My World

It’s been a long time since I rocked and rolled…

Philip — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 20:24:41 +0000

So it’s been forever since i’ve posted on here. I’ve been up to a lot, mainly working and paying off bills. Haven’t found a full time job that suits my degree but it feels good to be back in Illinois. Over the months i’ve dabbled in Ruby on Rails, Lua, Perl, and now picking up Iphone development. Have a short term contract with a new studio located in Washington, Missouri named 636 studios. Really impressed by XCode(Iphone’s IDE), reminds me a lot of C# in which it manages many things behind the scenes for you. Back to work though, will try not take forever to post again in the future.

Super Power Surge Spike gameplay video

Philip — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 22:46:50 +0000

So I was finally able to get a gameplay video of our final project game(Super Power Surge Spike) up on the internet. Check it out.

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

Download Super Power Surge Spike

Philip — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 04:54:10 +0000

So after a long 5 months Team Booty Rock has finally finished our amazing game Super Power Surge Spike. We are very pleased to present our game and always appreciate any feedback. You can send feedback to philip@philipfox.com. Enjoy the game.

DuskJacket:

Alice is a malicious computer virus. As the player, you must help her to infect machines, thwart the defensive efforts of security software, and ultimately seize control of the system. Due to her unique programming, she is able to absorb elemental energy from nearby power sources, such as electrical, liquid coolant, heat, and air. Using these powers alone or in devastating combinations, you must eradicate any traces of security before Alice can complete her infestation. It will not be easy, as Alice is designed to infiltrate extremely secure systems. They are hostile towards any intrusion, and will retaliate with extreme force. You must balance attack with evasion to ensure Alices’ survival.

Features:

16 different attacks with different effects

-Electric attacks: Stun enemies for a short duration

-Fire attacks: Will put a damage over time effect on enemies hit by fire

-Ice attacks: Slows down targets hit by any ice effect

-Wind attacks: Gust of wind knocks enemies away when hit

4 different types of enemies each with unique abilities.

-Electric enemies: Teleport to flank and avoid attacks

-Fire enemies: On death will sap your primary and secondary energy

-Ice enemies: Increased health and resistence

-Wind enemies: Ability to jump for a quicker path to the player

Multiple levels

Multiple Game Modes - Survival and Main Game modes

Multi-stage Boss

Profile system supporting unlimited profiles

Achievement system

High score tracking

Post process effects

Download

Download Super Power Surge Spike Here

Crash of Doom : Fixed

Philip — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 20:50:44 +0000

So ever since Alpha our game has been plagued by a second playthrough crash. This crash has caused us to waste precious manhours attempting to hunt down this elusive crash. With less than a week to go we have officially stomped this crash into the ground with the help of a program called Ensure++.

Ensure++ is a memory profiler/checker made by Parasoft. From what I can tell by watching my teammate Justin use this program is it compiles your code through their program and then profiles the code and the memory your program is using during runtime looking for any errors. It took us two hours last night of using this program to locate where our elusive crash was happening.

I’d like to thank the amazing people at Parasoft for giving us the opportunity to trial their amazing product in an attempt to find this crash. This has truly brought much needed morale to our team during the push to a final build of our game.

Thank you Parasoft.

Beta Build is Up

Philip — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 22:53:23 +0000

We had Beta presentations yesterday and it went amazing. The game is looking great and we ended up pulling an all nighter on Sunday to get all of our features in for Beta. Our Beta build is up on the site now, the biggest current issue though with our game is that it does in fact crash on the second playthrough of the game. It’s a crash that has stuck around with us since Alpha and we are still looking into the cause of the crash.

Download Super Power Surge Spike Beta

Sitdown with Vicarious Visions and Activision.

Philip — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 14:46:15 +0000

So last Thursday Vicarious Visions, a studio underneath Activision, came and visited Full Sail. Vicarious Visions has made many console and handheld games, Guitar Hero is one of their main IPs that they make games for. They also make alot of ports from different consoles to consoles.

My fellow teammate Tyler Keenan, myself, and Ten other Full Sailers got the pleasure to sitdown with Claudia Franco from Activision, Kerry Allen a former student from Full Sail and current programmer at Vicarious Visions, and Christina Nichols a recruiter at Vicarious Visions. All three of them had amazing information about both Activision and Vicarious Visions, got great information on how the interview process is done at VV, got some information on Demonware which is a middleware api Activision is starting to use.

So after the 1 hour sitdown we went to final presentations where my roommate and some other friends were presenting their games. At 5 o’clock that night VV put on a presentation where they took in many questions from Full Sailers that were very curious about both companies.

