This is the first blog post for this website and is among the first content that makes up my portfolio/profile.
I'm Won Bin -John- Kang, currently doing my last semester in UNSW for Computer Science and an aspiring game developer. I haven't made a single game yet-except for few small projects that were done in Uni courses, very little experience with DCC(digital content creation), and few minor experiences in modding. Long story short, I'm currently a uninspiring game developer wannabe with no income and little experience. Hopefully, with this beginning, I can change that.
As a first blog post, it makes sense to set a general structure of more blog posts to come-hopefully.
I've come to the goal of game development fairly recently, only 8 months from my counting. With the active semester spent on uni works and fitness-I've lost quite a few kilos- I had little time to work on it. After the break, I started planning how I would go about it. I made a list of my current skills that overlaps with those of professional game developer. Here is a shortened version:
It became very apparent that I was lacking several major skills. So again, I made a list.
First thing I've done during the break was to choose a rendering/game engine to familarize myself with game programming: I wasn't planning on writing an entire engine by myself. I went through few, re-visited Unity. LibGDX was an attractive choice until I later realized just how small 3D feature set it had: no implemented scenegraph, etc. Good platform for 2D, but 3D counterpart needs to mature a bit.
I moved on to Ogre engine and fallen in love with it. The API seems very compatible with me ie) makes sense to me. Highly module- benefit of OOP, large community, and few commercial successes on games built on it. The only sour spot was that it had little support for mobile platform, but like I said, the first project is for educational purpose mostly.
While going though Ogre tutorials, I've started on DCC software. I chose Blender over 3DS Max as it was both free and I never really learned 3DS Max enough to make it worthwhile to stay. Some of the Blender's interfaces and inputs are little bizarre, but have fairly low and constant learning curve and performs well on my ultra book. It also few integrated components: mud-modelling, texturing, which are basic but more than I will need for now.
Story-wise, I have a large selection of writings that I've done over the years, more than enough in my opinion.
Level designing, I've put on hold for now until I can learn the lower level skills.
That's the story so far.
For today's update, I've started on my blender tutorial: Blender Noob To Pro from wikibooks. It is a remarkable free resources which covers almost all of Blender's features and guides you through the very well designed sample projects.
Put on hold in Ogre tutorials which I am upto Basic Tutorial 7 as I am stuck on making the CEGUI work-I might as well get a precompiled version and work with it for little while.
With blender, I've just finished More Mesh and Editing Techniques in 2nd unit. After I finish the lightings tomorrow, I will be able to work on some of the basic modeling projects.
So far Blender proves to be a well thought out environment. Coming from the CAD side of modeling, I am impressed with the modifiers-and ease of using them- and tools available for just editing the mesh.
Hopefully, I can finish up and including unit 2C which is texturing by the next Wednesday-school starting date.
I also need to set a plan for during uni days.
I'm Won Bin -John- Kang, currently doing my last semester in UNSW for Computer Science and an aspiring game developer. I haven't made a single game yet-except for few small projects that were done in Uni courses, very little experience with DCC(digital content creation), and few minor experiences in modding. Long story short, I'm currently a uninspiring game developer wannabe with no income and little experience. Hopefully, with this beginning, I can change that.
As a first blog post, it makes sense to set a general structure of more blog posts to come-hopefully.
- Frequency: this blog is a sort of technical/progress diary. Should be updated daily or every-other-day.
- Length: no word/thought/plan on this. Hopefully succinct and not too long.
- Focus: I avoided using words like topic as I am very prone of going off topic and going to make no guarantee that this blog will be bound by a set of concrete criteria. However, the main focus of this blog is my game development project. This also includes moddings, gameplays of other games which will serve as both benchmarks and inspiration, DCC, and a novel project that I am doing in parallel-this should not take too long as it already has a dedicated offline wiki.
- Typesetting/Manual of style: No such thing. I am a terrible text setter and have even worse sense of style and consistency. I am planning to keep both fonts and paragraph style simple.
