New Year's Eve with a Blue Moon, and Rolling into 2010 with new Opportunities

Reflection in the Year of 2009

It is New Year's Eve today I take this time to reflect on the events that happened to me this year. All that was set in motion that led up to this Final Day of the Year. I am excited today that when the clock strikes 00:00 ringing in January 1, 2010 there will be a Blue Moon. I want to see it and think, reflect, and move on with my life. . Near the end of last year I was laid off from my job, and then I was given a job at Paychex in January of 2009. This year I was able to meet a gentleman that gave me the opportunity to work in the independent video game development.

Moving onto 2010

Near the end of the 2009 I was given the opportunity by Adams to take on a design position at Adam Jones Productions. Also, the last two weeks I had received an e-mail from a gentleman who is an Marketing Research Executive from Packt's Publishing. He saw that I was interested in developing Unity Game Engine and approached me to review his company's book that was made to teach Unity which was aptly named Unity Game Development Essentials.

I am really excited to read this book and to gain the knowledge necessary to develop in Unity. This book is written by Will Goldstone who also has a website with video tutorials on working in Unity. The book it self is written with the purpose to expand on techniques from the video tutorials from the website.

Conclusion

All these opportunities coming my way makes me think heavily and reflect on this year. 2009 has been an quite experience in my life. These thoughts run through my head as everything seems to be falling into place for me at this point in my life. I am looking forward to 2010, graduation, interning at AJP, working at Paychex, working in Unity with the aid of the book, the GRE, and hopefully FIEA in the Fall of 2010.

Links

Unity Game Development Essentials:

http://www.packtpub.com/unity-game-development-essentials?utm_source=andrewdieppa.blogspot.com&utm_medium=bookrev&utm_content=blog&utm_campaign=mdb_001943

Sample Chapter from Unity Game Development Essentials:

http://www.packtpub.com/files/8181-unity-game-development-essentials-sample-chapter-4-interactions.pdf

Postmortem: Sandbagz, Writing, and Reading

Sandbagz Production

Recently at my internship at Adam Jones Productions they have released a flash game called Sandbagz: Medeval! to be played on a browser. The game was released just yesterday and was able to make it to the front page of GamePro's Free Games page. Needless to say my boss is very ecstatic over that and the number of hits we been getting. My involvement of the game was being the quality assurance administrator. In other words I was in charge of the testing and who tested the game. We were able to get a lot of positive feedback on the game as well as some suggestions for the sequel of the game. I was also involved with managing the sound effects and the soundtrack of the game. Joe Adams and I did a lot of the sound effects using our vocal cords, and at one point I took a punch to the leg to get an effect of someone getting hit.

Writing and Reading

Lately in my life I have finally been able to read books for pleasure now other than just for educational purposes. I picked up three books that I have read in the course of the last two months. I read the Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff which is about the explanation of Taoism with the use of Winnie-the-Pooh. I also read Chuck Palahniuk's Invisible Monsters which was an excellent novel. A model with a prominent career and a great husband ruined after her lower jaw was shot off. Currently I am reading Crooked Little Vein and Unity Game Development Essentials to learn more about the Unity Engine.

For the last part Jordan and I have been collaborating to develop a comic book that takes place during the 1930s, but it is set in a cyberpunk universe. I am writing the main story line and Jordan is doing all the art. Right now we are currently in the development stage where I am writing character bios, timelines, and Jordan is doing some character art based off of what I wrote. Hopefully we can get a lot done in the course of the next months.

Links

Here is a link to the recently released flash game Sandbagz: Medeval!

http://www.davigames.com/games.php?id=9760

Here is a link to the postmortem for Sandbagz

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/AndrewDieppa/20091218/3864/Postmortem_Sandbagz_Medeval.php

Assigned a New Task

I am an intern at the company Adam Jones Productions. I was first hired on as a content provider for fiction for a game that is being developed. After a while though I was assigned to QA administering for their game which granted me the power to have people test the game after they have signed an NDA. My friend Jordan Card went from being an intern at the company to a full time worker programming games in Flash for Adam Jones Productions.

A few weeks ago the project manager at the company asked me to do some XNA programming for a couple of mini games to be released on Xbox Live Indie Games. However, upon a meeting with Joe Adams (producer, and owner) and Jordan Card at the CoLab I took it upon myself to start learning the Unity Engine. When Joe Adams was observing me learning and familiarizing myself with the interface of Unity, he asked me if I should develop the mini games on Unity rather than XNA. I would like to learn and develop on the Unity Engine, but I would have to discuss it with the project manager to see if he would be all right with me learning a brand new engine I am starting to learn or keep going with XNA which I have used in the past.

Welcome to Enigmatic Mind

Hello to all my readers that probably do not exists, yet. My name is Andrew Dieppa and I welcome you to my blog. What is my blog about? Well, to answer your question it is to serve as a place to post mortem anything I write creatively. I aspire to be a game designer in the video game industry, but I have a passion for writing fiction. Now I want to post what I write online and give you my readers a background of what you may be reading in the near future. Hopefully I can get some fiction done soon so you guys can get to reading my literary works.