Before I start, I just want to let you all know that Clayton Belcher (Jolly Crouton Media), Austin Huebner (Austin Pandemic) and I finished creating a new free strategy game called…

Franchise Wars is a turn-based isometric strategy game we created game jam style!

You can check out and download the game here

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Alright gang, let’s finish this series off from where we left off.

I was fast approaching my later years in college. (in fact, I’m skipping so much stuff that happened from the previous post that this blog post would be filled with so many things like cringey college events, samey cafeteria food, bad housing and dealing with dorm mates who stay up until 5 a.m. with a burning desire to create as much noise as-…Oh sorry, I was rambling for a second there.)

So anyways, I was required to take a science related class for my current year, and was suggested to take Astronomy (Not Astrology). It seemed neat, I mean who doesn’t like space and star wars? I enjoyed the class, it’s pretty technical in it’s own unique way (I think with angles, distance, time) but also “outdoorsy” as a science class (at least with what I experienced). I got the opportunity to watch some shows at the planetarium, which was pretty rad. In fact, I enjoyed it so much that my Astronomy teacher asked if I wanted to work there, so I was like “lol heck yea bro, yolo swag noscope hue hue hue jajaja”.

Let’s skip ahead several more months, for our final project, we were assigned to do what was called the Astronomy Integration Project. Because our teacher was awesome, we could create almost anything we wanted to as long as it had some relation to astronomy. I thought to myself, “Why don’t I do the stupidest thing possible and make a video game since I’ve never finished my own one before and we don’t much that much time left?” So I did that. I grinded for hours, this was my first time experiencing something close to would be called a Game Jam (A Game Jam is an event where you generally have a short amount of time to create a video game). I worked at the game for hours, I didn’t know how I was going to pull it off, there was a lot of uncertainty and lack of experience but I slowly put together my first actual game…

Rocket Launch.

Rocket launch had 9 Missions, it was challenging to make in and of itself, figuring out how to wrangle the code in Game Maker 8.1. I’d run into problems like having to create different sized versions of the planets and assets, handling their physics, hit boxes for unique objects like the tail end of a comet, particle effects and so on.

My Astronomy Professor loved it.

…

So now what? Let’s skip ahead a bit further as I was now required to create an Art Show for my Senior Final for Graphic Design.

I was in the middle of messing with Frog Hop during this time, and thought to myself. Why not have the art show be based on this video game?

So, I did that, I worked pretty hard, skipping some classes to try and crunch away time at it. I’d work hard to get posters printed and put up on walls (only to have people laugh at them and tear them off the walls) and make promotional cards (which also kept getting thrown out) to get people to know about the show.

Anyways, I don’t think I need to say much about the show itself, I had computers setup so that people could play the game, watch a looping video in the planetarium about the game, and some box art pieces for the game.

I’m pretty thankful that the planetarium and computer science department were so generous to let me use their equipment to pull this off.

Shout outs to the CS department, Astronomy department, the Art department, Yoyo games, the passive aggressive college post office guy and the people that kept throwing out my promotional material (I knew where you lived).

…

Well, that’s about all I got, of course, I could talk about Frog Hop itself, the other game jam games, Nameless, maybe my other endeavors, but for now I think this is a good stopping point.

So what can be learned from this? What is the TL:DR? What can you take from this?

At the end of the day, unlike the game developers who are super young and their first game sells millions of copies, obvious my story isn’t like that. A lot of this journey is, well, a journey! I don’t have it all figured out. Just because I create games and have reached the “other side” doesn’t mean that I’m different from who I was when I started. Even if I got millions of copies sold of my games, I probably would still be the same, just more stressed and way more busier. People think that you have to go on this extremely individualistic quest to self discovery. But honestly, the more I’ve met with older people who have pursued different fields, the more I’ve started to realize that really no one has it completely figured out.

Life is not a destination, it’s a Journey.

Well, that was quite the blog series, I for one really enjoyed writing this series and I hope you found it entertaining/helpful.

