Just a quick update that the Extra-Life 24 hour game challenge was a huge success. The charity in total raised over $1 Million dollars, and I heard that even afterwards they still were gaining more. The goal has now been set to $2 Million and it sounds like a reasonable goal. I was glad to be a part of it and managed, even after the fact, to end up raising $172. That means I hit 172% of my goal for the event. I would like to thank all my sponsors and everyone out there that gave money to a fantastic cause. I can’t wait to do it again next year. Hopefully the IGDA Twin Cities chapter will band together and get a team going so we can get some real fund raising efforts going.

I have recently signed up for a great event for gamers, or people that just want to help out a great cause. The event is to play video games for 24 hours for charity. You can learn more about the event itself at ExtraLife.org. The simplified version is you sign up at the site as a team or an individual, tell all your friends to donate money, then you play games for 24 hours. I love the idea because I love video games. I also love that the entire thing is pretty laxed as to how it all works.

You don’t really have to do a straight 24 hours and you can even put in time before or after the October 15th date. It is all kind of on an honor system, the most important part is that you are earning money for sick children. What more do you really need?

As I mentioned earlier I am participating in this so if you would like to help me out by donating some money, or want to join a team go ahead and either shoot me an email or go to my profile page to donate.

If you want to sign-up and participate as well you can visit ExtraLife.org or I have also put up an ad bar on the right side of the page. It is pretty large…I’m sure you have probably glanced at it as you were reading through this.

Thanks in advance and I hope I inspired a few others to join up.

At work all day I tinker on websites and fix common cross-browser issues. Any web designer will gladly tell you that these are the most annoying problems to run into especially when trying to support older browsers like IE6. This just don’t work as well but we aren’t quite past that point in current web design where we drive people to new browsers so they can see the latest and greatest. Businesses in particular suffer this curse because of massive amounts of testing that needs to be done and red tape that needs to be cut through to get changes in motion. Since I can’t break out the latest and greatest new supported CSS tags because of these legacy browsers I am forced to ignore them for now. I decided today to bring these to my own personal site for a fun change of styling pace.

First out I dropped the Javascript corner rounding script for the border-radius property (and of course the web-kit friendly version too). Not only have I just saved a script from running, I have a much more flexible way of changing the corners. Of course you say, “What about previous IE versions, even 8 didn’t support that!?”. To that I say, “So”.

– RANT BEGIN –

I’m going to break into a small rant here. One thing that irks me is how design is not helping to drive browser advancement. I am also an avid gamer and one example of this in the game design field is Crysis. Crysis is a series of games that has been pushing the graphical envelope on the PC. This is one of those games that you build a computer around, and if your old one is too slow, you buy a new one. This is how many ground-breaking PC game releases were. They were driving graphics card companies to make faster and more powerful graphics cards. They are games that are making 8 gigs of RAM a minimum in a computer these days. Yet the one industry that is not following this is the browser business.

It has taken this long and countless years just to finally get a round corner in a browser without annoying amounts of programming. The products being created are not driving the browsers to be better, the browsers are holding back what progress we are making. Now, of course, I say browsers, but I am of course referring to one in particular. Though one of the most widely used browsers around IE has taken the longest time getting its act together and now that IE9 is our, I’m going to take full advantage of it for personal projects.

If you come here with older browsers, you won’t get the full experience, I am going to admit that right now. If that irks you, tough. It is a very simple and easy process to upgrade your browser to the latest version. People don’t mind having to update a flash player because they wan’t to see dynamic content, but to view pretty stuff in a browser people just aren’t willing to go that far.

– RANT OVER –

Also you will notice some text-shadowing going on to help some of the text “pop” (which is a word that means absolutely nothing in the design business). Those changes plus a few tweaks to my post layout are all and I already like the look a little better. I also threw a shadow on the boxes that incorporate the blur effect.

Round corners…drop shadows…all I need are some gradients and I’ve hit the design motherload.

In the end this will probably be all scrapped for a whole new template, but since my life is pretty busy this will make it more manageable for the time.

Plus I got to have quite a bit of fun learning the ins and outs of CSS3 stuff.

This set of print materials was created for my wife and my home dog sitting business. This small (very small) startup was a way to bolster our unemployment income when we first moved down to Burnsville. We love animals and getting to play with dogs during the day, while giving owners peace of mind that their pets are happy and cared for, was a no brainer.

We had a few clients before both me and my wife found jobs and lost a good amount of time. While it was going however I designed business cards, response cards, and a brochure. I also got to create some cartoon characters for use on the materials. I always love when I get to create some cartoons.

