Akurasu Blog

If anyone remembers back to early March, I took a break from my Japanese studying so I could work on an AMV for Sakura Con 2009. For Sakura Con 2008, I submitted a Kanon AMV, which was okay. This year I was trying to go with a more universal idea and also use anime from various different sources. I actually spent about a week and a half thinking about possible sources for my video. I decided upon doing a Zombie video for the Commercial/Trailer category of the contest, using one of the awesome trailers for House of the Dead: Overkill. Guess what, the Japanese don’t have a lot of apocalyptic style Zombie anime. I did not have a lot of time, so I had to make use of what anime sources I could find and stretch them to work quite a bit. Read more…

I’ve been blogging about some of the notable things that happened to me at Game Developers Conference 2009. I’ve been a little slow due to simple laziness. Let’s see if I can still get through the whole GDC week before my memory degrades. I did take some decent notes for the whole week at least.

Ah, I had a funny little mixup on Tuesday. I was stupid and left my GDC work schedule in my hotel room. I knew today was the first day I had to work. Well, I kept track of when I needed to work and thought I could just use the master schedule to point me where I needed to be. Well, the master schedule had a bit of a typo. It said 30709. Apparently it should of said 300709 which means 3007 & 3009 two combine rooms. I was sent off to the North Hall to check in and North said “you don’t belong here”. And so I headed back to the Conference Associate lounge in West in confusion. Funny enough, 3007 is the room right across from the CA Lounge. Anyway, I got to my session late and I didn’t need to write on the Boo Boo sheet, since I was sent to the wrong location. (Actually, if I had my schedule on me, it wouldn’t of been an issue. So it is partially my fault too.) Read more…

I had a little unplanned marathon of the anime The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya today. An anime about an eccentric girl who decides to start her own club to keep herself from being bored. Thankfully I wasn’t alone, I enjoy company when I watch TV, so having someone willing to watch something with you is always nice. I have had the LE boxes sitting around for quite some time. I just never had a real incentive to open the boxes up and watch them. Read more…

Monday and Tuesday at GDC are Summit and Tutorial days. I wasn’t actually scheduled to work Monday, so I was able to attend the entire Localization Summit. (Actually I missed half of a session after lunch. Either way, I was still able to hit all the sessions.) Thinking back on things, maybe I should of hit a different summit, oh well. The summit wasn’t bad, however it had a big focus on the European and expanding market. Obviously more money can be made, the more regions you release a game in. There was lots of talk about the need for efficient tools and the ability to localize for several different regions at the same time. Lots of companies seemed rather proud about the tools they had set in place, like Sony and Lionhead. I loved hearing about the process they had for everything, however I am a bit more interested in the Asian <-> English localization market, doing something more like the companies: Atlus U.S.A., Inc; Nis America, Inc; GaijinWorks; and 8-4, Ltd. (Sadly the last two don’t have real websites.) So some of this was not as interesting to me as it could of been. Read more…

Hey, I just got back from the Game Developers Conference yesterday. I 100% thought I would have time to blog while I was at GDC but I only managed to send out a handful of tweets. I guess that that is better then nothing. I did however keep a few notes so I would have something to write about when I got back.

So I guess I will be writing about everything about a week late.

Sunday. This was my first flight by myself. I had no problems with security or getting on my plane for my early 06:30 flight. I got to the Moscone West building around 10:00. I just hung around for a bit before I had to go pack bags. I was a bit nervous at introducing myself at first but everyone is so nice, the other Conference Associates volunteers and everyone else. I got a chance to take some photos while everything was being setup. Read more…

Hey everyone, as you should know I’m heading to GDC soon. So I will be trying something new so I can talk about what is going on. I got my hands on a Twitter account and I’ll try to be micro-blogging during the Conference. If you see on the right side here, I got a nice gadget that feeds off my Twitter account. Check it out.

If you don’t know what twitter is, watch this.

Twitter in Plain English

Haha, I’ve been going through my files, and found something I completely forgot about. here is a simple animation assignment I did for my After Effects class. I don’t think I spent more then a day to toss this together, so don’t expect much out of it.

Download: Akurasu_-_Tux_Ani.mp4
(Update, the flash player seems like it might be acting up, if this is the case I’ll try to fix really soon.)

I even have a super mini script I wrote for it.

Penguin Sitting
feet twitch
head rocks

stands up
walks forward off screen

Yeah, the script wasn’t very specific, but it was a simple assignment.

I still think it’s rather cute. For one day of work, what do you think?

In my last post, I talked about my Tetris Clone I wrote. Since my last post, I felt like I should talk about making a Tetris clone in general.

I noticed while porting my code to Flash, there is now a ton more resources that help break down the game. In this blog post by Luke at Terminally-incoherent, Luke explains what details make up the Tetris game in a mini design document. While his document is nice, it made me aware something even better, the really cool tetrisconcept.com wiki. Something that wasn’t around when I wrote my original code for the game. This wiki taught me some terminology I didn’t know about before, such as “Wall Kick”, which is what allows you to move a piece while it is against a wall. I coded this feature because I noticed it in other Tetris games I played, but I never knew a name for it. The site also gives names to many of the popular rotation systems and talks a little about game strategy.

I didn’t change any of the core code in my port. So it is fairly identical to my original C++ code in functionality. But if this wiki existed when I put my clone together, I could of cut my original programing time in half. I originally programmed the game code in about a week and I remember spending about two days just figuring out the code needed to rotate a block. However, It is not a bad idea to figure out the concepts yourself. It certainly was good practice for me.

I don’t know if anyone will find it useful, but I decided to share the source code for my ActionScript 3 Flash port of the game. Read more…

A couple years back I programmed my first game, which was a clone of Tetris in C++. There are many good reasons to remake a classic game. First, you do not need to worry too much about a design document, since the classic games tend to be pretty simple. Second, you can learn a lot doing it yourself.

The actual game code took about a week to write. I actually spent more time writing my DirectX 7 graphics engine, which took about two weeks. Too bad I never used this graphics engine I made to write any other games. Oh well, I have since moved on to easier and more powerful graphics interfaces.

Today, I decided to get some more experience with Flash, so I ported my Tetris clone to Flash ActionScript 3. It took most of the day, but I think the results are pretty decent. Read more…

I took a break from Japanese study on my Sixth Week. Instead, I was working on my Anime Music Video submission for Sakura Con 2009. This video ate up a lot of my time. However, I am not going to go into detail on my submission for this year since It has yet to premiere at the convention. Which will happen in April if it gets approved. Instead, I am going to talk about the video I made for last year. Read more…