Zombies!

Excellent News

2013-04-19T07:21:00.001-07:00

Alright so here's the scoop.

We are taking a little detour on the game development so that we can produce a game for the android. We are super excited about this because it means that we will be able to produce a game in possibly as fast as a few months, rather than a few years! So Exciting!

We've started playing with a couple models, one of which I will share with you, our lovely audience.

As you may have deduced, we'll be doing something involving boats! What you ask...? Well, you'll just have to come back later and maybe we'll share that little tidbit. ; )

-Panda

p.s. Many thanks to Isgrrd for the lovely model to play with.

You think you know animation?

2013-04-18T13:43:00.000-07:00

Well folks,
Today was very humbling for me. I downloaded a new animation, with all the intent of using him as our sexy new game model. Little did I know, I would be greeted with the following image.

Come ON! I mean, MajorNightmare did a great job with this build, but I am in WAY over my head here. =)
With my previous animations, I felt confident enough to blow away any rigging I didn't like and re-do it, but this one I'm afraid to even look at sideways. I've had to reload the build from scratch about 15 times today just because I clicked on or dragged something I wasn't supposed to.
Anyway, wish me luck! I haven't actually accomplished anything today other than breaking this rig a few times, but I probably learned something... "Don't poke the bear".. That's something, Right? RIGHT? =(
-Panda

Portable Blender

2013-04-17T15:08:00.001-07:00

Hello and welcome,
Thanks to a little creative digging on X's part, we have managed to obtain a copy of Blender Portable! This means that I can continue to work on animation, even when the computer I'm using is stubborn. ^_^
To show-case the magnificence of this feat, here is a peek behind the curtain of me studying 3-d animation. (Many thanks to SebastL over at BlendSwap for sharing his Fully Rigged Mannequin)

Ooooooo Ahhhhh, so Impressive!

Okay well maybe not -that- impressive, but it's so nice to be working on the project once more.
Here we see a mannequin taking his very first baby steps. <wipes a tear away> I'm so proud, my baby's all grown up!

Thanks for tuning in folks. More to following as we DIG DEEP and get this show on the road!
-Panda

2013-03-13T09:24:00.000-07:00

Hey Hey,
After a brief (queue laughter) hiatus, I'm doing some more work on the Shadow-run Mod for RP-tools. I took some time off to learn how to host and create my own website using: html, CSS, and some PHP functions. It was very interesting and if you're thinking about doing the same, I recommend using Light TPD, it lets you host a website from your own PC for free (of course people would have trouble finding it without registering a domain name and all that). However! It's very helpful to practice all those html and php functions you've been itching to put into use. Heyo!
Anyway, I returned to see the picture below and was very thankful that Past-Panda had decided to leave me notes on what I had been working on.
-Panda

Wonderful Wednesday

2012-10-24T16:17:00.001-07:00

It's that time again, bloggers! Another snap-shot that takes 2 seconds to look at and hours upon hours of painstaking labor to actually create.
This is what the character use to do things in the 2-d campaign. If you see that window that blocks half the selections, that's pop-up text that will explain what every selection does (some are more obvious than others, like "Survival"... Aren't I always surviving?)
Anyway, enjoy!
-Panda Out

Character sheets

2012-10-23T16:27:00.001-07:00

Heya,
Here's a picture of our 2-d character sheet, we'll probably implement something similar to this in the official Zombie game. Html drive is ACTIVATE. =P
Obviously a lot of the stats and stuff listed here will be useless and irrelevant in a zombie survival game, this is more of a.... template.
-Panda Out

More Shopping!

2012-10-22T15:48:00.001-07:00

Another wonderful week!
For those of you that remember the -original- intent of this blog (3d zombie game, might ring a bell, just saying...), I actually launched Blender and played around with the character animation that is sort of the next big step for our game. I've been doing a lot of reading on animation, but I seriously should have gone to some sort of school for this, haha.
Anyway, while I'm figuring out why animation is the devil, here's another section of my 2d map.
Enjoy!
-Panda Out

2012-10-19T12:57:00.001-07:00

Good Afternoon,
Here's a shopping center I made.... Drawing is for suckers, fyi!

