The Search For Steady Employment
It's been a while since I've updated the blog. I've had quite a few things happen between September 26, 2012 and today. I lost my job at UNMC in November of 2012, tried and failed to get unemployment benefits, worked for 3 months of night shifts at QuikTrip, and finally landed a Researcher job in Lincoln at UNMC College of Dentristry. I research Candida albicans and oral candidiasis. (my work station also has a lousy keyboard)
Games ++
I also have continued to work on game design. I went to Games ++ last October. I worked with a group of people and managed to learn the basics of level design in Construct 2 while slowing the rest of the team down. :D Our project was titled "A Certain Death". The game is a plaformer where a cube becomes transformed over time by the novel deaths it suffers - a grinder shaves it into a sphere, spikes turn it into a wall-clinging spike ball, electricution allows it to activate wired devices, etc. We managed to get the ball to the spike death, but struggled to get wall jump to work. I stumbled upon an unorthodox method of allowing a ball to cling to a wall: change the wall colliders to steep stairs, only 1-2 pixels wide - wide enough to catch the ball, but not allow it to clip past the wall graphics. In the end, our game was mostly a prototype with working controls on an Xbox 360 controller. On the bright side, our game won best music (completely not my contribution).So now I'm back, and I'm ready to design games again, but I'm out of time for today ...more posts to come!
