Afternoon as Promised

Well, I didn't in fact get what I wanted for lunch, instead I got Thai noodles, meatloaf, and mashed potatoes. It was really weird, didn't really enjoy it at all. Whatever though, it's food and I was hungry. Good enough.

So Ubisoft hasn't written back yet, and I'm starting to think I'm going to have to make a trip down. It's always a risk to do that though. For all I know they'll have the guards take me out for showing up unannounced. It will however make a strong impact on them, and they'll have to pay more attention to me. Failing that, I'll just get released to look at other jobs. Sucks, but I'll have no choice, except for EA. I don't want to work on Madden.

So the CS games are coming up soon, and I haven't had any word on whether or not I'm on the team. I wish they would get their act together because I need to let my boss know in advance. Would be a bit rude to just not show up for work one day.

Speaking of work, I'm quite bored. I've got no real work to do as my manager is quite busy. I've been playing sudoku all day, even though I don't really like it. I've gotten down to about 8 minutes per easy board. So not bad at all. No, I haven't attempted a harder board.

I'm thinking that I'll have to stop playing WoW for a while so that I can code up a video game to show off at Ubisoft. I'm thinking that a standard side-scrolling shooter with a few effects would be good. Haven't decided if I'm going to do it in Java or SDL yet. SDL would make the per-pixel effects easier, but Java would probably make the sprite drawing easier. Though I do have a book on making games in Java. This might actually be a good time to bust it out. Come to think of it, I've got a half-finished shooter I could do something with. Just add a menu, HUD, more enemies, and a boss, and that would be it. I've still gotta figure out how to properly load images though. Gotta stop that flashing on first display nonsense.

It'll probably just be an updated copy of my game I made in high school, Starbeast Surprise. I'll have 3 kinds of enemies, the sinusoidally-moving UFOs that try to collide with you, the darts that fly quickly across the screen and shoot two or three shots at you, and the hunters that mirror all your horizontal moves (slowly) and try to collide with you. I'll also have to add in my special wave cannon along with the standard glowing missiles. The part that will absolutely have to be there is the lemon boss, with the straight-shooting sewage balls, and the angled and aimed orange plasma balls. I think that I'll have to actually put an enrage stage on this boss though. I didn't have time at school, but it would be fun if it did.

Crap, that's quite a lot of work. I think I'll have to prioritize it. So enemies first, wave cannon second, HUD third, boss fourth, menus fifth, and then extra enemies and the like. Should end up at around 3000 lines of code or so. Ill probably have to do some of it tomorrow at work even without a compiler. Hmm, I'll also have to reinstall 3dsmax. Well, better get cracking now with some algorithms for the movement of the ships.