Yestermorning, a little after midnight, I beat FTL: Faster Than Light on normal mode with The Kestrel Layout A (vanilla). I haven't been playing many games and FTL is the most recent game that drew me in and was something I desired to play. The first game in a while that's received as much time as it did from me in such a short amount of time. Lots of fun controlling a ship, flying around sorta like captain Kirk commanding the Enterprise. The last sector is hard, fun, and very challenging. I'm curious how the other ships will play and would like to try out other strategies with them.

Seeing the talk about the GameBoy Zelda games (a few pages back) reminds me of how I'd like to play through all the Zelda games some time, except for those CD system games.

Good to hear that the Walking Dead games are good. The show had been entertaining. Woah, according to the Walking Dead game's home page it has received some 90 awards! From the game play videos on Youtube it looks like a lot of fun and very thematic.

Bitcoins are rather unusual.
I understand that mining, that is producing, Bitcoins requires significant computing power; And the production and trading of Bitcoins is authenticated by peers.
I don't really understand how they work...

I'm definitely participating!

This past year, and specifically the past couple weeks, I've been getting really pysched up about developing and selling software. Looking forward to seeing all the success people have with this challenge!

Thanks for sharing this challenge here r3d5!

Suppose time travel to the past is possible and you plan to travel back in time and stop yourself from time traveling.

Would it be possible to predict if you would be the time traveler or the one being stopped?

Thanks for your consideration.

Pursuing a college degree will likely prove beneficial in understanding some theoretical concepts. The more one puts into it, the more one will get out of it. Hopefully one puts in enough to graduate and feel like one has earned much more than just a piece of paper officiating one's satisfactory completion of the required units to earn some degree.

When attending college work with students who look to improve themselves. Work with instructors who want to help you succeed. Not often will you find experienced professionals whose primary interest is seeing you be successful in your pursuits and who are paid to be available to you. So really try to take advantage of the resources that the university provides, including their networked computer labs, ACM Digital Library and human resources.

Universities provide opportunities for one to work with researchers, classmates and to receive an education that may be difficult or impossible to attain otherwise. Some people may feel that the University was a waste of their time, and indeed if they don't leverage their opportunities and commit themselves to development it can be a poor use of time and money.

In attending an university one will undoubtedly encounter students who are there just for the piece of paper, because they don't know what else to do, or less motivated students. Keep an eye out for students who are going some where, work on projects both in and out of class with them. Work on developing your resume. Some of my fellow classmates worked together for a total of some 400 hours on an Android App, they made some 20,000+ sales at $2-4 a piece. Not bad for a couple of students first attempt to get something on their resume. They later presented on their project, sharing with us their challenges and successes, providing other students and instructors an opportunity to ask them questions.

Universities also provide great opportunities for interdisciplinary research. Social networking with others is incredibly valuable, who you know is invaluable for being hired.

If you want to develop video games I highly suggest doing just that. Make them. Start now. Do it often. Always look to improve and learn more about developing video games.

If you attend a university, take what you learn and apply it to your own projects. Definitely practice, practice, practice.

One's ability to program takes time to develop. One can't realistically expect to have piano lessons once a week and become a decent pianist. One needs to practice; The more, the better. Same with programming; a couple courses won't make one a proficient programmer. Some university professors echo this in recommending students spend many hours a week programming outside of class assignments. Practice what you learn in class, experiment. Wrestle with the ideas; immediately implement concepts you learned in class in out-of-class projects. Make use of what you learn. Make class material useful when you learn it, don't wait around and hope it proves useful someday in the future.

Classes and degree's don't auto-magically make one great at some skill; it takes a lot of self-discipline, sacrifice and practice to develop valuable skills.

I'm not too sure what the Game Development major involves; though I'd imagine it would have some overlap with the pursuit of a Computer Science degree. When I look through job postings, either for game development jobs or other tech related jobs, a degree in computer science seems to be most in demand. A Game Development degree may be acceptable for some positions instead of a degree in Computer Science. A degree may help make one more eligible for a job position, but it is one's resume, past related work experience, who one knows, related skills, ability to work well with others and knowledge relevant to the job position that will likely win one favorable job positions.

As other seem to have already said: developing valuable skills takes a lot of work and paying for a degree isn't going to change that. As some of my professors say: college isn't for everybody. A degree in Computer Science may help make more of the job market available to you, both for game development or other tech related jobs, than a degree in Game Development would. However I'd imagine a pursuing a degree in Game Development will provide you with many like minded students, classes would be designed towards helping you towards your particular interest, and Game Development instructors would be particularly valuable to you.

With either degree I think you could be successful in game development, provided you work hard, work smart and always be improving. Seems that a degree in Computer Science is sort of the standard for many tech related jobs, other than for Hardware side related jobs requiring degree's in Electrical Engineering. I don't know how profitable a degree in Game Development is in the job market at this time. Pursuing a degree in Game Development will likely provide you many valuable resources, classes, and people that you could greatly benefit you and your pursuit of game development.