I've come to the goal of game development fairly recently, only 8 months from my counting. With the active semester spent on uni works and fitness-I've lost quite a few kilos- I had little time to work on it. After the break, I started planning how I would go about it. I made a list of my current skills that overlaps with those of professional game developer. Here is a shortened version:
- Advanced C++: Did it last semester as a course, easily the most difficulty coding course I've done. To many, this is an industry standard for game dev libraries, engines, etc. It is also focused in performance and loads of documentations and communities for game development. However, with the rise of mobile gaming, the poor portability of C++ and APIs written on it are a significant disadvantages. There are few cases where wrappers and NDKs that can remedy this, but I have zero experience with either.
- Java: It's been awhile since I've used it for anything, but is easy enough to get back into it. However, I need to shop around for other graphics engine other than JWGL, basic but painful.
- Autocad: a sort of DCC
- Unity 3D: Whilst a great tool for artists and others for making great quality games, my experience with it have taught me the performance is no where near I want it to be. While I think it's important to make a game, but also learn how it's done by most AA level developers.
- JWGL: A wrapper for OpenGL, good enough for uni, not so sure about the rest.
- Graphics: Fortunately, I've done a course in the uni which I enjoyed immensely. I have a basic understanding of computer rendering and using graphics language.
- 3Ds Max: Small experience with it during F3, FNV, and Skyrim modding days.
- Starcraft 2 Map Editor: A great underrated tool for making top down games.
- Concurrent/ parallel computing: MPI, Promela SPIN, distributed computing etc. Even while I was doing the course, some of the concepts were completely lost on me-the incompatible lecturer did not help, somehow I passed it though. However, some of the implemented examples in the industry makes a lot of sense.
- VHDL, digital circuits designing: Um...arcade games anyone?
It became very apparent that I was lacking several major skills. So again, I made a list.
- Programming: I need more experience skill in both graphics rendering and inputs.
- DCC: You can't make a game with just a wall of text; well you could few years ago.
- Level designing, game mechanics.
- Story.
First thing I've done during the break was to choose a rendering/game engine to familarize myself with game programming: I wasn't planning on writing an entire engine by myself. I went through few, re-visited Unity. LibGDX was an attractive choice until I later realized just how small 3D feature set it had: no implemented scenegraph, etc. Good platform for 2D, but 3D counterpart needs to mature a bit.
I moved on to Ogre engine and fallen in love with it. The API seems very compatible with me ie) makes sense to me. Highly module- benefit of OOP, large community, and few commercial successes on games built on it. The only sour spot was that it had little support for mobile platform, but like I said, the first project is for educational purpose mostly.
While going though Ogre tutorials, I've started on DCC software. I chose Blender over 3DS Max as it was both free and I never really learned 3DS Max enough to make it worthwhile to stay. Some of the Blender's interfaces and inputs are little bizarre, but have fairly low and constant learning curve and performs well on my ultra book. It also few integrated components: mud-modelling, texturing, which are basic but more than I will need for now.
Story-wise, I have a large selection of writings that I've done over the years, more than enough in my opinion.
Level designing, I've put on hold for now until I can learn the lower level skills.
That's the story so far.
For today's update, I've started on my blender tutorial: Blender Noob To Pro from wikibooks. It is a remarkable free resources which covers almost all of Blender's features and guides you through the very well designed sample projects.
Put on hold in Ogre tutorials which I am upto Basic Tutorial 7 as I am stuck on making the CEGUI work-I might as well get a precompiled version and work with it for little while.
With blender, I've just finished More Mesh and Editing Techniques in 2nd unit. After I finish the lightings tomorrow, I will be able to work on some of the basic modeling projects.
So far Blender proves to be a well thought out environment. Coming from the CAD side of modeling, I am impressed with the modifiers-and ease of using them- and tools available for just editing the mesh.
Hopefully, I can finish up and including unit 2C which is texturing by the next Wednesday-school starting date.
I also need to set a plan for during uni days.