Early the next morning I was able to interview with VV for a possible job with them. I think the interview went amazing and wanted to thank Kerry and Christina for making it a very relaxing atmosphere. VV seems like a company I could really see myself fitting in at and I look forward to following up on the interview.

But just wanted to give one final thank you to Claudia Franco, Kerry Allen, and Christina Nichols for taking the time out of their schedules to come down and visit Full Sail. Wanted to also give another shout out to our amazing Career Development Department at Full Sail for giving us an opportunity to meet amazing companies like VV and Activision. Rob Coble continues to do an amazing job of getting these companies interested in Full Sail.

But about to do Beta presentations, so we will have our Beta build up on the website this afternoon….

Sitdown with Sony

Philip — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 22:49:15 +0000

So this past Wednesday I was able to sitdown for an hour with about 10 other fellow Full Sail students and talk to Mike Mumbauer, the Senior Manager for Visual Arts Service Group at Sony, and Melissa Banks, the College Recruiter at Sony Entertainment. This sitdown was geared very heavily towards the Art and Animation side but Mike has about 15+ years of game and film industry experience so it was great to hear all of the knowledge he has gathered over the years. For being an animation guy he knew a lot about programming as well so it was a great experience. So just wanted to thank Melissa and Mike for visiting Full Sail and giving us the opportunity to sitdown and talk with some experts in the game industry.

New Build up for Super Power Surge Spike

Philip — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 20:07:17 +0000

So we had our Feature Fragment 2 turn in and presentation yesterday. It went amazing, our presentation is pretty solid we just have some aesthetics to fix with our slides. The game is looking great as well, one of our teachers said he is really happy with where we are at as far as gameplay goes. One of the big things I think our team really needs to focus on from here until Beta next month is on a lot of polish. We have a lot of features implemented in the game but they’re not extremely polished. We need to add a lot more player feedback to the game as of right now.

But anyways the build is up now so check it out under the projects section.

Christmas has come early….for gamers that is.

Philip — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 18:19:04 +0000

So this holiday season there are a lot, I mean a lot, of great games coming out. Last month we had Fable 2, Farcry 2, Fallout 3, STALKER 2(I know that’s not the name but it’s easier to reference it), Spiderman: Web of Shadows, Dead Space(Which is scary as hell), and Silent Hill: Homecoming. So that was just October for great games coming out.

In November we get Left 4 Dead, WoW: Wrath of the Lich King, Gears of War 2, COD: World at War, Mirror’s Edge, Banjo Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts(Which looks phenomenal), Tomb Raider: Underworld, and Sacred 2.

In December we get a couple of games, the new Prince of Persia game which looks insane, and a new Destroy All Humans.

So as a gamer I am insanely pumped about the games coming out this holiday season. Also if you are a former WoW addict and haven’t checked out Wrath of the Lich King yet I highly recommend you give it a shot. Picked it up last night and I have to say I am really impressed with the polish and changes they have made to WoW since I last played in April.

Wrath of the….Blizzard visits Full Sail!!!!

Philip — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 18:52:45 +0000

So if you’ve never played video games in your life then you probably don’t know who Blizzard is. But if you’ve been playing games for more than 3 years then Blizzard should be a name that tingles parts in your body. They’ve made small games such as Diablo I,II, and working on Diablo III. Starcraft I and working on Starcraft II, Lost Vikings I & II, and the small franchise of Warcraft I,II,III, and World of Warcraft.

So Blizzard stopped by Full Sail to talk to students and give a presentation about Blizzard themselves. A lot of the presentation was about how to get a job at Blizzard as a programmer,designer, or artist. They also discussed how they are making their local internship program national now and how they are starting to hire a lot more entry level positions. So it was a great presentation and you would think I would be plenty satisfied with them just giving a presentation.

But I was 1 of 7 lucky game development students who got to sit down with Blizzard for an hour and talk about many different things. I was also part of one of the lucky final project groups who got to sit down with the Blizzard people and have them check out our game and talk about how things are done at Blizzard. That was great and they seemed to really like our concept, we also told them that we got a lot of our abilities from WoW and Diablo. They seemed surprised by that.

Oh but it’s not over yet, Rob Coble the head of Career Development for the Game Development program here at Full Sail called me earlier this week end informed me I had the rare opportunity to actually sit down and interview with Blizzard for 20 minutes. This was amazing and I was very excited to actually get to sit down with them. The interview itself was a lot of fun and I really appreciate them coming down and checking out how great Full Sail really is and how passionate we are about games here.

So to end this I would really like to thank the two employees from Blizzard Entertainment University Relations who stopped by and visited out school: Choua Her and Sumer Ortiz.