Howdy everybody! It’s been a crazy couple of weeks for me, but boy do I have a big update! To start things off, I’ll give y’all a brief overview of what I’ve been up to in class.
To start things off right, my Video Game Programming class has been going strong with a full top-down shooter complete with a HUD, spawning mobs, health tracking, and even my own addition of health packs. Since the game focuses on survival, it only made sense to add health packs to help prolong the game; however, I didn’t want to make this too easy. Rather than the normal health packs that drop randomly through the game, I actually created packs that only drop from mobs, forcing the player to enter the fray to actually regain health. Players can get a little creative here though! The health packs are picked up by the player, but when a mob hits the health pack, they send it flying across the map! With this interaction, the player can actually get a mob to start chasing to knock a health pack over to the player, keeping them at bay while simultaneously regaining health.
Once this project was finished, we transitioned over to our final project in groups of three, and naturally my group decided we wanted to try a networked game (I might have a theme). In this game, we’re combining League of Legends, Starcraft, and World of Warcraft all into one ambitious project. The game functions like a cross between a hack-and-slash and tower defense game where the player can alternate between building towers to defend the base and jumping into the fray to hack down the minions (and the other player)! For this project, I am working primarily with the player, controls, and interactions which has proven to bring up a lot of unexpected challenges like removing gravity for a single unit (which turned out not to be the best idea!), managing user input based on the state of the player, and even rigging animations for the player even when they don’t show on the player’s own camera (since they will show on the other player’s camera). We’re still in the beginning stages, but I’m looking forward to uploading a demo reel in the coming weeks!
All of this is only the beginning! In my Entrepreneurship class, Feasibility Analysis, I’ve been talking with all sorts of people about expanding EnvoyNow into new areas (which I’ll remain mute on for now, just look forward to the launch!). It’s been really interesting to attack this project not only from my typical operational standpoint, but also from financial, marketing, and legal standpoints to name a few. In the end, the goal is to determine what kinds of investments would be required for a large scale expansion as well as how feasible the project is given the kinds of returns on investment that it could produce.
Finally, I’m very proud to say that I’ll be joining VISA this summer as a software engineer in the mobile development department! I’m very excited to be joining the program this summer and I look forward to telling y’all all about the cool projects I’ll be working on! (Provided I can of course!)
Until next time!
~Patrick
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