George Clingerman

So....this past week has been a bit of a mini-vacation from things. Why? Well, I bought the Orange Box and I got addicted to Team Fortress 2. How addicted? Well over a 4 day period, I logged 24 hours into the game.

Yeah, an entire day devoted to play a game. I've cut back a little bit, but every time I have a small window of time, I'm tempted. Very tempted.

It's not often that I get sucked into a game like this, especially for the PC. There's only been a few. Unreal Tournament 2004 was my first. I played that game for hours long into the night. Joined a clan (which I am still a part of, I just don't have the time to play with them anymore, but I miss it) and even competed in a league. So we had official practices and match times. It was a blast. I loved it. (although it did make people laugh when they were over visiting and I told them I had to go to practice and I would walk back to my office and get on the computer)

UT2004 had been out for a while and the leagues were disappearing and just not as many people were playing. Thing were winding down and then Guild Wars came out. A lot of the clan moved over to play that and again, it filled most of my nights.

After I had played through that a couple times, XNA kind of took over my life. I bought a few of the expansion packs for Guild Wars, but I just felt like making games more than playing them.

There were a couple casual games here and there that I put some time into, Desktop Tower Defense for example, but nothing like the time I had put into UT and Guild Wars.

Now there's Team Fortress 2.

I just haven't had that much fun playing a game. I like the cartoony look and feel and the servers I've been playing on have a good mix of skilled and noobs like myself. Plus, they have the medic.

Man, I love playing the medic.

Even now I can close my eyes and hear my teammates yelling, "Medic!" while running around on fire from some enemy pyro. With a quick sprint, I'm over next to them giving them some life and sending them back into the fray. It's fun feeling needed and recognizing times when you can turn the tide of the battle simply by giving health to the right people at the right moment. And going uber, oh yeah, now that's REAL power. 

If you play, feel free to add me as a friend. My Steam name is clingermangw and in game I go as Byte. I haven't abandoned XNA (I've been coding much of this morning and I had our user group meeting last Wednesday), but in times when I need to go and clear my head, you'll probably find me healing up my team and taking down checkpoints.

I'm glad I've got something fun to relax with like Team Fortress 2 in the free time I have. I have fun developing with XNA, but there's times I need to step back and remember it's a hobboy and not a job. Team Fortress has been doing a great job reminding me of that. So what's filling your free time?

The fourth meeting of PAXNAUG was this past Wednesday. I intended to give an introductory overview of developing games for the Zune but things didn't go quite as planned...

We did a much better job of advertising for this meeting and the turnout was great. As 6:30 rolled around, people were still trickling in and we all sat around socializing and chowing down on pizza. With all the newcomers we decided to go around and have everyone introduce themselves and just give a little bit of what they were currently working on.

As each person gave a quick introduction my jaw kept dropping a little further. By the end, I wasn't even qualified to breath the same air as the people that surrounded me. Needless to say I was thrown off just more than just a little. I tried to collect my thoughts and was mentally trying to adjust my talk for the audience I had but I never really recovered from my shock. I had to chuckle as I was wrapping up my very casual talk and one of the guys asked me, "so, when are you going to do your presentation?"

Ouch.

The cool thing though was that I was just so jazzed up from meeting so many cool new game developers in the area, I was on cloud nine at the end. I'm hoping I can convince a few of them to give some talks in the future and also, with this bigger audience, I can finally start inviting some actual presenters down to Portland. There were several guys who were running small game studios, guys working on titles that should be coming out on XBLA later this year and we even had a sound guy who was busy working with on orchestra on some music. Just incredible cool people with some amazing portfolios. I'll try and put together a web tour of their portfolios and sites soon, it was really cool seeing all their past and upcoming projects.

Needless to say, I'm really looking forward to next time! Thanks to everyone who showed up, hopefully I'll get to meet you again sometime when I'm a little less star struck.

We should put putting up information about the next meeting of PAXNAUG shortly, so keep a lookout and hope to see you there.

