New Year, new goals, long vacation, Steam sale, mobile port, pixel day, back to the grind, etc. What do you think?

The Angry Video Game Nerd's channel just posted the final installment in their playthrough of Abobo's Big Adventure. I was sincerely laughing out loud along with them when they got to the ending. It gives me a deep feeling of gratification to see the game connecting with people who "get" it. The expressions on their faces at the end say it all. Thanks @mockery, @poxpower, and @TomFulp for helping make this game a reality:

At 24:45 I'm going to tell myself that we touched the AVGN's heart so deeply he actually cried...

Hey, I finally graduated! Only 18 years after my high school graduation... :-/

In other good news, the Angry Video Game Nerd finally got around to playing Abobo's Big Adventure! It makes me smile constantly to see other people enjoying Abobo and getting (most of) the jokes:

I agree with some of the comments that he should have hired us to make his Steam game... ;-)

If you wouldn't mind terribly, please go nominate Super Chibi Knight for the "I Thought This Game Was Cool Before It Won An Award" award on Steam! http://store.steampowered.com/app/283080

Your help is sincerely appreciated. As a reward, here's a 3d sculpt a fan did of Super Chibi Knight!

  Rotate-able 3d model: https://sketchfab.com/models/910ecc27f1644c89befb2b724eb62b18  

Here are some more anims from http://www.bossclash.com that I put together last week, hoping to make good progress during the month of December on this project:

Thanks for visiting, and once again, please take a sec to nominate SCK for the "I Thought This Game Was Cool Before It Won An Award" award on Steam! http://store.steampowered.com/app/283080

Much <3 !

I made it to my first long-ish school vacation break! Thanksgiving week! Woo!

To celebrate, I made a video about everything my students have been working on for the past 3 months:

With the vacation time I'm picking things back up with http://www.bossclash.com and lemme tell ya, it feels GREAT to be doing my own game development stuff again!

Here are some anims:

If you want updates/first look at beta test, sign up here: http://www.bossclash.com

What are you doing for Thanksgiving?

I keep cranking out videos about Photoshop, Illustrator, and Flash - I'm putting myself out of a job by recording everything I know for everyone in the world to see for free. It is kinda neat to realize that I've learned a lot over the last 10 years or so... I usually take it for granted, but systematizing everything has made me more aware.

Here are a couple vids I recently made:

1. Arrays in programming

2. Photoshop "blend modes" which were NEW to me!

There's still a whole lot to learn though... what would you like a demo of?

For Halloween scariness I'm posting a link to my Photoshop tutorial about layer mask gradient blends used to merge various animals into a SPOOKY new creature!

Hope you enjoy/get scared!

How was YOUR Halloween? What did you do?

I've been teaching a "Digital Game Development" class at a local charter school for the past 12 weeks! My "internship" is nearly over and then I'll get that sweet sweet paper degree in December!

To scratch my creative itch I've been making videos about Graphic Design and Game Dev. for my students. If you're interested in learning pretty dang quick, check out this playlist on YouTube:

[ Digital Game Development Play List ]

The first few vids I snatched from other people who did a great job with the basic introductory stuff, but the last 10 or so are made by me.

Here's a sample to see if you like my style!

In other news, all this time sitting in a classroom has bred some good game ideas... I still have a BIG game (http://www.bossclash.com) that I need to finish once my internship is done, and I have some interest from a unique company regarding Deterministic Dungeon that might create some decent cash flow... hoping things work out for the best there.

I've got Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks coming up soon and I hope to be able to get back into the game-dev swing with the time off.

How do you balance the mundanity of making ends meet with your desire to be creative (all while not burning yourself out)?

One of my big struggles with doing my student teaching has been feeling the urge to MAKE things. Teaching high-school kids can be rewarding, but when I don't have a personal creative outlet I get antsy and frustrated.

So, I started making instructional videos for my classes. Not only has it scratched my creative itch, but it's been a REALLY nice way to teach my students. They basically get a custom one-on-one learning experience with me that they can pause, rewind, and fast forward/watch at double speed (plus extra features like automatic closed-captioning for multi-modal learning). If there are extra questions, the real me is there in-person to answer them (which is much better than watching a kahn academy video or something non-personal online), but 90% of the students are learning without much real-me intervention.

The video method is also a huge boon for absent students who can watch my videos at home and get caught up almost immediately.

I feel like I'm on to something good for education. The last part of this blog post by Bill Gates helped spur me on to teaching this way.

https://www.gatesnotes.com/About-Bill-Gates/Accelerating-Innovation

Here's one of my better videos explaining what functions are in programming and how they work (I can usually knock 2 or 3 of these videos out every day during my prep. periods):

What do YOU think?

Ever want to create a Mandala design, but been too lazy to make all those intricate lines? Well fret no more! Here's a video I'm using in my Art Education internship to teach high schoolers about symmetry and symbols!

This video is an effort to have the students do something fairly complex, but to teach them the technical stuff in video form so they can go at their own pace (pause, rewind, watch in 2x speed, etc.)

I'll see tomorrow if it works!

I dare you to try it!