I started my game development journey here and it has come such a far far way in 6 years. To anyone that this might help, I have created a game development DVD and I'm working on a second one to be put out immediately.

Thanks for taking a look. Sorry for not sticking around but I don't user allegro anymore.

http://www.ultimategamedevelopment.com/

My other work. Currently working on a very large scale game after these dvd's launch.
http://dpadam450.deviantart.com/
http://adampawlowski.uphero.com/

Not sure what you mean, since you mention ambitions I'm assuming: have I changed the type of games or scale of games I want to work. In that case, no. I always started game development to make the best tech, best big scale games that I always liked playing. I still have not released my own game yet, but I definitely have something more solid brewing. I have done plenty of demos in the past though.

Still updating the website a little bit. Offering this in WMV(working on DVD), the WMV will be higher quality 1024x768 vs DVD 720x480. But I want to make sure that the text still shows up good enough since you will have to be able to see the code.

Run-time is 8.5 hours. This one is aimed at first time coders, so I cover some things like pointers and vectors that take some of the time to explain but again the goal is only to teach minimal coding and not trying to optimize/organize on DVD1 as it would be a 20 hour DVD to try and teach every C++ in/out, bad design etc. So your looking at 4 hours a piece for each game, which if it were a book would take a while to read as well as having to decipher what the author is saying and physically doing because you cant see them do it.

The entire game industry in my opinion is pretty low. I started game dev to do whatever it takes. So I learned everything, art animation coding. And I see that most people dont have any ambition, most people have never created their own game in 3D from scratch, and thats why a lot of people fight my opinions, because they have never done it for themselves. They hang this 3 million lines of code needed for a game, and 50 people team above their heads.

In short: More coders = more time for me to code. At work I code/fix bugs at about 1 bug an hour, sometimes more and code slow because I have to look through so many c++ files to figure out execution paths. So if I own 100% of the code, I code about 100x faster (fix a 1 line bug at home I know the exact line # and why my code is broke, vs at work I have to find it and fiddle because I dont know why its broke).
My other opinion is that every game right now solves the same exact problems, thousands of games each year, then why are we solving the same problems.
How many games shoot bullets? Have terrain? etc etc and my game engine was meant to abstract all of this and essentially back up each of those things in the editor, so that you wouldn't need to code gameplay EVER. Unfortunately I don't get to work on that full time, but I can prototype just about any game you can thing of it my engine within a day and without writing any code.

A lot of people argue this idea but they just dont get it from my perspective: You shipped Modern Warfare 2, Modern Warfare 3 is coming out. You should be able to make all new art and drop it in the engine and ship Modern Warfare 3. So if it took you 30 programmers to from scratch create MW2, then you shouldn't need 30 to carry on small work in MW3. Essentially from pure money standpoint, EA should be able to say: sorry we are just going to pay for artists to make this game using the existing engine, after all they do technically look about the same. "Well what if they want to have a helicopter spin into a building and it collapses." That to me, should already be an abstracted event class that would allow the artist to create that. Every game probably has been solved before.

And given that I can tell you that I am working on one of the biggest solo projects ever in game development. 1 to prove a point that it can be done (and has radioactive software = 1 guy, wolfire = 2 guys, frictional games = 3 guys) but I want the bar a bit higher still, and I'm doing all the art. And 2, without money, you can only get free workers which is basically young modders that are not very skilled, and not going to be as dedicated to my game, so it would hinder my work.

http://www.facebook.com/GettysburgArmoredWarfare

1 Man, Publishing Deal with a major publisher, has help from the lead designer of Battlefield. Time in development less than 1 year.

I know it sounds dumb, why wouldnt people do what I say, but they are starting to. I'm glad I met that guy at Radioactive cuz we do all of our own coding and he inspires me that I'm on the right path and my ideas are correct. And when hes done/ I'm done with my next game, then making the next one will be easier. You have to fail over and over and over, but I fail at big things, so that each time I learn that much more. And it is because of this that I want to teach people how to make big things so they don't have to fail or pick the brains of hundreds of people through books and tutorials, and just have the information given to them upfront.

I'll take the harassment, it has been typical, but I'll never give up the fight and I want people to be able to learn game development and make the most awesome game they can imagine in their head. Not everyone has a million dollars, so I'm teaching how to do it alone.

[quote]people could learn for free from gamedev help sites like GameDev.net.[/quote]
I spent over 7 years as a member there, it's nice if you know what to ask, but nobody there is going to give you an hour long video explanation reply on how to do everything needed to make x,y,z games. You might find some basic XNA game tutorials but nothing really covering a full scale 3D game. I did actually learn alomst everything I know from reading nvidia stuff and gamdev.net by asking questions but that takes time, I don't want to try and fail, I want someone to show me how to succeed and make something exactly as I play it.

[quote]and learn to do all that for free.[/quote]
You can research for 4-5 years for free stuff and a mess of tutorials all written by separate authors. Thats what I did and its not fun believe me. Most people actually end up spending 30 bucks on a c++ book, 40 bucks on a shaders book. Not that all books are bad, I'd rather pay 30 bucks anyday on a book or dvd, then try and learn from online tutorials that go "ok here how you do the basics, see ya"..you are left not knowing what to read next. Whose tutorial should I read after that?

I always only cared about next-gen stuff year after year as those are the only games I play. I just wish someone would have been like "here step by step what you should learn in what order to make that game you just played."

Sorry that you have no faith in humanity and steal everything you own. I don't torrent and I just bought another book actually the other day. Gnomon apparently has success making DVDs, book publishers still print books, EA still makes videogames.

Noted. I'm just saying man BF just sold how many million copies? Not everyone torrents and small things like this will not be on the #1 rip and torrent list.

Well me personally, I have a salary job. I buy and support anything I like, whether it is games movies whatever. But to not even have the ambition to do something because some people will steal it would just mean I should give up on everything. I can just as easily put out fake torrents to fight those if it comes to that. I talked to a guy that wrote Game Programming for Teens and his book sold 50K copies over 5+ years (not sure when it was published), that's pretty big.

I get all my games and movies legally (going November 1st to pre-order and pay for Skyrim). I just don't waste $50+ on books if I don't know if they will help. I have 80 PS3 games and 60 PSN games, about 20 or 30 PC games. Sold my xbox and all my other systems years ago. Plan to get a 360 eventually and plan to get the XNA license one of these days. When it comes to learning it is better to find free ways as you are already spending your time to learn it (Nothing is ever truly free, you Always give up the time you could use for something else) so if the user has a choice of spending $20 on videos or spelunking through tutorials and such online for free, they will usually chose the cheaper path.

Open source isn't about price. It's about the freedom to use, modify, and distribute software. Free software refers to the freedom, not the price.

(quote)If somebody wants to create a book or DVD about programming and try to make a buck, then more power to him. Of course if he wants to be successful, then it better be a professional product at a reasonable price.
(/quote)
no idea how to quote on here. I would like to make them as professional as possible which is why I'm taking critiques serious. It's not too much about the money, but there is a serious lake of condensed knowledge as far as game dev goes. Of course the more pro it is, the more people will at least reach, whether I make a couple bucks or not.

With GPL is kind of the opposite. If you in some way make a "derivative work" of some GPL code, it is now GPL compatible and can be slurped up into the original product at any time. It's really about keeping the code open, to now allow anyone to "subvert" it like you can do with projects licensed under much laxer licenses. Also though there is a little bit of the "anyone can fork it" at any time and you're allowed to distribute it as much as you like. But that only applies to the source itself. Feel free to distribute your binaries on a CD/download and charge for that, all you have to do is provide a link to the source with the license.

cool story bro