Now the question is, what do I write about next? If only my readers could suggest some fun and interesting things for me to write about.

Concluded,

-Brandon

www.tinywarriorgames.com

Welcome to your doom!

Previously on “HDISMVG” Part 5:

“I…greeted…an even greater abomination called college…But…I was…a gaming computer.”

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I was introduced to a new program called Game Maker 8.1. It’s white interface with quirky icons like a red pac-man boggled my mind. I remember opening the application up, only to be greeted by a bizarre tutorial telling me how to make a game about clicking a clown. It made me a bit concerned for the mental health of the Yoyo games employee that created it.

Even though I felt a great amount of discomfort at the idea of catching a clown in a game, I proceeded to follow the tutorial. I didn’t really understand what I was doing, I just did what the tutorial told me to do. After continually going back and forth looking at the tutorial, I’d remember the MIDI song that would play while I clicked on the clown that moved around the screen.

At this point I was done making video games, I worked as hard as I could and got the recognition that I deserved. It got so crazy that it got to the point where I could make the worst game possible and yet my fans would adore everything I made. I sold so many copies that eventually Yoyo games had to owe me back money for using their application. Moving forward, nowadays I spend most of my time sipping pina coladas in my private cabana.

…

Oh right, sorry I got lost there for a second.

The game worked, I’d look at some other stuff they had like a platforming game like mario and a pac-man game of sorts. But something about mindlessly doing what someone else told me to do didn’t really teach me anything. Progress would slow down a bit, I wasn’t really sure what to do after following the tutorials.

It was only then, that I would google search my way to victory and find a book called The Game Maker’s Apprentice. This book is the sole reason I really took off with making games.

While it is pretty out of date since it was focused towards gm 8.1. It contained some great explanations for game design and would allow you to create a handful of games that actually worked. But while I could have fallen into the same trap of just mindlessly following the tutorials in the book, this time I wanted to really try and at least hypothesize and understand why the tutorial was telling me to do certain things.

Somethings I found that helped me to learn more effectively:

• Try to make your own assets, trust me you will feel a greater sense of ownership and accomplishment even though you followed the tutorial.
• Don’t just mindlessly do what they tell you to do in a tutorial, if they introduce a new concept to you, take a moment and really try to study what it is about, go online and just spend a couple seconds understanding it. If you don’t understand it, it’s possible you’ll be left behind in the dust unable to understand later stuff down the road.
• Don’t make games about catching clowns.

Perhaps in a future blog post, I will go over some of these old games I made from the Game Maker’s Apprentice.

I will admit that it’s kind of lame that I would drop something like this to you, especially if you were interested in using the Game Maker’s Apprentice. Unfortunately, they’re so out of date that I don’t really think they’ll do newer revisions (and who knows Game Maker will eventually keep upgrading with more nonsense like Game Maker 3, and then Game Maker Remastered, Game Maker Ultimate, Game Maker Classic Revisited, Game Maker Modern Warfare, etc.). But despite that, there are so many free up to date tutorials nowadays that you can make some pretty great stuff.

One last thing before I go, I found that Open Source Projects are an amazing way to learn really fast. If you come across them, you can really study how they put the game together, how they programmed their systems like physics and so on. Doing little things like changing the sprites or sound effects are a great way to see how it works. But whatever you do, DON’T export the game out there as if you made it unless the creator gives you permission to do so (Seriously).

In the next post, I’ll give a quick rundown of useful stuff that I learned from this journey.

To be concluded…

-Brandon

www.tinywarriorgames.com

Howdy Howdy gang, Continuing from last time…

I graduated from the abomination of society known as high-school, only to be greeted by an even greater abomination called college. But aside from that, things were looking good, now that I was done with high-school, I would finally build a gaming computer.

After struggling to finally get this thing to work, I’d be introduced to a whole new realm of gaming and software. During this time, I’d play games like Team Fortress 2, Fallout 3 and other really bad free to play shooters which I look back on and cringe at…well…I’ll explain in a bit.

