Last Week at DWG

Hey guys. Last week was my last week at my internship and I must say I was really sad to leave. Even though I probably need more free time to prepare for college and just relax after all the hard work of this year, I came to enjoy the time I spent at the office, meeting and working with other extremely intelligent people everyday.

I finished my last feature for that game that was so difficult, but being out due to illness, I did not have time to make the game that I designed. However, I was really happy to hear that my work for the company proved to be very beneficial in terms of productivity and creativity. 

Challenges: I will miss going to the office in the morning. I hope that later in life I will be able to find an environment that has good people and similar good vibes.

Victories: My supervisor took us to lunch and told us that he too also enjoyed working with us. We were very helpful in that we got more done than he could've by himself. 

Thank you so much for reading! There will be one more post about how my presentation in front of the Senior Research Project Committee goes, so I will see you all then! 

Week 9

Hey readers! I'll be heading to the last week of my internship and my supervisor has given quite the awesome gift... To make my own game! Now that I am close to finishing the last game we were supposed to program during my time here, he said that I could come up with my own game idea and program it! Also, if I come up with a good name, the name might even be used! (probably not, but a boy can dream, right?).

Being me, of course I tried to come up with overly complicated and convoluted features, at which point my supervisor brought me back to reality. So now I have thought of a couple possibilities which is what I'll be working on next week. Even though computer programming seems really boring, and this SRP might not seem like the most exciting, I really am not looking forward to it coming to an end. I will cherish the time I spent here, and the lessons I learned, and the people I met.

Challenges: Trying to come up with a game idea that is feasible for the programmers and artists is proving to be more difficult than I thought. Everything I wanted to did not have a reward that would justify all the work.

Victories: I finished the feature I was stuck on last week! Only one more left!

Thanks for reading guys, see ya next week.

Week 8

Hello readers! We are nearing the end of this fantastic experience getting to intern at Design Works Gaming. This week we spent our time very similar to the previous week: designing and programming games.. what a surprise! However, this week I started a game that my supervisor told me would be the most difficult game I have done.

In this game, there are four features: each one doing its own specific and complicated action. One feature is pretty easy; it just replaces a set of symbols with a random one from a weighted table. There is one difficult feature that is challenging me. In this feature, a specific symbol triggers the rearrangement of the symbols in order from lowest to highest value, bonus symbols being the lowest and aces being the highest. However, the starting index of the lowest valued symbol in randomly chosen from two different starting locations.

Also, this week, I feel like I have mastered the macros in Microsoft Excel (the macros pretty much export certain text documents to be referenced in the code). In order to save time, what I would do is copy the macros from one game to another, then just change a couple of the numbers that refer to certain columns and rows.

Challenges: The new game that has the challenging four features. I'm having difficulty setting up the framework in order to carry out the features.

Victories: I finished another game this week. We are getting close to our deadline for completing these games and all is going pretty well!

Also, by the way, if you are on Facebook, you should like the page Diamond Sky Community! Help the company out.

Until next week, happy gaming!

Okay, So It Is Difficult

Hope you all had a great weekend! This week at my internship was pretty cool because in addition to programming, we also got to make some design decisions about games. My supervisor introduced us to two ideas for a game, and he gave us full disclosure to make different mathematical and design choices. Initially I thought that having this freedom would make the job easier, but I realized that having more to choose meant having less to work with. So, in reality, this turned out to be more difficult. It has given me a bigger appreciation for all the work that these folks have to do when they design a game. At first, my narrow access to the process made it seem as if anyone could do this job. But as I continue to work week by week, I see that there is a lot of advanced math and logic involved. My way of approaching any sort of problem has really changed through the work that I am doing here.

Also, if anyone is interested, my partner Armin and I finished the game tuning project we were on. It took some time, but hard work, determination, and creativity proved to be the necessary ingredients for success. The more and more we do, the better and innovative our approaches become. I feel like this internship will really prove helpful to me in the future.

Challenges: Having to make design decisions has shown me that making a game as a programmer is not at all as easy as I initially guessed it to be. But, I will continue to work at it.

Victories: We finished the tuning project we were working on. Also, we started a couple more games.

Thank you for reading! Please ask any questions you may have.