PS. I don't feel like I practice much or work a lot with others. I could have made a lot better use of my time and money. My responsibility, and really my duty, is to do my best.

Best of luck to you and your endeavors.

Having a scalded mouth from eating food that is too hot.  

http://evanbalster.com/crap/glitch104.mov

Bug where every graphic in my engine used the same vertex array with different numbers of vertices.  This game made it look cooooool.

(apologies for download requirement; I say it's worth it, though...)

Wow, impressive. Kept my interest with flying forward, changing shapes, changing colors, seemed to develop throughout. Really cool. Thanks for sharing. Wish there were more music visualizers that looked like that.

Indeed, very cool.

I enjoyed it. Seems fine for a mini-bullet-hell type game.
Put on my headphones, I think the sound effects and music are appropriate.
Some rounds seem to end a little quickly; some rounds I get up to a score of 14, or my high score of 22. So sometimes rounds seem unpredictable and very challenging compared to other rounds, getting swarmed early and often. I like having things switch up, but scores feel like they are some what based on luck.

The menu's seemed functional. Nice to have a menu, credits and all.

Enjoyable. Thanks for sharing.

I think tinkering with and modifying some simulations in NetLogo could be a fun, quick way to see various mechanics and ideas working and prototyped within hours. Not saying to make a game or large project in it. But you could totally do some quick simulations of resource hunting, gathering and trading and get almost immediate feed back throughout the development process. You will be able to see what every little step of development does. Quite an approachable piece of software.

I'd suggest grabbing maybe one of the wolf and sheep models and modifying it to fit kinda what you want to test out. Perhaps add another kind of entity that can sell/trade excess food with wolves or something, you could have some wolves be more efficient hunters than others. You could add other resources, like berries, that could grow and be picked and traded or something.
 

I haven't had much experience developing games.
I'd imagine PompiPompi examples of FSM uses and TomHunt's suggestion of A* Search will likely serve many of a game developers needs as far as AI goes.

Virgil's is very, very good.

Those Buffalo Wing and Bacon Sodas look interesting to try...
Spicy? Taste like chicken? How could they emulate the greasiness, the saltiness?
I think saltiness and greasiness would kinda counteract the refreshing qualities of a drink.

A Finite State Machine doesn't have to take user input, but could take other inputs as well.

If an NPC's hydration drops below a certain level then it could perform a search for water.
The NPC could use a graph search to try to find something, or could stop when whatever other end condition you may want is met.
There are many kinds of graph searches. In selecting a graph search one may want to consider:
Is the area bounded or unbounded?
What knowledge do we have of the area?
How much of the graph/area is visible/known?
Is the thing(s) being searched for plentiful, clustered, near or far?
Do we know the general direction and distance to the thing being searched for?
What are the costs/limitations on our search? ie. limitations on time, memory, area, cost to travel, etc.
Is the thing always up/down hill? ie water is down hill at trough/ditches/rivers/lakes/local minimums; snow is atop mountains, etc.

There are many types of graph searches one could perform:
Breadth First - exploring the nearest areas/nodes.
Depth First - If there are paths then we basically follow a path down until it ends, then explore all its forks and then we explore the next path all the way to the end and repeat.
Dijkstra's Algorithm - Find the shortest paths to all other areas from the starting area.
A* Algorithm - Like Dijkstra's but if we have a heuristic (an approximated distance to the thing being searched for) we could save some memory and perhaps time searching for this area/node. A* seems to be the primary algorithm to use for path finding in games.
Hill Climbing algorithms - always climb up hill until the thing being looked for is found, unless we get stuck at a local maximum, then we could use some kind of random walk to continue on from a local maximum to continue the search.
There are many others...

Supposing you have an AI that prefers to purchase some kinds of foods over others than you could have a priority queue (a sorted list of most favored to least favored) of foods he would eat. He would choose to eat the available foods nearest the top of the list. The NPC could make pseudo-random decisions if you don't want him to be too predictable (ie randomly chooses one of his top 3 foods).

If you want the NPC to make the best decision of what to eat to best meet his nourishment needs with limited stomach size then perhaps the knapsack problem is what you would want to look at. Knapsack problem algorithms could also be used to carry the most valuable items in one's limited 'knapsack'/inventory space.

A handy skill to develop is to be able to recognize related problems that can be solved using similar algorithms. To be able to abstract problems into more general cases where we already have algorithms to solve them.

Good luck Strelok.

saibot216, that sounds like a fun time. Most anything with best friends and relatives is awesome.

I just finished a Database Final and dropped off loaned research papers and a HUGE Old's Book on Women's Health centered around childbirth to a Doctor in the Nursing Department. And I drank a glass of milk.

I've been wanting to give ZGameEditor a good shake and after hearing allen say how it is an easy to use solution for FPS I'll definitely be using it for this challenge.

Perhaps the URL can be private messaged.