Gluttony

I'm currently working on a 2D side scroller utilizing C++ and DirectX for rendering the graphics, and it's called Gluttony. I'll give a quick brief about it later on. It's an individual project required for my CSE 380 (Game Development) class and will be by far the biggest project I've ever worked on in terms of programming. I've drawn most of the graphics myself and so far the only thing I've been able to finish coding was my main menu - whoopee! That took me the course of an entire weekend. Phew, I wonder how people do it.

Granted, I'm not the most skilled codemonkey, but I still cannot believe it took me several hours to read over the source code and just try to figure out what everything in each class does. My second benchmark was due today, and I'm pretty sure that I didn't even complete the requirements properly. But for my first benchmark, we were to create a game design document and a storyboard, so I already have the idea for the game down pat.

Gluttony is a game about eating, with me as the main character (this was a requirement!)
Short backstory from my game design document:

"Upon falling deep into a food coma, Pam wakes up in a strange edible land. At first, she believes this is dream come true until realizing that seemingly harmless cotton-candy bunny rabbits and other odd food-creatures attempt to eat her. Guided by a mysterious omnipresent voice named Wage, Pam learns that the only way to survive in this world is by eating everything else in sight. It’s either flight or fight, and she will have to either eat or be eaten."

The game design needs to be constantly revised, but that's all I have for now. I'm very excited to get this game completed, but the class is so demanding, I'm worried I won't have time to do much else. Wish me luck!

Video Games !

I may sound like a old man but video games are really not what they used to be. Video games is the one of the product of our era and most homes contain one or more consoles. So the companies have to start catering to more groups, a lot of these casual gamers. I don't hate casual games, but they make things almost too easy. Usually they just walk you through the whole thing and you basically were there hitting the buttons on the screen. Try playing Castlevania on the NES, it was probably one of the harder games you played. I'm not saying that there are no good video games out on the market, because there are many. But many games that are released are almost too easy.
One game I thought was particularly hard back in the day was Clocktower for the SNES. When I was a kid, this was a scary game. You play an orphan girl who has to survive in this mansion. You had to survive, and you had to run. The antagonist? The Scissorman, a boy with a hunchback and distorted face with a pair of scissors as big as himself. You had to run. It got my heart racing and I loved that game. Even though I couldn't beat it( I did so later when I was in 8th grade). The modern version of this game Amnesia the Dark Descent. I know for a fact that this game is scary from everyone I know who played this. Too bad my computer isn't good enough to handle it but it seems like something I would love.
But the real point of this post is that challenging games are fun. And that's why I play alot of games with competitive scenes. Because 99.99999% of the time, there is someone better than you. And the competition is fun, to see where you place on the ladder and slowly climbing up. But for single player games, the challenge is nowhere to be found and I think we should all enjoy challenges. Or life would be boring