I still love how this all turned out and hope to get to create some more business kits.

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The second of two “Kinks” comics I did for the Crystal, MN FedEx Kinkos district newsletter. For the long story behind these check out #1.

Short story for this one is that it was the first one to make the newsletter because it had a more friendly attitude towards the customers and the company. I’m pretty proud of how this one turned out and the only downside is that this was also the last one.

After this our manager found a new job, our store shut down, and the newsletter was killed. Luckily they will live on through the interwebs.

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This comic was created a while ago when I worked for FedEx Kinkos. I was working in the Crystal, MN location (since shut down) and our boss was briefly in charge of a district newsletter. Working at the store I got the opportunity to put pen to paper and write a few comics. I had two completed and this first one didn’t even make the newsletter.

I guess my disgruntle with company showed a little too much in this one. It sort of summed up my feelings after wasting 2 years (at the time) with the company. I stayed for another year before being terminated quite unsanctimoniously.

In the end being fired was one of the best things to happen to me and my wife. We uprooted and migrated south to Burnsville and found great jobs and a great apartment.

That was a lot of history for such a small comic, but it seems like most things I’ve worked on have a story much bigger than the project.

Created for my bro, this site is a fairly simple blog site. I did a WordPress theme over his site. The site has a simple blog stream page and an “About Me” page. Simplicity was the idea and I think it was achieved. The simple mocha colors are inviting and the little pixel character was just an added touch by me. This can always be replaced with an image or other design.

The RSS link sits playfully behind the main page with text that looks handwritten to offset the solid block layout of the site.

Of course the ever busy guy has yet to fill in the content so far. With his house renovations, fancy job, and kid on the way I don’t blame him. If you check out the about page you can get a general idea of how it works.

Check it out: http://www.jeremyseverson.com

Built for the International Game Developers Association Twin Cities Chapter. This WordPress theme created much more order than their previous theme while carrying the red and orange throughout the theme. It is also linked to the other social media outlets that they have.

The theme also has full custom templates for The Event Calendar which is linked to the Eventbrite account for the group.

After finishing this for the group I got taken on as the “web guy” for the group. It works great for me because I am going to school for Game Design and Development. I get to contribute to a group that I already enjoy going to because of the amazing presentations. If you live in the Twin Cities and are interested in game development, either serious or hobby, make sure to stop on in.

I plan on taking this to the next level as they want to incorporate a user base with profiles for users and local development studios.

Check it out: http://www.igdatc.org

The second entry for my game prototypes build for my Rapid Game Prototyping class at UAT online. This is a prototype for Spy Hunter which we were given some freedom with so I made it a space based game called Spy Hunter 20XX. The essential gameplay is similar with space ship cars replacing regular cars.

Controls are the arrows to move around and Space Bar to shoot.

Though very rudimentary the gameplay is decent and goes to show the “bumping” effect that the white enemies do, the shooting that the blue enemies do, and the score decreasing effect of the green “pedestrian” ships. I also used a scrolling background (which is actually just a single 8 x 8 sprite that has about 70 instances placed with random alphas, sizes, and speeds that simply re spawn in a new location at the top of the screen when they run off the bottom. In keeping with my Asteroids HUD layout (I like how they meld into the background) I placed a score counter in the lower left, and a life counter in the lower right.

Of course given that I had to end up cramming most of my time working on this into the weekend I wish I could have gotten more in there as well as more polish to the entire thing. Either way go ahead and give it a whirl. Its a good way to kill a few minutes.

Download the Spy Hunter Prototype Here

This prototype was created for the first week of my Rapid Game Prototyping class with UAT online. I like how it turned out so I decided to upload it online. This was the second prototype I had to build and I will be uploading all the rest as I build them. The first one I just decided to skip since it was a prototype of Pong. That is one thing the world doesn’t need is another Pong clone uploaded online.

For this game the controls use the arrow keys to rotate and move your ship. You will notice a difference from the old school control but I really liked how these came out so I hope you enjoy. Space bar shoots bullets, and you can of course hold it for a more rapid fire.

As you shoot the asteroids they split into smaller ones that travel a little faster. If you can clear the level you get a victory screen, if you get hit you get the defeat screen. Very basic but a great game to build a prototype for. We were offered creative freedom but I felt bad giving asteroids a very different look. The next one I did (Spy Hunter) I also ended up with a retro look but I am going to strive for a bit of originality in my coming assignments.

All of the prototypes for this class are created with Game Maker for rapid prototyping.

Download Asteroids Here