Welcome to the new, temporary, home of tylerkoskes.com! I’ve switched domain registrars from GoDaddy.com to Namecheap.com, which means I need to figure out a new hosting situation (was using godaddy’s provided shared hosting). In the meantime, this blog on Github Pages will be my home on the web. This blog will receive some updates as I figure out where my site will be heading, so stay tuned!

Over the past month or so, I’ve been putting time into Dragon Age 2 (25 hours total) and now that I’ve finished it, I’ve decided to write a review of the game and my experience with it. I picked up Dragon Age 2 about a year ago in a 2 for 1 deal bundled with Mass Effect 2, which was the main reason for the purchase as I heard a lot about the changes that were made to Dragon Age 2 for the worse, when compared to Dragon Age: Origins. I decided it was time to play it since Dragon Age: Inquisition is on the horizon, so let’s dig into the story, gameplay, and graphics a bit.

You read that right, I may be writing a book. A major publisher of books for the tech crowd has approached me to ask if I would be interested in authoring a short book on programming using specific technologies (more info as I find out what exactly I am allowed to say). Needless to say, I am excited for the opportunity and a bit terrified, as I haven’t really done a large writing project in a long time…Especially not one that will be published through a major publisher.

All that being said, I am very excited about the prospect and I intend on chronicling my experiences during the process here, as I am able. This should be a fun and exciting challenge. Stay tuned!

Between classes, work, and figuring out everything for Imagine Cup 2011, I’ve been busy as hell. Next week is my last week for both my Game Scripting and Data Structures and Algorithms class, which both take up a considerable amount of my available free time. At work I’ve been wrapping up a market share study and implementing a few long awaited features for one of our main apps. So, after those two, that has left me a few hours to deliberate over which theme to pick for Imagine Cup, figure out team members, and figure out the direction and concept of the game. Between Zander and myself, with a nice random idea from Jarrod, I think we’ve nailed down exactly what we want to do for the competition. Zander has decided he definitely wants in on this, so it is up to me at this point to decide if I’ll be able to spare the time to make this work, which I have pretty much decided that I will. In the meantime, I’ve decided to setup the project environment, complete with subversion repos, integration and build server, wiki, issue tracker, and a bunch of other things. Read on →

So after putting off starting this blog for quite a while now, I’ve decided it is time to do this. I guess the main reason I never really did anything with it before was lack of motivation. I kept asking myself what I would write about or why should I take time out of my increasingly busy schedule to write a bit of drivel, here and there. Well, I’ve been pushing myself into game programming a bit more lately after taking an XNA class and loving it, and decided it’s time I start chronicling my progress and interesting things I run across.