Waiting on God or just being lazy???

Here is a pretty helpful articles I read and I will leave it to cover this weeks blog post. These will deal with what it means to rest what it means to be lazy. They will address why you have no energy throughout the week and why you feel un-motivated and stressed out and feel like the guy running from the blair witch. Hope you enjoy!

http://www.crosswalk.com/family/singles/is-waiting-on-god-an-excuse-to-be-lazy.html

http://www.desiringgod.org/articles/the-complicated-life-of-lazy-boys

http://www.desiringgod.org/articles/put-laziness-to-rest

Coming to terms with our 120,000 debt!

Recently I started reading Dave Ramsey book the total money makeover. It has been pretty eye opening and really see how people see and use debt. I have to be honest and say that I had no clue we were this far in debt. We combined pull about 50k a year and are sitting at around 120,000 in debt. 30 from my Associates in Electronics about 70 for half my BA in Game Design from Full Sail University and the rest in my wifes Associates in Electronics. We are currently staying at a place where we don't have to rent and so you would think at least 25k of the 50 could go towards our debt. If we did manage to live on 25K a year that would mean it would take us about 5 years to pay off all the debt. Obviously that is not an option at all and we live on about 40k a year without RENT! I have a car I just started leasing and am being garnished on top of everything else lots of court costs. Anyhow I write this as a starting point for our debt reduction and to give you faith that if we can do it you can to! Please follow us on our journey to be debt free and see how long it really is going to take to pay off all these student loans. Hope you guys enjoy the difference in subject matter for a while and have a great night!

Update on GreenesTowerDefense

Hello everyone, it has been a while since I last wrote on here. Honestly I been going through the motions on weather to keep working with Game Maker and complete this game or if I am better suited for C# and ASP.NET for web applications. I spent most of this weekend sulking and binge watching Steve Universe (Its a great show by the way) However on Sunday I got off my lazy butt and decided to go through and create a little more content for GreenesTowerDefense but I realized I had no plan. No end goal in site and thus had to go through and create a sort of plan to build from. Today I am going to go through with you what I decided on and how my original GDD(Game Design Document) got thrown out the window and I started over with a little more thought and took some time to figure out what exactly I wanted to create. To start with I realized that being a visual learner it is very important for me to be able to see a vision before I can figure out how to build it so the first part was to define the art style I wanted and the camera style I wanted for example the view I wanted to use. I decided on a cartoon style and an Isometric view point. Next I needed to know what I was going to build so I decided how everything was going to function and what the game was going to be from start to finish. After that I had to decide what was going to populate this game world and so I decided to list out all the sprites I would need, this also included backgrounds and more. Next I realized a hole in my plan and that I had not decided how each of those characters were going to interact with each other so that was what I did. Again realizing I had not been detailed enough I decided to go through and design each level what it would be and  what it would look like (roughly). Then I had to decide what all the systems would be in this game and how they would work. Last I had to figure out what all the sounds would be. I still need to figure out where to get them from or if I am going to make them myself, how. I hope you enjoyed this write up and if you would like to check out the new GDD (Aka: Plan of Attack) you can find it here...https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MvG9pmsM0x7HuKyXXNIvKcfdQGHT5osiB8Tr7Zkokzc/edit?usp=sharing

Thanks and till next time You can do this! Sincerely Jonathan Greene

GreenesTowerDefense Release on Android!

Hello all I want to let everyone know I just released GreenesTowerDefense on google play. The links is here. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.companyname.it_let_me_save&hl=en Please feel free to let me know what you think both good and bad! I really appreciate any feedback so I can improve the game more.