We've had our third meeting of PAXNAUG and it went really well. We had an interesting discussion on sprite movement and the presentation and demonstration went swimmingly. We had quite a lot of snacks and refreshments as well. We had the room reserved, the signs posted and even put up reminders on the PAXNAUG site.

We did have one slight issue though. Small turnout.

It's ok. We know you were busy. But we did miss you just a little.

We want to start bringing in speakers from great faraway lands. Other XNA MVPS, book writers and community evangelists. Maybe even some of the legendary XNA team themselves! But we want to have just a few more people consistently coming to give them a decently sized audience.

It's our fault I know. We're pretty new at running a user group. We're getting better though. We swear! And we're making an even greater effort this time to spread the word about the next meeting. We're planning on contacting some of the local college campuses, getting in touch with the .NET user group and there's also a local game development group that we can get in touch with.

If you're reading this, help us out a little and spread the word yourself.

Here's the details.

 

Who: Portland XNA User Group (PAXNAUG)

What: XNA MVP George Clingerman (that's me!) will be speaking on "An introductory look at creating games for the Zune"

Where: River East Center (next to OMSI) in Portland OR

When: Wednesday June 25, 2008 at 6:30 p.m. - 8:00 p.m.

 

Hope to see you there!

I turned thirty today. Not really sure how I feel about that. I don't often think about how old I am. Others have my whole life. To them, I've always been the young guy. Even when I wasn't, people treated me like I was. I have a young face so that's part of it. I'm also interested in a lot of things that make me seem younger. Cartoons, video games, comic books and all kinds of toys. I love them still and don't plan on stopping loving them any time soon. So I've always been considered younger.

But now, I'm not really the young guy anymore. I'm not twenty something. I'm thirty. As the card my sister sent said, teenagers all over the world think I'm old.

I'm just not sure what it means to me though. I usually take time to reflect every year. I know a lot of people use New Years for that, but for me it's always been Christmas morning. I love to get up really early on Christmas morning, 3 or 4 a.m. I've been doing this ever since I was a kid and it's not because I want to dig through the presents to see what I got. I never did that... I've just always enjoyed that moment of quiet peacefulness. The Christmas lights twinkling on the tree and the silent stillness of the house. I like to lay on the couch and and think about my life and the past year. I think about the future and what's coming and what I want to come. It's a great time and something I look forward to every year.

That's how I feel today. This age just feels like a big milestone in my life. A marker on the path of where I've been and a nice place to stop and reflect on whether I'm going where I want to go. Overall, I'm extremely happy with where I am. Hard not to be really. Just thinking over everything in my life reminds me just how well things have gone. Some things have happened as a result of luck and some as a result of very hard work. I originally started typing all the great things in my life out, but I had to delete it because it looked so ridiculous all written down. I'm a pretty confident guy, but even I have some limits for how much I'll brag (really I do!).

So why did I write this post? Well, it's my birthday and I'm looking for presents of course! Really though, I know how I'm doing and I've got a good idea of where I'm going, but what I'm really curious about is where you are. I think one of my favorite things to do is the story swap. You guys are always hearing about my story, now I'm just asking you to take some time to share yours. If you think it's too much for a comment write a post and leave a link. But I'm curious, if you think about your life, how's it treating you? Tell me the good, the bad the indifferent. How did you get to where you are, are you happy you're there and where do you want to go (and what are you doing to get there)? I want to know it all!

So if you have a little time and want to give me a little birthday present, share a little and tell me just how is life treating you?

If you haven't noticed, I've been playing a LOT with game development. Specifically game development using Microsoft's XNA framework. I love it. It's probably one of my favorite ways to spend my free time. I love to code, I love creating things and making games is just, well, FUN! I'm also fairly active in the XNA community and have been for quite a while. So being actively involved and helping out other struggling game developers, one common theme I hear is, "I can't make my game, I can only do programmer art".

