Hello Again! It's been a while. Since my last post I've been very busy applying for jobs and doing some small time contract work. Unfortunately I can't post about those under NDA, but I should be starting another project soon that I can post updates about.

I have also been considering changing up the way I do my blog. After looking at the blogs of some other programmers, I think a better way to go about these blogs might be to do larger blogs about development processes. I haven't yet planned the first one I'll be working on, but odds are it will be developing interesting mechanics in unity or the my thoughts on the use of a system of that engine. Odds are my next post will be about that, and will probably come out a lot less often.

Last, I've been doing a lot of research in the last few months. Anywhere from tutorials, to books, to podcasts. I think it's worthwhile to share what I've been learning and my thoughts on it. Very soon I will be putting up a page that contains all the ways I'm currently trying to work on myself as well as links as to where to find the resources.

Until then,
Andrew Decker

Hello again! There hasn't been any updates in the last two weeks because I have been diligently preparing to attend the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco! I am going to be a part of the Conference Associates program this year, and I am honored to assist the Conference in giving the best experience possible to all attendees. I am also very thankful that UBM will be providing me with an All Access Pass for my work. I am very excited to get out there and meet a bunch of intelligent minds as well as begin applying to studios for software engineering positions. If you are going to be in attendance at the conference, please use the contact page to get in touch with me! I would love to grab lunch and get to know you.

See you there!
​Andew

Hey all! As said in the previous blog post, I had some time this past weekend to clean up some of the code in Plumber Simulator 2KInfinity (PS2K8) and was finally able to publish it on itch.io! Builds have been uploaded for Windows, Mac, Linux and an HTML5 for those who just want to play it in browser- I also added an HTML build of Seeds of Friendship, but the play itch.io window changes the aspect ratio rather annoyingly, I'll have to play with that to fix it. I'm personally not a big fan of browser builds. I've had some issues with them before, so I recommend downloading it. 

There aren't any big game development updates this week. Plumber Simulator should be getting an update real soon and my GitHub is shaping up nicely and I will be dropping links to that all over this website very soon.

However, this past weekend I didn't do much game development. My wonderful girlfriend Emelia Douglas is the Treasurer of OUGDA as well as a talented animator and got together an incredible team for the 2017 Ohio University Media Arts and Studies 48 Hour Shootout. As president of OUGDA/supportive guy, I wanted to be there for them to check in and get them things as they needed help. Emelia and the director Tom Wade were too busy producing to do their part in the animation and asked if I could give a hand to help the other members of OUGDA's team. I spent the whole weekend with them and had a blast doing it.

I am exceptionally proud of the team for their hard work. Also, I am proud to announce that their animation: Reluctant Reaper won the 48 Hour Shootout. Here is their animation taken from concept to final product in just two days becoming the first animation to ever win the shootout.

All clean up work on ​The Seeds of Friendship​ is complete! I could go on and on about it in this blog post but I cover the details of the game better on its page. Click here to go to the project and see how I made certain mechanics for the game.

​With this game finished and documented, I'm going to get back to work on getting the page on last semesters games finished and prep that page.

​I am also going to start organizing the source code for all my games on GitHub. I would like to thank my friend Abraham Blain for the idea. I saw his GitHub and it was an elegant way to communicate how I am writing the code for these games. I don't have all of my old projects (like Shift and Perihelion), but once I have my repository ready, I will be posting just the scripts for my games to show how I make the mechanics work.

​Look forward to those updates in the next week or so, and go check out ​The Seeds of Friendship​ page! It has links to the free itch.io page where you can download the game and play it yourself! There is also a YouTube video of me playing through the game in it's glorious three-minute-entirety.

Until next game,
​Andrew Decker

We did it! As I posted earlier, I participated in the Global Game Jam at the Ohio University Game Developers Association's jam site. The theme for this year was "Waves" There are a lot of awesome games that our members made this year with a lot of interesting interpretations of Waves. Some of the interpretations included waves of anxiety in a game about staying sane in college, causing ripples in the space time continuum, and even a game about vaporware music. For this theme I came up with a few ideas. The first was a game where you are both surfing on a wave and drawing the wave at the same time in order to avoid obstacles. It would be a 2D game most befitting a touch screen. The next idea I had was a VR game in which you are in a room with no gravity trying to get a ball to a goal using only concussion waves from small explosives you could place.

You play as an orange-utan making his way across the land to a watermelon cave to cheer up all the angry animal friends along the way. The mechanics are in the style of classic beat-em-up games. The player has a slashing attack and ranged attack to defend themselves with. I am working on turning some video clips into GIFs. When they are complete, I will be adding a new page for the project under Programming/Unity Projects, so look forward to that in the upcoming days!

Hello again!

​Updates on games from the previous semester are nearly done, I just have to pull some footage and an update on that will be posted here soon, Along with two new game projects to look at. Unfortunately, those will not be going up this weekend, as I am leading a jam site for the 2017 Global Game Jam at the Ohio University GRID Lab!