Thanks, Jonathan Greene

Getting Android to work in Game Maker Studio 1.xxx

So today I would like to start off this post with my explanation of how I got android to work in Game Maker Studio 1.xxx. Lets start by referring you to a few sites. https://help.yoyogames.com/hc/en-us/articles/216753498-GameMaker-Studio-Android-SDK-and-NDK-setup- This will be the first site your going to want to visit. Next your going to want to follow the steps and get the Java SE development kit from here http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/java-archive-javase8-2177648.html Ok here comes the tricky part or at least it was for me. Next if you follow the yoyo instruction it tells you to just download the SDK and NDK for android. I found no use doing this possibly do to my lack of understanding of it. So what I did was just to download the Android Studio. Start a new project and then on the right hand side at the top of the window you will see an icon that  says SDK manager. So I used that to download the versions of android I needed. Next what I did is inside the android SDK there is a SDK location at the top of the window I used that and copy and pasted it into Game Maker as the sdk Location and vala it worked. Next I looked for the NDK at the very bottom of the list of stuff in the SDK downloaded that and looked in that same drive to find the location of the NDK and got that working next I had to create some kind of Hash key in Android so I did that and last I had to download a driver for my phone to be able to be seen in android. I hope this helps someone and hope you enjoyed reading. Feel free to message me about any problems or questions. Last Remember to Restart your computer and Phone if things aren't working right!

Thanks, Jonathan Greene

Getting over the fear of your first release.

I was once given a call to action by Brendon Buchard that no mattter what it was I was working on I needed to release to get over the fear of that initial release. Well it took me a while but i did about 2 days later muster up the strength to release my first title out for the world to play. It was a disaster and I even payed people to test the game out. That was a bad idea they were not honest at all and after a few more play tests it was obvious no one could figure out how to play that game. The game I am talking about is called Mathalvania and can be downloaded for free on android here...  https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.companyname.Mathalvania2&hl=en Mathalvania

Well I got to say Brendon was right on the money and I had a lot of growing that only could happen after releasing that first title and dealing with the backlash (mostly from family) of how bad it was. It was ugly and people did not understand the control and concept until i explained it in detail. At that point it was actually pretty fun to play if you know all your basic k-6 math. I write this to inspire others that no matter how bad your game is you should release it and as you build better and better games keep doing the same thing. Don't ever think your game has nothing to offer and don't judge it against other games made by other people. Everyone is on there own path and if no one wants to play test your game you can always leave me a link in the comments I would love to play test and give a report of the game or project your working on. Remember your (your) hardest critique and no one is going to be able to see your vision but you. Just keep plugging away at it and in a few years you will be on top of the game. Hope this helped and inspired someone and have a great 4th everyone!

Building without a plan

Today I would like to talk about my experiences with building without a plan. As a self taught developer I know we are all going to be there at some point. We have some grand idea for a game,app or whatever and we know what we want it to be. We are all excited and jump right in, building and building until a few months later we look up and notice we have no clue where to go next. Our vision was not very well defined out and we did not spend the time needed to flush out what exactly we are going to do. I have found my own formula for helping me to figure out what this project I spent so much time on is. First I am going to talk about that and what it is, then ill talk about some of the benefits and drawbacks of this approach,

Step 1. Find a rough idea of what exactly your trying to make. (You most likely already have done this)

Step 2. Define your start date and your end date. (These do not need to be exact but def something to shoot for. Lets say at max 3-6 months to keep you from losing focus and drive.

Step 3. Find what your project is going to look like in half that time.(This is your mid point and should be your first mile-stone)

Step 4. Break it down more and more. Cutting it up in half until you know exactly what your  going to be working on each day. (This prevents burnout and fatigue)

Step 5. Knowing what your doing everyday you have a clear goal for that day,Week, Month and so on.
Step 6. Now that your done SHIP THAT PROJECT!!!


The benefits are pretty obvious for this method. but the drawbacks are not so. First of all you need to keep focus and really buckle down on what you are building. Think of all the sprites needed, The systems needed. What objects your going to need and what they need to do. You will need to create all the screens your going to use. I use paint to build these its quick easy and just a blueprint so only needs to be a rough representation.  So lots of prep work needs done ahead of time.

If you would like more indepth information on this process feel free to comment and I will see what I can do.

Thank you for ready and hope this helps some people.