Programmer Art. You may not have heard this term before, but it's commonly slung about in the computer industry. If there is the opposite of an artist's art it's programmer's art. It's a stereotype of course, but most developers have a very hard time visually creating (you may have used a few of the ugly applications we've made, or maybe you've read some of our comics). There's a lot of game projects that just never get off the ground because developers just can't stand looking at their own artwork.

I've always argued against this because, well I feel if you can't have fun playing the game with horribly drawn graphics then adding beautiful images just makes a bad game with good graphics. In fact, I've been working on a few projects where I'm just using a square to demonstrate that point. (I think Rory's comics demonstrate this point as well. They're fun despite the art and maybe even because of it.)

However, I'm having a hard time convincing people of that and I know no matter what, there are some that just will not let it go. They just can't keep working on their game because they can't stand looking at their own artwork. So I've done a little something to help with that.

First, let's get one thing straight, I'm not an artist but I do like to draw. I also like to help people out. I don't want these great game ideas dying in people's heads simply because they can't look past their own artistic ability.

Not one to just talk about a problem without at least suggesting some kind of solution. I present to you, XNADevelopment.com sprites page. Every time I make a new sprite, I plan on adding it to that directory and making it available to the community. There's currently just a small sampling up now I was testing with, but now that I have all the code working I will make an effort to gather up all of my current sprites and add them all this week.

Hopefully that helps someone out. I'm interested in seeing what you making. I want to give a special thanks to Nick and Catalin for inspiring me to finally finish this project. Watching you guys use my sprites was a blast!

Now come on community, stop letting art assets hold you back and show me what you can do.

So the XNA forums are down for a bit of "reconstruction" I just thought I'd do a post to let people know there's no need to panic. The excellent support and help they get via the forums will be available again momentarily. The real question though is what am I going to do with this reasonably large chunk of free time I'm going to have available now that I don't need to troll the forums every minute of the day?

I think I need to start posting some of the projects I've been working on recently. The new XNA 3.0 CTP is incredible and I have been having a blast playing with Zune development and using the new SoundEffect content pipeline type to easily add sound effects to games without XACT.

Yep, tonight I think it's going to be a great time to make some videos and post some demos and samples. Now if the XNA Team can just figure out what's causing my Zune error I can even start sharing some Zune networking code....

Happy Free Comic Book Day! I meant to write about this earlier but better let than never. I just can't let today go by without reminding everyone about Free Comic Book Today! Yep, that's right, today at participating comic books shops (which is basically all of them in my area) they will be handing out Free Comic Books. The kids and I have a blast on this day. It's becoming a holiday for us that's about as big as Easter (it's already bigger than Halloween for me since I don't really like candy, but I LOVE comic books). Yesterday we spent some time drawing super heroes (there's one I did for Reece on the left). Today we'll be driving around town hitting up the local comic shops and collecting our FREE COMIC BOOKS!

If you're curious if there's any participating stores in your area, you can check with the free comic book day store locator. Most comic book  stores don't open until just before lunch on Saturdays so you've got plenty of time to get around and ready.

Speaking of that, I'd better start getting the boys ready so we can make it in time. We want to be there when my favorite store opens because my friend's wife (Anne Timmons) will be signing copies of the stories she drew (they talk about her in the last couple of paragraphs in that article). Pretty cool to actually know someone who draws comics for a living.

Hope you enjoy your Free Comic Book day!

The MVP Summit has come and gone for 2008 and once again I was just blown away by the experience. This was my second summit and I came back extremely motivated and inspired to make sure I have a third. Just being around the other MVPs and the people  at Microsoft makes you feel like you should be better at what you do. Just smart and inspiring guys all around.

I personally want to say thanks to the entire XNA development team. You guys are doing a fantastic job and I really felt my time there the entire week was well spent. Hopefully listening to us complain doesn't make you dread the summit too terribly much. You guys are my rock stars! I'll keep trying to do my part to keep the community excited about your product, but to be honest, I'm not sure you really need me. The product speaks for itself and you guys are rocking it out there in the community already. I wonder if I should send this to that email address I was given during the keynote...what was it Ballmer at something?

