyway, I did a short video for my project:

Why I chose to do an elaborate project instead of simply pumping out a 2-page paper? I have no idea. For some reason, the day before the assignment was due, I had a change of heart. Instead, I wrote over 500 lines of code, recorded the ending music, recorded voiceovers, captured video from the custom game output, and spliced all the audio and video together.

Notes: all of the actual Braid artwork (the character on screen, the backgrounds, all the good stuff) has been released for free by the artist himself...because indie game developers are awesome like that.

For everything else, I used Flixel, Debut Video Recorder, Cakewalk Sonar, Adobe Premiere, and SFXR.