Anyway, I found some bugs that had to be ironed out, it was actually awesome because the time I spent hunting down the bug would have -completely- ruined any attempt to play the game with people (ex. if I had to try to figure it out mid-game.)
I sort of want to have someone de-bug the things that I have in game right now, however.... I discover so many bugs myself..... >_<
-Panda Out

Late Night

2012-10-18T16:42:00.001-07:00

For all of you in the late-night Blogosphere,
Here's a quick look at the nonsense that is html and html tables. (Yes I realize it's not formatted for CSS, to that I say PBBBT). =D
Many props to W3 Schools for "schoolin" me... Pretty much everything I know was learned there.
Enjoy,
-Panda Out

Quick Update

2012-10-18T11:06:00.000-07:00

Hey,
To validate how burned out I am on building... buildings? haha, here's a layout that took me about an hour to design and then create. God help me when I get to interior design, maybe I can hire one of those guys on TV to "Pimp Dis Game". I'm going to go shoot myself for saying that now.
-Panda Out

2012-10-18T09:06:00.001-07:00

Hey guys,
Super crazy-random update is GO! Today I'm going to be working on adding some more to the map of the side-project. It's hard for me because the scale is ginormous and I have zero artistic talent to begin with... Or maybe this qualifies as architecture, which I'm also horrible at so.... I guess defining it is pretty useless, I could sum it up as saying "me bad at this thing", but we know that won't happen.
I might get crazy later and show you some of the "work" that goes behind making an html window (We use these in the game for things like: Character sheets or game-related pop-ups... They're sort of like mini web-sites... I can't tell if that's more confusing or less... So the statement stays. =)
Here's that picture of the map.

If you look waaaaaay down in the bottom left corner, you can see those tokens and things from the previous post. A token is the "player", so you can imagine if the players are that small, how huge this map is, in comparison.
Exciting stuff!!
-Pandeyo Out
P.S. In the interest of keeping this blog zombie-related, this 2-d Table-Top game will also be Zombie Compatible (for those of you that are like, WHERE DEM ZOMBIES AT?) ; )
P.P.S. If this sort of thing is your proverbial "Cup of tea", please check out the people that make online table-top gaming possible.

Two-fer?

2012-10-17T16:21:00.000-07:00

Hello and welcome,
I've decided that this blog can serve a dual-purpose. I'm going to also be showing you an upcoming side-project that I'm sure will be a big hit (at least for table-top gaming purposes).
If you know what D&D is, then describing Shadow Run as a "Sci-Fi" version of D&D is fairly apt. If you do not... It's a table-top game that's Sci-Fi, close enough! =)
Basically I'm working on an online version of the "table-top" game that will enable players to do things like: shoot guns, punch some dude in the face, ect ect, without having to dig through books just to figure out how many dice to roll and what not.
Anyway, here's a picture!

As you can see it uses tokens and hand-drawn buildings (I'm not artist, so... yup, those are buildings). I plan to add textures and stuff later, but for the mean time, this will let me play a tabletop game with my buddies on the west-coast.
Once I finish this Framework, I plan on posting it for other people to use.
Back to work!
-Panda Out

2012-10-17T16:09:00.000-07:00

Hello peoples,
I'm sure you can tell from the picture that we feel horrible for vanishing off the face of the earth... I sorry?
Here's the update.
Planetside 2- Mediocre
Game development- Slow
Playing World Of Warcraft- Pandas!

It's slightly depressing that so much time can be quantified by so little... Health and Work have been delaying the super awesome happy fun times, but we're working on being more vigilant.
I've decided to continue updates to the Blog with my side project info and just whatever. More updates means more human!
Anyway, until a little later
-Panda Out

2012-07-17T09:12:00.001-07:00

Monday! (checks watch), Tuesday!
Another week and a little more work done. Nothing really major to write about, so let's talk about the socio-economic.... okay enough big words, the short story is, the design team is still waiting to get invited to the Planetside 2 beta and we're all dragging our feet.
The most important thing on our agenda, to keep cohesion, is to select a side we can all agree on. See the pictures below for more information what I could be talking about.

