Where am I?

This blog has been like a desert for quite some months now, and I think it's time that I finally post again about what I'm doing and where the hell I am.

College - the final frontier

Or whatever is the equivalent of visiting an university in your country.

I always knew that college isn't going to be easy and that it takes time and discipline to get through it. But somehow I'm still surprised at the amount of work I put into it. The main energy drain are not the exams, since I have them all in a 2 week time-span every month and a half; where I devote my time into learning. The main thing (at least for my choice of study) are the constant exercises that you have to complete in order to even take the exams. Every week you get some exercises to do at every class, and that adds up to a nice package that takes quite some time to complete, so it's best to so something everyday. And that leads to a state in my mind; where I simply don't have the will to do additional personal projects and rather relax playing games.

But let's stop here. I don't want to bash my college, since learning by exercises is by my opinion the best way to learn. And the classes cover a lot of different topics. Well except math is always math, always harder. I just wanted to point out that it doesn't go well with my personal projects, so I have to put many things aside in favor of college. And it will probably stay that way until ether things cool down or I change the way I think and work, and that's something I want to achieve.

Life and living

I don't want to write much about my personal life, so I will just make this short.

I quickly got used to living in a city and I really like it here. My roommates are also great, we understand each other nicely. The weather currently sucks, we haven't had a nice warm day for a few month now. It's just snow and rain. Everyone is waiting for the real spring. And I have had a cold for a week now. And that's  mainly it, life is good I guess.

Current project, plans and personal

Even though it's hard to find the time to do something concrete I still do a few things here and there. And there are some plans for this year.

Currently I'm a technical reviewer for a book about SDL game development. I go through the chapter and check if the code and terminology is correct. It is using SDL 2.0, where there are not many tutorials about it on the web, so the book will be an addition for those interested in this topic. I don't know when the book will be done, I just review it as it comes.

Subscriber amount on Udemy and YouTube is constantly rising. I'm happy that people find my tutorials useful, even though the planned 'make money with Udemy' failed nicely. I'm not planning on creating any new videos. I don't know what I should cover and I also don't want to go into more advanced things, since it's hard to teach, specially on YouTube where you have people from all knowledge levels.

I even found some time to work on the framework this week. I fixed and added some things. I was also shocked that FTGL (the library I use to render fonts) has memory leaks when using pixmap fonts; that just shouldn't happen with a framework like that. So I had to change to texture fonts, which work nice. The framework is now ready to integrate Box2D for physics handling, and then it will be more or less done. I don't want to complicate too much, I hate it when frameworks constrict people. I will try to work more on the project, but who knows when it will be done. 

I had a big idea at the start of the year, to try to make one simple game every month. But it just didn't work out. I have one small game in production, but I will probably abandon it, because I just can't find the graphics  appealing. I really suck at graphics. And thinking back to my complete projects, all of them had really simple and abstract graphics, but in the last year or so, all I tried was more 'pixel art' stuff. I think it's time to return to my roots with silly programmer rectangles and make something that is more fun mechanically and gameplay wise, but probably lacking in fancy arts department. 

(2x0ng, an interesting game I found here)

The last big thing I want to mention is that I got a job offer for summer in Ireland. I would live there for 2 months and work on a project. I won't tell anything about it, but it looks really interesting. I would really like to work on a real project with a team, so I could experience how it all works out in the real world. The time there would be dedicated to that project only. It would be a real change from the standard summer slacking or shitty jobs that have no relation to CS. I'm still haven't accepted the offer, since moving and living completely on my own where I wouldn't know anyone for 2 months is a really big change for me. But I think it's a thing that I should get used to. I still have to think about it, but the more I think about it, the better it seams to accept the offer.

And that's about it for this blog post. I haven't posted for quite some time, so it's quite long; but I felt it's necessary to tell the main things. I hope you enjoyed the post, and that you enjoy the new blog design. I know it takes a little longer to load, but hey, dynamic pages. Please, feel free to post any comments regarding the post, or any general questions. I will try to post more often, but you never know; I usually don't know what to write about.

About the course, school, videos, life and other stuff

I’m writing this for the 2nd time today. It was already done but then Live Writer crashed on me. Here we go again.

Let’s talk personal.

The first thing I want to say is that I finished school. I’m now officially a “Computer technician”. I still haven’t used that title anywhere, but I hope I will someday. It feels great that after 4 years I have finally finished the school. Come to think about it, I started this blog when I started with the school. So this is something of a milestone to me. When I’m reading my first posts I almost have to laugh every time. Not only how my grammar and pronunciation looks like, but also about what and how I was writing. It brings back many memories of when I was younger and had a totally different mind set but similar goals like now. All I have to say is that I have come a long way, and a longer path is still before me.

  

In Fall I will continue my quest with education. I’m going to an IT university where I will try to improve myself. I’m already accepted in the school and have a “check in” next week. The program will last 3 years, so that could be like the next milestone. The new school also means that I’m going to move to a city. I will live there during the week and probably come home during the weekend. I’m probably going into public student homes but it’s not settled yet. It will be a big change in life and I hope it will be fun and interesting.

So that’s some personal things, let’s go to the projects.

Well I can’t really say I have done much in the past month or so, but there are some things.

