This last Friday was the commencement ceremony for the graduating class of this and last quarter and the principle speaker there was Akhil Gupta, the Vice President of Johnson & Wales University. It was taken largely in part from this video, which really makes you think about the world we live in and the speed that it is advancing and changing. Today more than ever, outdated has become a word applied to technology one or two years old, the latest and greatest instantly losing half it’s value almost the instant you buy it. This video really portrays this well, and though this video is not what got me to Neumont, many of these realizations is what founded this school about 5 years ago and is what will drive the future of this school.
Many thanks to Arron Reed for posting this video, I’m re-posting it here for convenience.
As I’ve continued working on this game due to the large amount of support from friends and professors here at Neumont, I’ve decided to rename the game due to another game being released with the exact same name by Lucas Arts (http://www.lucasarts.com/games/fracture/) I’m still unsure if I’m going to end up releasing a full game or trying to sell it at all via steam or xbox live or not, there is still a huge amount of work that still needs to be done on the game to make it production worthy.
As far as progress on the game goes, there are now power-ups, better game logic, a simple menu system that was thrown in last minute, several difficulty levels, level regeneration, two new space backdrops, new weapons, and the list goes on… needless to say there has been a good chunk of additional work put into this game since the last time you saw it.
In addition, I was given the opportunity to demo this game to the new prospective students this last Friday after they went through a XNA demo and had a chance to try out what you could do with XNA. A lot of the students were very impressed, though I couldn’t decide if it was a ‘oooo this is a cool game, or oooo this cool that someone here did something like this’ kind of reaction. Guess we’ll see when I get the chance to create and release a demo version :)
However, my blog is not complete without giving you some sort of media to look at, so, here is a desktop background made from one of the space backdrops in the game at 1920×1200 for your viewing / using pleasure.
Neumont has been officially haunted… by stalkerish crazy computer scientists… AHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!
Fortunately, everyone somehow managed to survive this haunting occasion unscathed. And as a result of a awesome costume contest we ended up with a wide selection of great photos for your viewing pleasure.
About two weeks ago I got a call from a model I had worked with in the past saying that she was setting up an event at a new studio that was was opening down in Provo. We talked a bit about what was going on and she asked me to come down and do some shooting with some other photographers and models. I don’t think I fully understood exactly what the event was going to entail but I agreed to come if I had time and if school permitted and didn’t really think much about it.
A few days before the actual event I get a call from her asking if I’m coming and that, if I do, she’d arranged for me to be one of the main photographers there and have my own area to setup and shoot in. Cool right? The whole studio area was larger than I had imagined it would be, but I had a nice large area to setup in, plenty of rooms to stick my lights wherever I wanted to and plenty of photographers and models coming and going from my station.
All in all, a good night, met some good photographers and models with the added bonus of lots of good pictures.