As you may know, years ago I spent a lot of my time going to websites to play flash games and watch flash animations, which influenced me to want to create flash animations. Well during this time in college, I’d spend countless hours on youtube watching frag videos (also known as montages, xxxSnipezxxxNoscopezxxx APOCALYPSE epic movie or MLG swag moments). I think you can see the pattern here, seeing these frag videos made me really want to get into making montages.

And well, I’d use screen recording software and record myself playing games, then edit my amazing moments which would lead to me receiving death threats from 13 years olds online, awesome.

I’d learn to use After Effects to do eye popping effects which I look back on and really didn’t know how to put a leash on my desire to let loose and create. While I think the videos had questionable effects used, I think this was a necessary thing to have happen, because rampantly using different effects really did help me learn and led to me gaining the experience to use my video editing skills for actual work.

But wait, what happened to my animations? Well, this was sort of my dropping off point for flash animation. I still have a soft spot for flash anime.

The one below was probably the most ambitious one for me, of course, it never got finished, and honestly I don’t plan to finish it. Still some interesting ideas here and there.

Honestly there’s a lot of videos I made during this time, like…A LOT. I’m not going to go over them because they’re cringe worthy and just, not that great. (I mean that’s not completely true, there are some I’ve made that I still hold near and dear)

That was the most vertical slice post I could have made, because there is so much to show but honestly I think you get the idea. This point in my life was definitely one of dreams, curiosity and an outright ambitious desire to learn new skills. I didn’t really complete my ambitious projects, but I felt it would be good to show this avenue because well, as much as making frag videos may seem irrelevant to making actual games, they are, and they played an important part in the exploration of skills and lessons which would eventually lead to helping me learn to create games.

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Oh, right we were supposed to talk about games. I’m sure you’re curious how I somehow got back into learning to try and actually make games this time.

During my sophomore year in college I met someone in the cafeteria named Michael, and this would rekindle my passion for making games with the software non-other than-…

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Game Maker 8.1

To be continued…

-Brandon

www.tinywarriorgames.com

Howdy gang, just want to let you know that I do have a twitter, and I’ll be sharing some GIFs from a small project that I’m working on with my friends from Cincinatti, JollyCroutonMedia and AustinPandemic.

It’s called…FRANCHISE WARS, a strategy game where two franchises engage in an all out war to dominate the food industry…

I’ll keep you guys updated as we get it wrapped up.

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So let’s continue on from last time…

So now that I’ve entered my later high school days, I knew I wanted to get better at my art and learn new things.

During this time of my life, I took classes for computer graphics, where I’d learn how to use Photoshop, Flash Animation and make maps in Unreal Tournament 2004. These classes were my favorites to go to. Being able to finally use programs to create digital artwork was so exciting.

Flash Animation!

Below I’ll share some flash animation stuff I did, think of this as if it were a really amateur digital museum. Enjoy!

Photoshop stuff!

Here are several graphics I made photoshop CS3 (Yeah that’s right, the golden age before Adobe got greedy with Creative Cloud).

Unreal 2004 Map

I unfortunately don’t have Unreal Tournament 2004 to see the map I created.

This was a super ambitious final project map that 2 other guys and I collaborated on to create a large scale map. The premise was that it took place on a large beach cliff island with two opposing bases, but then you could go inside the bases to enter a giant tunnel that connected the two bases inside the mountain. The cliff was pretty high up so you would die if you fell off.

I have very fond memories of Unreal Tournament 2004, what a great time to be a real boy. (wat)

Later when I would graduate from High-school, I would finally experience having a new computer. After finally putting it together, a whole new realm was opened up to me (Actually to this day I still use the same computer to make my artwork.). I’d not only be able to play games like Team Fortress 2 and Fallout 3 at high settings without hiccups, but I’d learn about creating videos and further developing my music making.

To be continued…

-Brandon

www.tinywarriorgames.com