Just Thinking…
Posted by Cherno | Filed under Life
Hey, what’s happening guys?
Over the last few weeks I’ve had some really exciting opportunities pop up, and I’ve had the pleasure of being able to take things into my own hands and actually produce something out of it. It made me reassess my life as a whole, and what exactly I want to do with it. It’s exactly one month before my first exam, the first exam of the last school exams that I will ever do, signalling my graduation from school and the end of the so called “high school life” or whatever you wanna call it. It marks the end of an era. And then I guess onwards I go, to university. Still not sure exactly what I want to study. I’ve applied to Film and Television as my first preference, with Software Engineering and Computer Science type courses following after that. A lot of you guys always ask me what my plan is after school, expecting it to be me becoming some ridiculously amazing programmer, particularly in the field of game development, like a hero or something. That’s not exactly what I want to do with my life though. I’ve thought about it a lot, and I just can’t imagine myself sitting in an office all day and programming some kind of main menu for a mediocre Australian game that no one will ever play. It seems… depressing. Programming is nothing more than a hobby for me, and I definitely want to pursue it as a hobby, and create and release many games to come, and have that as a source of income. I don’t however, want to become some kind of indie game developer who makes just enough money to feed himself and his cat. No that’s not me. Unless that indie developer is Notch. Because then yeah, I wouldn’t mind scrapping in 200,000+ Euros a day, and having such an amazing community back me.
At times I think back to what I wanted to be when I was little. I love flying, and I have throughout my entire life. My first flight occurred when I was 6 years old, in 2001, when my parents and I flew to Frankfurt, Germany, from Melbourne, Australia via Changi Airport in Singapore, right after 9/11. Since then, I’ve totalled 31 flights. Becoming an airline pilot sounds like fun, and after all, I do spend hours on flight simulators like IL-2 Sturmovik (although that game is just amazing all together), and of course FSX. I’ve also wanted to become a detective, or a police officer. I’ve also upheld justice and respected it, so it seems like a logical choice. I’m also Russian, and would definitely enjoy beating the crap out of criminals and arresting their asses. Sounds like fun, honestly, and the pay after a few years is pretty damn good. The cons do those two career choices? For the pilot, it’s the damn lifestyle. They have these things called “crash pads”, where you sleep in a room with 20 other pilots in between flights, and get paid like, $16,000 a year when you start off. Yeah, that’s pretty much all the cons. For those of you saying that it’s dangerous, I don’t see that as a con. If you’re the pilot, the plan is in your hands. That makes me feel safer than someone else flying it. Maybe I’ve got trust issues, I don’t know. As for police officer / detective… well the obvious danger is violence, and not just that, but being exposed to stuff like HIV from druggies. It packs action, and thus danger. Starting salary for Victoria Police is ~AU$54,000. That’s honestly not too bad for your first year. Especially as it pretty much doubles when you get promoted.
So yeah, that’s what I’ve been thinking about lately. As for the things I was previously passionate about… like become a film director or producer? I still really want to do that, but Australia isn’t exactly great for that. I mean we literally have no good TV shows. I’m not talking mediocre shows, I’m talking GREAT shows like Dexter or Breaking Bad. None of that here, we’ll just show reality TV shows for 22 hours a day. Great. As for programming, I guess I’d prefer becoming some kind of security systems programmer, or really software engineering for medicine or aerospace stuff. That could really be cool. And then make games in my spare time. Still, I don’t know what that would be like. In the end, I’ll probably end up starting my own company and doing exactly what I want to do, and changing that activity every now and then. I’ll also by a business jet, and fly myself around the world when I need to go to important meetings and deals and such. Sounds like fun.
Ludum Dare 24 Progress!
Posted by Cherno | Filed under Uncategorized
4 hours later…
It’s probably gonna be a Zelda type looking game. Maybe some puzzle aspects. The theme is Evolution, so I’m thinking the character gets stronger each night, or something. He can kill at night, but during the day he’s harmless.
Ludum Dare 24
Posted by Cherno | Filed under Programming
Ludum Dare is a 48 hour game programming competition, in which you have 48 hours to make a game from scratch on a particular theme. The theme gets released as soon as the competition starts. I’m entering the 24th Ludum Dare.
Ludum Dare 24 is starts on the 25 August, at 11am Australian Eastern Standard Time, or 1am GMT. I’m going to live stream the entire event of me making the game from scratch. It will be live streamed directly to my YouTube channel. The only issue is that I will be occasionally stopping the stream; it won’t be on for the entire 48 hours, because I need time to sleep and eat. But what I will do is turn my channel into the Live Broadcaster template for the duration of the event, meaning you can just go to http://www.youtube.com/thechernoproject and you’ll be able to watch whatever stream is currently live, as the links of the individual streams will be different. That’s pretty much all the maintenance stuff I was gonna cover. How was your day?
Taking an entire weekend off school work is actually making me quite nervous, but I’ve decided that Ludum Dare is something that I’ve wanted to do for a while, and number 24 is looking pretty good. Only thing I can’t promise about the stream is the amount of questions that I answer. Making a game in 48 hours is challenging enough, but answering constant questions is going to make it impossible. One thing I will try to do however, as long as it doesn’t severely diminish my productivity and efficiency, will be to roughly explain the code as I type it.
One last question you might have is what exactly I’m going to use to make the game. I’m going to use Java, with Eclipse Indigo as the IDE, as well as Paint.NET (and maybe Photoshop if I make something high resolution) for the textures/graphics. For sound I might try and record/make my own music quickly, although I highly doubt I’ll have enough time for that, so I’ll probably just cut the music and use some kind of sound effect generator/creator (like http://www.superflashbros.net/as3sfxr/) for the sound effects. What else… that’s probably about it. I don’t plan to use any external libraries at all, just pure Java. As for what kind of game I make… well that largely depends on the theme, doesn’t it? I really want to make a puzzle game, but I’m also open to creating a tile based 2D Zelda type game, that could also be fun. I’ll make a YouTube video talking about this whole Ludum Dare thing as well.
Anyway, that’s Enough For Now (http://www.youtu.be/qVU8WVzUylo).
What do we have here…
Posted by Cherno | Filed under Stuff
Hey what’s up guys, my name is The Cherno, and welcome to my website.
Yeah, I finally got around to making one. Throughout this page you’ll find mainly blog posts by me, as well as every YouTube video that I’ve published.
I was thinking of turning this website into blogs not only about my life, but also about code, and maybe even updates on secret projects I’m working on (with screenshots!)
I’m not exactly sure what this site will turn into, but I bet it will feel nice to be able to write and express myself that way, instead of just making a video and uploading it
to YouTube as I’ve always done.
I honestly don’t even know if you can follow this blog. I think you can. You can make an account, I believe, to comment, and… do other stuff. I’ve never had a blog before
so it might take a while before I start getting everything right.
Hope you enjoy,
Yan Chernikov.