Just Wow!
5/25/2021
As of now its nearly been a full year since I last posted to this blog, and quite a bit has happened during that time. We bought a house. There was a pandemic. We played a lot of games. We built some proof of concept projects. But that's pretty much it. Not much else has really happened to report on. So yeah, my family and I purchased a house and moved in. It's an older home, on a nice 1.5 acre plot of land just a block away from downtown. its got plenty of rooms so everyone has their own room, and I got a garage to finally start wood working in. I think over-all we're really happy with the house, now that we've been here nearly a year. Sure, its got some work that needs to be done, but what house doesn't? Not long after we bought the house, the global pandemic started. I had taken a work trip to Ireland for two weeks. While I was there, i was watching the news as COVID was making its way through the countries to the US. It was a little bit nerve wracking because I was worried that I might not get back before they had to lock down our borders for quarantine. I did manage to get back home with no issues, though I had to self quarantine at home for two weeks before going back to office at work. But then when I went to the office, it was only for half a day because the company went into mandatory quarantine that day. Needless to say, I've been working from home pretty much since just before the global lockdown. As for COVID-19, thankfully no one in my house, or immediate family or friends circle, has contracted COVID. Like nearly everyone else, we've all been keeping our distance from other people, wearing our masks, and using sanitizer as the CDC recommended. We haven't yet gotten the vaccines, but we are planning to do so soon. While no one in our immediate circle has been infected, we have felt the effects of COVID, as other people that we know have gotten it, and some have even passed away due to it, so we're not taking it lightly. As for the proof of concepts that were built, well there were two. The first was nicknamed project space. The goal there was to build something like a 2d space flight simulator where an entire galaxy was generated on the fly. By that I mean that the whole galaxy would be generated during run-time. This means that nothing about the galaxy or any star systems would be saved to disk. I wanted to see how fast we could get that generation to be while ensuring that every star system and the galaxy would be generated exactly the same each and every time. I'm pleased to announce that the proof of concept works. To be honest, it worked better than I expected as I had to add in a forced delay so there'd be a visible transition from one screen to the next. While the proof of concept was successful, I haven't yet decided to turn it into a full game, because to be honest, there's already of ton of games already like it. The second proof of concept, was built during a game dev challenge against a friend. It was kind of like a game jam. We were competing between us to see who could build a playable game the fastest. We used an online theme generator and set to work at the same time. It took just under four hours for me to get my game completed. He still didn't have anything playable at that point, so I won. I do have to admit though, if he had gotten his playable, it would have been much better than what I made. Anyways, i've uploaded the PC binaries for what I built, so you guys can download it and try it out. Feel free to send me feedback using the CONTACT PAGE on this site. You can download the game here: http://files.CupCodeGamers.com/CasualTown.zip One last major change is something you might not have even noticed. Sometime in mid April, my web host moved my entire website and databases to a new server. I worked diligently with them to ensure that our website and all of its services remained operational during that time. I think we managed to get everything transitioned with no issues. At least we haven't seen any problems so far.