Although I am running the jam, I have not yet seen the theme, as I plan on participating! I am fortunate enough to have my Vice President, Taylor Rohrig and fellow Ohio University Game Developers Association officers run the administrative side of the jam so I participate. I will still be doing basic introductions and announcements but they are kind enough to assist me in the registration process as well as keeping things running smoothly and handling most questions.

​At the end of the weekend I will take the game me and my team members have created and I will upload it and a build to GitHub as well as screenshots, some recap, and some gameplay video if possible! That might push updates on the previous semesters games back a bit more, but I'd like to get this one up here as soon as possible. On that note, I am going to sign off, see you at the end of the weekend!

I am now approaching the end of my college career. This will be my last semester and I really want to do better at documenting the work I do. Where often schoolwork has prevented me from keeping up on this page as much as I would like, I am now taking less courses and have more time to document my projects during their development. My goal is to write at least weekly and have every post dedicated to one specific project I have been working on or just be related to things I am doing. Some cool things to look forward to this year will be UNDR[H2O] I am developing with GuessworkVR, Kind Spirit at the premier title for the OUGDA Studio Program, as well as some small projects for the University, the Global Game Jam, Game Developers Conference news and anything else I'm up to. ​I'll be doing a post soon recounting this past semester soon as well as openings to these new projects so look forward to that!

It's been a wonderful remainder of the Spring for me and I'm excited to announce a lot of cool things coming up soon! Today we'll be talking about a recap of the last few months, some project updates, plans for the Ohio University Game Developers Association, and my Summer to come.

​This Spring has been very productive, and while it did get very busy at times, I feel accomplished and ready to take on even greater chapters coming up. I will do my best to summarize and keep things short. OUGDA has been very exciting. I have completed another beta for The Book of Five Rings, a 2D Adventure game we plan to Showcase in the Fall. I was elected to be next years President for OUGDA and have a wonderful Executive board joining me this coming year. We have big plans for the organization and the image of the University in the eyes of the games industry and I am excited to keep you all informed as this progresses. I also helped work with a lot of wonderful teams to help them present their games at the Ohio University Student Expo. At the expo, I was able to showcase two games, Memitim and Plumber Simulator. At the end of the semester, I was fortunate enough to be able to assist the Game Development I Teams in completing their games for class.

​OUGDA has a lot of great things coming up for the Fall semester as well. We were able to secure a grant to take all of our students to the Game Developers Expo (GDEX) in Autumn and will have our own booth to present student projects. I was also able to Implement the OUGDA Summer Tutors Program. This program will ensure that students that become tutors have experience in what they are teaching younger students and have appropriate workflows and habits. This will provide better recourses for the younger students of OUGDA that are unable to take some of the development courses yet.

​The Summer months to come are not to be wasted. I am spending multiple hours a day reading over new development techniques and tutorials. I am working on polishing some projects for GDEX in the fall and am completing the OUGDA Summer Tutors Program. I am also working on a few more projects, but news about them will be released as they get further along.

​Thanks for keeping up and see you next time,
​Andrew Decker

I just landed in San Francisco, California for Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2016! I am arriving Tuesday night to start bright and early tomorrow. I flew in with Tyler Blust traveling CMH to PHX to SFO. We're meeting Kevin Bruggeman at the Hotel Whitcomb. Kevin Bruggeman and Tyler Blust are fellow Games and Animation students at Ohio University with me. I hope to have more information in tomorrow's post on some of the exciting things going on at GDC.

Kevin Bruggeman's Website:
​http://www.hightenstudios.com

Hello and Welcome!

​I've decided it's about time I start my blog and keep this website up to date on what I'm doing in game development. I'll be posting development anecdotes, code snippets, gameplay footage, problems I've run into and some of the solutions I've found. I will also keep details on any of the projects I am working on onto this blog page (as my current workplace permits).

​To introduce myself, I am currently an Ohio University Games and Animation Major in the School of Media Arts and studies. I have been studying games for three years and programming for 1 year. I am very familiar with Unity Game Engine and Xcode. I am familiar with C++. C#, Swift, and JavaScript languages. I also was not always a programmer for games.

​When I entered college, I wanted to be a music teacher. I soon realized that it was no career path for me. I then believed I wanted to write music for videogames. I entered the games and animation program and started studying music in games. I continued this study, not quite certain of what I was doing most of the time, for a year until January 2015. I was on a game development team for a class at the time and we had no members who knew how to program. I took it upon myself as the producer to learn and found it to be a new passion. I have been coding ever since.

​Since then I had finished the class, worked on three projects to completion, acted as a programming director for Lantern Light Studios, and am now working as the director for a new Virtual Reality Project, Memitim. I tutor Ohio University students on how to code and work the unity engine and lead a programming lecture series for the Ohio University Game Developers Association.

​That about brings us up to speed with where I have come as a programmer. Future posts will deal with the actual development of the projects I am working on and events that I am attending such as the Game Developer's Conference next week! (March 14th - March 18th)