Game Tuning

Hello guys! This week at Design Works Gaming, I was introduced to the process of tuning. This is when we adjust certain probabilities to influence another facet of the game. If you thought what I did sounded boring before (which it really isn't, it's really quite fun), this tuning would not be the kind of work that you would want to do. For this specific game we are working on, there is a variable that keeps track of what jackpots one can win. The variable increments by a amount that depends on the spin of the reels and the number of times it has spun. If this variable reaches a certain number, a specific jackpot is awarded. In order to get the distribution of awards correct along with the total payout, we have to adjust a table of numbers. One change might fix the distribution issue, but mess up the total payout. Perhaps this adjustment corrects the payout, but now it is impossible to get the highest jackpot.

As one could guess, there is a lot more statistics in this part of my job. Determining if distributions can be considered normal or if there is something anomalous occurring becomes even more important. As we continue to finish and fine tune games, I see the attention to detail that is required in a this field, and I look forward to any challenges that I can learn from in the world of programming.

Challenges: I am stuck on free game section of this game. It's funny that now as I'm getting a handle on the programming part, the tuning and math part gets hard.

Victories: I learned how to increment a jackpot outside the context of a free game, which was originally a concept I did not understand.

Until next time then! Thank you for reading.

Week 5

Hey everyone! I completed the week and everything is going well. This week was more of the same: programming games and playing facebook games. This week however, the data we were collecting for the games was of a different variety. This week, my supervisor wanted us to accumulate data on the number of free credits we could get just by initially signing in on any given day. This includes any freebies the game may provide, like daily bonuses, free lotteries, bonus wheels, etc. Now that we have the data, the higher ups will analyze it and plan the next step to take.

Challenges: The new game I am programming has line pays, scatter pays, and some sort of weird stack pays. Usually, games will have a line pay. For example, if the game has a 3x3 grid, three in a row could be a win. There are also additional patterns; these are called line wins. A scatter win would look at how many times a certain symbol appears in a row. Based on the number of times it appears, the pay changes. Then, a stack pay is a pay that awards the player for a reel containing consecutive occurrences of a symbol. I'm having a hard time formatting all my text documents and programming in order to account for all three methods of pay.

Victories: Our floor in the building is getting a lot of new renovations! Our floor finally has a restroom, which is, needless to say, very convenient. I did not really have much of a hand in this, but still it's very nice to be part of this transformation.

Thank you all for reading! Some weeks it might be a little boring (especially with this post title), haha sorry! Hopefully you learn a little something about slot machines. Until next time!

Out of the Kitty Pool

Hey guys, another week has gone by, and I am really starting to fit in at the office. I love the work that I am doing and the people I'm surrounded by. This week was mostly the same as last week--lots of programming--with a couple twists here and there. Overall, I'm starting to become more responsible for my actions and decisions as a worker. There's still a lot of hand holding, but I am starting to branch out on my own get things done individually.

I am almost done with my second game (Yeah I know, the first game took me 3 weeks and this one only like 1 week. I'm getting better!). This second game's feature or specialty was a little more difficult to put into code, but nevertheless I am almost there. Moreover, this week I learned how to program a Gaff List, which is like a separate program that helps game testers test specific parts of the game. For instance, in the Gaff List, one could predetermine which type of game is triggered for a certain spin (type of game meaning base, free, or bonus). This helps them determine if the game is working precisely how they intended it to be working in every single small detail.

I should be quickly finishing my second game on Monday and starting my third!

We finished collecting of our initial data for the other Facebook casinos, recording data relating to hit frequency, ads, number of levels, etc. This is a pretty big step for all of us, so I am hoping that the information we collected proves fruitful.

Challenges: Remembering all the minor details when it came to programming arrays and arraylists was a little frustrating, but in the end I eventually got the hang of it. I realize how helpful AP Computer Science was for the kind of work that I am doing here.

Victories: The second game is going a lot faster and I feel like pretty soon I'll be getting the hang of this! Also, I did not need as much help this time through with settings and, more importantly, Excel.

So, all in all. I am starting to work more and more on my own, becoming increasingly responsible for my own work. I am making my way out of the kitty pool and into the deep end as I learn how to get more work done correctly without the assistance of others. I look forward to updating you next week!