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 :)

A little older again

I haven’t posted quite some time so I will post a small update.

On 10th of May I celebrated my 19th birthday. Yeah I am that young/old for those who didn’t know. It was more or less just a normal day with extra chocolates coming in my way.

Not my cake obviously.

I’m currently working on finishing the new course. I decided that I will scrap SDL in favor to SFML which is easier to teach to beginners. So I had to redo everything I had with SFML. I’m using the new 2.0 version. My deadline is somewhere this week and then I will release it to the public. I will still add additional videos once it is online but first I want to publish it when I have the main parts done. I hope that people will like it. I’ll post it here once it is online.

Well as most of you may know it’s May 15th and the Diablo 3 box is standing here on my desk. This is going to take quite some time from me but I hope that I will be able to work on things as normal :) If anyone following my blog is also playing D3, then fell free to contact me in any way and we can play together.

Now back to slaying some monsters, also expect more updates soon.

Some new small games in development

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A new video was released where you can see them in action, but let’s talk “business”.

I will try to be short in this post. As I said before I’m working on the documentation as always. I have to finish it this weekend so I hope that I won’t have to mention in again. I hate it.

The two new games are Deep Green and Vuzball!. Vuzball is a game I made in a day and now I’m just adding some final touches so that it’s fun to play. It’s a simple clone of another game and it was just something I did for fun.

I already posted the code on GitHub. It’s a quite ugly code so don’t expect much from it.

The other project is Deep Green. It’s a game that I have worked on some time ago and I decided to finish it. I ported the whole thing from the old quick code to my box2d “framework” and now it works even better. I’ll try to make something out of this one but you never know.

So that’s about it for this post. Now off to work on the documentation.

A successful weekend

A year has passed and we have visited our capital city to participate in the programming tournament again.

The tournament was held on Saturday in Ljubljana at the institute of Jožef Štefan (IJS). Our school organized the trip and we arrived there sometime in the morning. The competition started at 10 AM till 1 PM. There ware 4 groups as always: 3 difficulty stages where you had to solve tasks with programming and 1 group where you had to build a website.

I joined the 2nd group of programmers. It isn’t the hardest one but we didn’t have any real preparations for the tournament so it was better that I went into the 2nd group. We had to solve 5 problems using any of the more known languages (C,C++, Python, Java, C#, …). The website team had to build a pong game out of basic HTML using divs and JavaScript.

After the competition ended we had to wait till later for the results. A few talks were held to shorten the wait time.

The results (Slovenian link) were in and I was 4th with 86 points out of 100. I’m really happy with that. I won an 60 GB SSD drive and I plan to switch my OS drive today. A friend of mine (Vito Meznarič (Slovenian blog)) was 1st in website development.

I would call that a successful day.

In other news: I made a new video log few days ago and haven’t posted it here yet. Sometime it takes some days for me to post…

 

For those who are not in the mood to watch the video, here is a picture of the current state of my small Box2D framework.

I added collision sensors, filtering and ignoring into it. Most of the framework is done I only have to fix some rendering things and maybe add joins but I don’t think that I will need them so I probably won’t add them yet.

And that is all for this post.

Working on the new project

Hello, I haven’t posted for quite some time now so I think it’s time that I update the situation.

First let’s go through what I have been working on for the past 2 weeks. Well one of the bigger changes is that I started learning playing the guitar. Yeah, I got myself a guitar and now I spend at least an hour a day practicing. When I started last week I was practicing even more so I didn’t put much time into other things. But now I just settled on a “fixed” schedule so I can work on other things. I hope I’ll stick with it because I really want to learn it.

I also finished my school project “School Jumper”. I released it for my school class for testing and already made a new version fixing some bugs. I also found a mistake that I was doing from the day I started with OpenGL. I thought that using images for textures with a resolution different than the power of 2 was totally OK. But as testing showed it was not. Some graphics cards did not support those texture resolution and the result was that the users only saw white squares. This is a problem that appeared already in Squared Shooter and every other game that came after it. Back then I thought that it was a driver problem but now I know that it isn’t. So from now on I’ll only stick to the default (16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, …) resolutions.

“School Jumper” isn’t really interesting. I was getting bored with it early but it had to be done. But it’s a small little time waster. I’ll wait some time before I release it here because some changes might happen but it probably won’t take long. I’ll also make a Linux port when I will find the time. I will release the source code after my project it graded so it will be free to use. Expect the source code around end of May or something like that.

The main focus currently is on the “documentation” of the game/project. I have to write it and post it till April 14th and I still have a lot to do. It’s a pain to write it but it has to be done.

The other big thing currently is working on the new project. I’m learning Box2D for it and I’m writing myself a really small framework for easy creation and handling of complex shapes and things like that. I still have to look up some things but Box2D is really an awesome framework. But it also changes the way you handle moving, collision and rendering so it takes some time to getting used to it. I also switched from orthographic OpenGL to normal OpenGL so everything is a little different now and takes time to properly understand it.

And that is all for now. I also haven’t made any new videos so I will try to make an interesting test with Box2D and make a video with it so that you can see what it looks like. Maybe even today, but who knows.

Video log #3

No fancy post names. It is what it is: a new video log!

Well it does look like I missed the Wednesday upload date but now it’s here. I’m kind of lazy these days and don’t work that much. Who knows why. I’m probably in some creative block state or in super lazy mode. I’ll try to change that as soon as possible.

I just show the projects I have been working on these days. The game is almost finished. I implemented the instructions screen while the video was uploading which leaves just the levels. I’ll try to make the game at least 20-30 levels long so that it has some play time (more than 10 minutes). The OpenGL demo might seam silly for some, but I never really got into true 3D with perspectives, triangles only, no orthos and some silly lighting. Also as I said don’t expect 3D games.

Now that the game is almost finished and I’ll start writing the documentation. I hope that won’t kill me because I hate writing it. I’ll also start recording new videos for the course so that I can get it public in a month or so.

And that is all for this post.