Meeting the other XNA MVPs who I know through our community involvement was a blast. Great to finally have faces to the forum and IRC nicknames I've known you as for so long. We have a great group of MVPs and I'm looking forward to seeing each of you again next year. Then once again we can swap stories while I drink and drink and drink and drink some more. We might even have a drink or two after that as well.

Before I forget, I need to give a big thanks to Scott Hanselman. He seems to have his fingers in every pie. In this case, he's the reason I made it to  the summit  on time. If he hadn't twittered me on that Monday morning, I would have just mozied on up to Seattle sometime that afternoon. I had totally blanked and didn't realize there was an opening address, a lunch and open sessions on Monday.....so thanks Scott (and Twitter!).

Running late, not remembering which hotel I was staying at (and later not remembering which room I was in or even which floor), suggesting we can solve problems  by just waiting for people to die, drinking way to many whiskey sours, being told secrets we can't share, meeting new friends, "XBox 360 MVPs rule!", mother fetcher, DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS! speeches. All in all a great week and something I'm glad to have been a part of.

I'm back, working on new content for my site and coding on various game projects, but I can't wait to go again. It's going to be a lot of effort and I'm going to have work  hard to keep up the pace so I can earn the right to go again next year but it's all worth it. Am I going to see you there?

The first meeting of the Portland Area XNA User Group was a complete success! We had a great turnout for our first meeting with just over ten people showing up (for as inexperience we are at running a user group, we were THRILLED with this turnout). I apparently love the sound of my own voice and managed to talk about XNA for over an hour. I wasn't really planning on talking that long, it kind of just happened. I didn't see anyone sleeping and I got some great feedback afterwards so hopefully I wasn't too horrible as a speaker. I just really have a lot to say about game development, the XNA framework and what a great community has been built around XNA. Sometimes it's hard to keep quiet about it all.

We had the same great luck getting the hardware setup just like we did in the dry run so that helped out a lot. The laptop and the XBox 360 performed wonderfully and all the samples I showed on each went well. I had planned originally on coding a 2D space shooter during the talk, but I scaled that back some when I realized I had already spent over 30 minutes on just introducing the XNA framework and XNA Game Studio. I did do a quick little demo of getting a sprite drawing on the screen and moving it around with the keyboard. I think just how quickly you can put something like that together using the XNA framework always does a nice job of impressing people.

So with the first meeting under our belt, it's time to move on to the next castle and find our princess! Yep, that's right, time to schedule the second meeting of PAXNAUG! The date is April 23rd and the place and time remain the same. We're still looking for a speaker, so if you're interested drop us (or me) a line. More details for the second meeting will be going up on the PAXNAUG site soon!

Thanks again to our sponsors Coaxis, O'Reilly, Apress and Wrox. We really appreciate all that you've done for us and look forward in continuing to work with you. Also, we're still drumming up more sponsors so if you can provide swag of any kind or help out with the food and snacks please get in touch!

I also want to thank everyone that took the time to come to the meeting. This group is going to continue to grow, so congratulations for getting in on the ground floor! Looking forward to seeing everyone again and watching what kind of progress people are making with XNA and with game development.

Mark April 23rd at 6:30 on your calendars and hope to see you there!

The first meeting of PAXNAUG is tonight! If you need directions or more information about the time, look at the PAXNAUG meeting post. Looks like it's going to be a small turnout, but for as new as we are to running a user group, that's probably a good thing.

We have the pizza ordered and we're making a run for the few other remaining supplies we need right now. We didn't get sponsorship for the first one, so this meeting is on us. We figured we'd aggressively hunt sponsors for the higher number meetings.

The dry run with all the hardware yesterday went well and it looks like we will have wireless access available. We also managed to get the XBox 360 and the laptop talking and projecting onto the screen pretty quickly. Hopefully we have the same good results tonight because it only took 10 minutes to setup yesterday.