^TerranRepublic^
Loyalty Until
Death

^ Vanu Scum^ ^New Conglomerate^

P.S. I'm clearly not biased.
- Terran Republic Panda Out

2012-07-12T16:30:00.002-07:00

So,
The PanX Studio team is currently under siege by an onslaught of addictive gaming, with the anticipation of Planetside 2 we have all re-subscribed to Planetside 1. Needless to say, it's affecting how much we're getting done on our actual project, but it's quite good for morale.
Anyway, feel free to join us in-game to see the "team in action". Username- Whitefire325.
-Panda ooooooout

2012-07-11T09:36:00.000-07:00

Howdy
(two posts in two days? The apocalypse has come! Or maybe we're just back on schedule).
After a brief gaming interlude (like 2-3 hours brief >_>), we realized that in order for us to Sync our game development we would have to get the Toirtoise SVN file sharing client working.
To quantify this a little bit, our team works coast to coast (Panda on the East, and X on the West). Luckily after I hit the sack, X continued to grind it out and has it working again. I managed to upload my animation and with any luck X can do some dirty dirty things with it while I'm making a couple sawbucks.
Believe it or not, during our interlude I actually learned some very basic coding (for my side-project using the RPTools online DMing tool. I'm making a ShadowRun Campaign). It's mostly a little very basic HTML and (quoting X here) "Such a mosh-posh of languages there's no use calling it a single, useful, language". I will simply call it a "Macro Scripting Language specific to RPtools". That's a mouth-ful, so maybe in the future I'll use the acronym MSLStR, although that almost looks like "molester" so maybe not...
Until next time,
-Panda Out

2012-07-10T11:20:00.000-07:00

Well...
I guess an explanation is in order? <looks at his watch> Oh, I lost track of the time!... Just kidding >_<. I probably should have warned everyone that with the release of a certain -Diablo-esque- game, we would suffer from "production down-time". After that it was "Oh my god, our game can never be this great", followed by "Binge gaming". Luckily the entire crew has been put through Re-hab and should be able to jump back on the development wagon!... OR ELSE.
As awesome as that last paragraph reads, I may have taken a little time for myself as well, but without a polygraph test you'll never prove a thing. Luckily I've been using some of that time to watch tutorials on animation and have a very very basic animation for X to try hammering into Unity. With any luck, it will integrate perfectly and we will all have cake! But knowing programmers/ coding/ blah blah blah, I will be re-animating this same character later this week...
In case you missed the good news, WE'RE BACK BABY!
-Panda OUT
p.s. I learned how to sail as well =D, wheee

The One-Two Shuffle

2012-05-09T14:36:00.000-07:00

Updates! Hooray!
Our character now has a walking forwards, backwards, and "maybe" strafe left animation. The strafing remains to be seen because.... well that's complicated, don't judge me!
In the terms of programming, X has gotten a few actions programmed- Attack, Attack-self, heal-self. Once I finish up this animation, we'll be able to have two (admittedly identical) characters beating each other up! This is a pretty huge step, so we're looking forward to it with great anticipation.

Here's a pic of X's accomplishments so far. If you look closely you can see some items in the action bar (attack and heal, ect ect) and using his previous multi-player coding, we were able to log-in and wail on each-other. Woo!
-Panda Out
p.s. The roman soldier is not our character, he's just a test dummy.

Be Healed!

2012-05-03T15:12:00.001-07:00

X linked me to this picture, at first I was like.... whaaa? Then I realized that our characters have health bars (or at least the HUD does, haha). Later he informed me that those health bars are actually networked, so there's even more going on than I realized. For those of us that are as bad with computers as myself, that basically means that if my health bar goes down on my screen, it will also go down on the screen of anyone else that can see my health, yeah!
There's been so much news on the little things I do, it's nice to get X some face-time on the blog(even if it's by proxy). He's grinding away like crazy while I'm crawling along. Once I get this animation done, I'll start moving at a good pace again. Animation is slow work when you're learning as you go.
Until next time party people,
-Panda Out

Well Played 9gag...