Udemy

The course on Udemy is now finished. It was a different experience than YouTube. I made all the videos I wanted the course to have so now I’m just commenting and helping others on the course. I had to drop the price of the course many times. With the starting 19$ to 9$ and a few days later to 4$. It’s like that for over a month now and I will leave it like that. Considering that Udemy recommended me to price it 10$ for every hour of content (The course had over 3 hours of content), that’s a huge pricing difference. My course is probably the cheapest (except the free ones) on their site and it’s kind of weird seeing some courses get away with less content and quite higher prices. But that’s just how it is. The main thing is that 30 subscribers have learned something from it. And I made 80$, which I’m really happy about. If you are still interested in the course then you can find it here. I will not post about it anymore until I decide to make it free, which may be later this year.

YouTube

While I was working on the course and finishing school I was also uploading some older videos. They came from an abandoned Udemy course. At first it was about SDL but the I switched to SFML and that left me with 7 videos. I decided that they still may be useful to someone so I uploaded them to my channel. The playlist is here and here is the first videos in the series:

Keep in mind that I won’t continue this series of videos.

Now let’s talk some future plans.

One of the first things I’m going to do is release and open-source the game I made for my school finals. It’s nothing special, the gameplay is something like “Me and My Shadow” but without the shadow. I will make a separate post about it so I can include it on the “Project” page, which is on the top right if you didn’t notice :)

I’m also planning on open-sourcing all of my games. They will all be published on my GitHub. All the images and sound will be under the Creative Commons BY-SA license and the code will be under GPLv3. All this basically means that you can use the code for your projects or just modify and improve the game as long as you don’t make it commercial. Meaning that you make money from it. I made everything in my spare time for free and now I’m giving it away and I don’t want that someone makes money from it. I hope this makes sense.

 

I also want to bring more stuff to this blog. Even though I say this every holiday and every start of a new year. I will really try. Because a few posts every few months is too little. Some of my favorite blogs went down (well they are still online) because no one posts anything. I don’t want the same to happen here. This is after all my personal blog where I can see what I was doing and when. And many posts help. The problem is I don’t know exactly what to post about. So please give some advices or wishes in the comments or email me.

So that’s about it for this post. Expect a new post in a few days with the game, and then with more stuff. Have a nice day.

A new course and some additional information

Hello everyone. My new course is now public and I have some general information.

The new course is done. Now the first thing I have to say is that it’s a paid course. It costs 9$ to buy (it was 19$ at the start) and once you buy it you get full access to it forever. If you don’t like it there is a 30 day money back guarantee. The course is about C++ game development using SFML. It’s structured into learning parts of SFML first (window, graphics, sound) and then we actually create a simple game. There is currently over 3 hours of content and more is coming. So if anyone is interested, take a look here, check out the free introduction video and then if you want you can buy the course and support me.

Now the course is a side project of mine and it should be completed in June. I was contacted by the Udemy team and I just tried it to see if I can make some money from it, because that really helps. Here is a video on YouTube where I made the announcement:

I hope the video was helpful.

Now to some general information. I’m currently finishing my school. I have finals tomorrow and in the following 2 weeks so that takes away quite some time. In the last month I was busy with school, getting the course ready and playing Diablo 3. I also haven’t found the time to make games or do any other programming but I hope this changes once I get the school out of the way. After that summer break starts and I will try to find the time to post more on the blog, make more videos and make games. I’m also searching for a summer job. I’m trying to find something computer related, but we will see how it goes. Here is a second video I did containing some general information:

I hope this gave you all an idea what I was doing and some plans for the future. Have a good day :)

My workspace

Everyone has a workspace, and it’s time that I show mine.

A room to work in

A picture is worth a thousand words, so I’ll just stick with that.

Not really high quality (I took the picture with my phone) but it should do. As you can see I use a “dual” monitor screen setup. I’m using my laptop (HP ProBook 4530s) all the time and have an external 21’ LG monitor hooked up to it. I use the big monitor for developing/programming and the small one for things like browsing, music and messaging. The laptop is not really a beast but it’s really good for any kind of development and it still runs most of the games. It’s really practical that I’m all the time one the laptop so that I can simply unplug it and go to school with it and continue there. My other computer (the gaming beast) is currently using my younger brother. I sometimes miss the power but as I said my laptop is good enough for me. I use a classic English layout HP keyboard and the Logitech G700 mouse. I usually listen music on my over 6 years old speakers.

My software setup is Windows 7 64x OS. I’m not using Linux, because it has really bad support for the ATI graphics card and Windows gives more battery power. I miss many Linux tools (I use a Virtual Machine when I really need them) but I really got confortable with Windows. Mainly because of his wide support for different developing environments and better software support. I can use Visual Studio for my IDE again and FlashDevelop for AS3 development. Windows also has Graphics Gale, the best pixel art graphics program. Other software I mostly use: Qt Creator (For C++ GUI development), Eclipse (Java Android development), Aptana Studio 3 (HTML, JS, CSS, PHP development), Inkscape (Vector art), GIMP (Raster graphics / free Photoshop clone), Windows Live Writer (Blog posting), Winamp (Music listening), Pidgin, Skype, Steam (You can find me as "#include<luka>" add me for a round of TF2), etc. There are more but I think this is enough.

As you can see I have a big whiteboard in the middle of the room. It has some “secret” things written on it but you won’t be able to read of it because of the high quality image. I just got the board yesterday so I still don’t have colored pens and it’s not as full and colorful as it will be.

In the bottom you can see my high tech TV with my Wii hooked up to it. My brother can’t understand how I can enjoy playing games on that TV size but I love it that way.

And that is mainly it. Nothing special really just my room where I made all the things you can find on my blog. Other interesting things on the picture: a Pokemon cup, fancy lamp, full trash bin and a copy of Zelda: Skyward Sword.

And that fellow readers was my room.