Now I just need to finish up a few more things with the code I'm working on for my presentation tonight and I think we'll be ready. If you're in the Portland/Vancouver area, hope to see you there! If not, we'll be announcing the date for the next PAXNAUG meeting tonight so be ready to mark it on your calendar.

....I think I can finish this presentation before 6:30...how hard can it be?

I just finished up the fourth and final part to the Wizard and posted it to my site at XNADevelopment.com. This final installment in the series covers adding the ability to have the Wizard shoot magic fireballs. So creating projectiles and maintaining them it covered in the tutorial.

This has been a fun (but LONG) set of tutorials to write. Let me know what you think of them so I can either continue doing tutorials in this style or adjust them. I'm always happy to hear feedback. Several things I've changed about the tutorials and even about the site layout itself has been from feedback I've received from the community.

Head on over and checkout The Wizard: Part 4 - Making a Sprite Shoot Fireballs and let me know what you think.

Part 3 of the Wizard has just been posted to XNADevelopment.com. This part in the Wizard series covering sprite movement and actions shows how to add the ability for your Wizard sprite to "duck". This introduces you to the concepts of using a sprite sheet and learning to change "frames" for your sprite in game.

I'm making a serious effort to deliver the re-write of the original Wizard code in smaller, cleaner and more digestible chunks. While the original tutorial "worked", I knew the code wasn't as clean as it could be and I felt like I was throwing too much at you at once. Let me know if you think if it's improvement this time around. I'd be curious to hear from those of you who went through the tutorial before to check it out again now to see what you think.

Check out The Wizard: Part 3 - Making A Sprite Duck and let me know what you think. I always enjoy reading the comments and emails that I get.

I have just posted part two in the Wizard series. This series is covering adding movement and actions to a sprite. You can head on over to XNADevelopment.com to check out The Wizard: Part 2- Making A Sprite Jump. Part two covers adding the code needed to the project to get your sprite jumping around the screen.

After working through the tutorial, don't be afraid to modify and play with the code. That's one of the best ways to learn. If you get things messed up too badly, you can always delete the entire folder and re-download it from the site. The source code is always provided just for that reason.

Feedback, as always is encouraged and makes me purr like a kitten.

First, I just want to say thanks for all the great feedback I've gotten in comments and email. I don't make any money from doing these tutorials, I don't want donations and I'm not a fan of ads so your comments are what keep me going. Silly I know, but just a little "Thanks!" really does make all the work that goes into the site and these tutorials worth it. So "Thanks!" for the comments and emails. Keep them coming! I love hearing back from people using the tutorials and benefiting from them.

I have been working on completely re-doing the Wizard tutorial and the re-write is now down and posted. I have broken this tutorial into four parts to make it a bit more digestible and easier to follow. This is Part 1 and it covers getting basic input from the player via the keyboard and then using that input to move a sprite around on the screen.

You can head on over and check out, The Wizard: Part 1- Moving a Sprite around the Screen.

As always, the source code is provided along with the tutorial and feedback is strongly encouraged and welcome. Enjoy!

I have completely re-written and posted the tutorial covering scrolling a 2D background on my site . This tutorial has been upgraded with improved code and art assets and is now completely re-written for the XNA 2.0 framework.

I have also take the time to create a more advanced version of the source code. I tend to target beginners with my site so I don't always make my code as "robust" as it could be. Often, it teaches a concept, but it's not easy to reuse in another project. The advanced version of the code attempts to delve a little deeper into just how you might structure your code in a more object oriented approach for future reuse. Both the simpler and advanced versions of the code are available as separate source code downloads.

Head on over and check out the tutorial on Scrolling a 2D Background.

As always, I'm *BEGGING* for some comments and feedback. Seriously, even if it's just to say "Hi!". I love to hear from people that have read the tutorials and enjoyed them or even from people that didn't enjoy them. If you have some advice to give on how I should improve, I'd love to hear that too. And of course, if they're helping you out, I'd love to hear that as well. Just a couple comments can really make a difference in helping me stay motivated so if you have a few seconds, just take a little time, I really appreciate them!