2012-05-02T16:20:00.002-07:00

I couldn't help myself. 9gag truly understands how I feel about this mystical force called "programming".
-Panda Out

My Head Hurts

2012-05-02T15:08:00.000-07:00

Seriously guys... Okay I'll share this with you since X will get a kick out of it and so will any of you that are into computers (sigh). I message X and ask him a question and 10 minutes later he comes back and says "sorry knee deep in figuring out why Microsoft can't change an int to a float without a 3 line long cast."
I cocked my head to the side and squinted at my screen, hoping that this madness he was speaking was actually another language I could google translate. If any of you have "that programmer friend" you will know what came next. I asked "What sort of crazy are you speaking?" Which, I now know, was probably the worst idea ever! For the next hour I was explained to what Ints are, what floats are, how they effect Cpu speed, Ram speed, why floats are the devil and how variable precision is evil.
To be fair to X, I now understand quite a lot more about computers. That's pretty cool, however I still have no clue how it will effect the game... Maybe one of you do? Drop us a comment so I can look extra cool next time I talk to X.
-Panda Out

p.s. No making me look stupid by giving me gibberish to tell him... Sometimes I swear you guys make up words!

Success!

2012-05-01T15:39:00.000-07:00

Our first attempt at streaming last evening was quite a landmark success for us. This is quite obvious to a couple of you that tuned in. We are going to be keeping the live-stream going since it seems to have gone over so well with you guys, thanks for the support!
Admittedly we only streamed development for... 30 minutes? But I've been informed that it was very pleasing to see a glimpse "behind the curtain" at what we actually do here at PanX Studios. The rest of the evening was research... Still, we logged almost three hours of stream, not too shabby!!
X has informed me that he's nose deep into more tutorials about merging his coding and my animations to utilize the few movements I have nailed down. I'm pretty thankful that the majority of what I do is hands-on learning and grunt work, in comparison to his advanced mathematics and theorems attempted to put into practice.
Until next time,
-Panda Out

Streaming Goodness

2012-04-30T15:22:00.000-07:00

Greetings programs!
As you may have (hopefully!) noticed, we now have a streaming feed on the right side-bar. I, Panda, will attempt to stream -something- every night around 9pm EST. I cannot guarantee that it will be 100% game development, since I need to do.... research? Yes let's go with research. I may be playing video games for research!
I hope you guys enjoy this new feature, we here at Pan X Studios are very very excited to be able to bring you live feeds of our video game development! Please don't hesitate to drop a comment if you have any questions or ideas about how we can improve your experience with us.
You may have already guessed, but there's no real update on the game itself, we sort of got giddy with integrating this Livestream and gave it our focus. Now that it's all taken care of, we can hopefully dig back into the development (with you guys tagging along, with any luck!).
-Panda out

Tentative Steps

2012-04-25T13:44:00.000-07:00

We are "dipping our feet" back into the water, as they say. I spent an hour last night working soley with our character's feet (primarily the right foot). Why, you might ask? Well it's simple, the foot hates me. Seriously though, the feet are distorting the more we play with our animation so i'm focusing on fine tuning that before I can move forward on creating that long list of animations.
My super awesome programmer, X, is back from haitus and taking his baby steps getting back into the swing of things as well. His words to me yesterday were as follows: "I'm changing a lot of things and when you look at how they effect the game, you will say.... Nothing has changed, and that's sad". I know he secretly works hard though, so I don't pick on him as much as his imaginary version of me does.
-Panda out

The Daily Grind

2012-04-23T14:43:00.002-07:00

And we're back!
Animation and coding drudge slowly forwards, our team is getting burned out (remember my last post? haha). We took a couple days off and are now back digging into the program. I don't have much to share with you guys other than saying stuff like "working a full-time job and working on the game full time is rough" but that comes across as whiny, so we'll just skip that nonsense!
We've had some pretty good feed-back recently about ideas for what should be in the game to spice it up, but we always look forward to more of these types of comments. Being hardcore gamers ourselves, we know what we enjoy seeing in a video game, but it's always nice to get some outside perspective. However please keep in mind that zombies will die. It's just how things work. You have to decapitate a few zombies to make some kind of zombie...omelet.... monstrosity.... I think I just grossed myself out.
-Panda out