Blogs - jeffsandefur

A little over a year ago I introduced to XNA in a proper,
school taught way. I had bandied around in the framework a small amount on my
own buy never really got a feel for it on my own. What was funny was in school I
was show, to my amazement, that XNA could do 3D. I’m not sure why I was
surprised, given Microsoft’s foothold in graphics (DirectX to be specific). All
I saw was before this was spritebatch this or texture2d that. Now I was looking
at what I though should do flat images and seeing a spaceship I could rotate
and move. I would link to the work, but as I found out a few months ago
Microsoft saw it fit remove all their XNA tutorials.

Anyways my point is I find it funny now, while I’m using
Unity3D , that I’ve made primarily 2D games with it. I’ve gone from being
amazed that a 2D framework can do 3D to forcing a 3D engine to do my bidding in
2D. I’m not saying that I’m limiting myself either: Quite a lot of the
scripting work I now do in Unity requires calculations done with 3D vector
math.

The last time I tried to shoehorn a gamestyle into an
existing engine did not fair nearly as well. A project at my school, working directly
with the developers, was to push the limits of the StarCraft II editor and game
engine (Yes, that means I got to work with Blizzard :P ). We tried to recreate the old graphing calculator game Avalanche. Here’s the problem with that: There’s no dumb fire,
on collision test attacks in the game. The Protoss Photon Cannon, the unit
chosen to attack the player, HAS to have a target. And before you ask, it wasn’t
possible to gain access to the ship in the Lost Viking game. To make a long
story short, our goal of “pushing the engine” was met way too early in the
project. Not that the engine is bad. We just found, by chance, a game type that
was incompatible that could easily be made elsewhere.

Funny how things flip around like that: between having an
engine just flexible enough to work how you want it verses hitting a brick wall
with others.

I haven't really gotten the hang of posting on Desura, as a blog site, yet. This is about trying to, and to not seem so vague and/or closed off to the community.

You may notice off to the side that I work and now am in a partnership with Jacob's Ladder. We're an awesome little group out of Tempe, AZ. Many of us either go to (Myself included) the University of Advancing Technology, or have graduated. We're just now getting out of that phase, one that we were looked at as simply a some school project group.

In fact, the past 8 months have been a blur of activity for myself and the company. If you told me in March that, by end of year, I would have 2 published titles and have at least 2 on the way I would have called you crazy. If you then told me I would be a partner in that company, with possibly plans of reforming to dual CEO status (that would be with Jake/Grimzblood) I would have worried about your health.

How did I get here? Well, I won't tell the full story but I got out of a really shitty relationship about, oh, over 2 years ago now that ended up being an eye opener. I was 30, but with nothing holding me down to my home state of California. I did some soul searching and got really excited by the idea of going back to school, and trying to get into the gaming industry. Combining both I found UAT and in August of 2011 I ditched CA for AZ. I haven't looked back. And I couldn't have been happier since I would not have ran into Jake at a career fair. I found my self a few nights later, working for him (I have a funny story about code commits and "You have some 'splaning to do, Dana" from that night). Now, Jake and I are amazing friends, we strive for to create the best gaming experience we can muster and then some. We've condensed a team that wasn't really working, added in some new blood, and are hard at work on a new game. Keep an eye on us (an me) in the coming months for more information.

~Jeff "El Jefe" Sandefur

I've heard good things about Desura so I finally decided to join in. I'm also doing so because I, though the company I work for, want to publish games here. I'm post this (literally this blog post) to get a feel for the site. And now I'm putting more words because there needs to be 300 words in here. Are you kidding me? Fine, two can play at this game.

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