Week 21 : Christmas

It has been a nice quiet holiday. I have had the opportunity to send out more resumes, network with local people and visit with family.  Presuming I find work by the time I graduate there is a high chance that I will not be returning to Lexington for a while. So, I have taken this time to tie up any loose ends in my hometown. Additionally the house seems to be coming together, we have half of the house re piped, I may get to see the hot water working before I leave.

During my downtime I have been reading the Game of Thrones series ( just starting the 3rd book today), I'd like to think I am doing prep research in case I get an opportunity to work on Tell Tales' new GoT game.

Talk about a Dream come true.

See you in Twenty weeks.

Week 20 : Midway

Well the Holidays are upon us and I have reached the midway point to this experiment. I suppose it is time for a reflection:

School: I haven't gotten official grade just yet, but having looked at my scores for projects it looks like another 4.0 semester. It feels great to maintain A's for all my graduate courses. When I started school I did not have confidence in my abilities but now I can see that I can whatever anyone needs. Website with shopping card using credit cards? No problem. Need me to process data on a large scale, no worries. How about replace the AI system? Got it covered. It feels good to know the world is your oyster. Worst case scenario I can always do my own work on the side.

House: As you might recall I am renovating my house and there have been complications. My initial inspection had me worried, but now I feel better. It will look nice and it will sell. I just hope it get on the market before February arrives.

In general there has been a lot of growth this year. I am excited for the future wherever it may take me. Yes I am scared s#%tless that I don't have a solid plan for post May but I am putting out resumes, and even checked with my old boss at Spencerian College, I know I will find something. But I really do hope God sees fit to give me a chance at TellTale Games. I feel in my heart I was born to build games, to be a Californian. All I can do now is wait.

Update: Yes I got all A's for the semester, only 3 more to acquire.

See you in Twenty One weeks

Week 19 : 'Game of Thrones' & 'Borderland'

Hello all,

Well we rapidly approach the middle of this experiment to get me a job. This week is finals week and then I get a few weeks off before I start my final semester. With any luck I will have a job by the end of the next one. I saw a few interesting press releases from Tell Tale yesterday, they are going to do some games for 'Game of Thrones' and 'Borderland'.

This is exciting, as a consumer I can't wait to see what TT does with Game of Thrones. I am a big fan of the show, and have just caught up on season three thanks to HBO Go. As a potential employee I hope this means they need to hire many new people and that I can be part of the new team that joins up. All in all I see this as a good thing.

Here's hoping!


See you in Twenty Two weeks

Week 18 : Presentations

This week I start a week of presentations, as I right this I am less than an hour from starting my 'Security for Video Game' presentation for my Cyber Security class. Later in the week I have a presentation on 'Phi and Facial Detectors' for Computer Vision. The final presentation will be next Monday where I present my project 'Pyhop and Unity3d' planner.

If that isn't enough I woke up this morning to this note in my Linked In account

Dear Anthony Rosenbaum,

The purpose of this letter is to invite you to be a speaker at our upcoming International Conference on
Computer Graphics and Media Design (Computer Graphics-2014) on July 8-10, 2014. This conference will be held at Chicago, USA
hosted by OMICS Group Conferences.
For titles and topics please visit: http://www.omicsgroup.com/computer-graphics-media-design-conference-2014/cfa.php

I love seeing stuff like this, it means I am touching the right type of people and those people see that I am a determined hard working programmer who is passionate about games and interactive entertainment. Not to mention being a speaker always looks good on a resume.

See you in Twenty Three weeks

Week 17 : Thanksgiving

Well it wouldn't be right to let a week go by without a post.  However we will keep this post simple. Work doesn't amount to squat without friends of family. So for the holiday I had an old friend come down for Atlanta and we ate:

Beef tournedos with a homemade Horseradish sauce.
Roasted Butternut squash & Chipolet  soup
Bacon Wrapped asparagus.
Hummus with Pita
and a Custard pie with Guava sauce.


All in all it was a great time. Hope you had a great Thanksgiving as well.


See you in Twenty Four weeks

Week 16 : Skills resume

Well the weeks keep trucking along, we just passed the six month mark for this experiment. There have been some promising developments but we'll keep them under wraps until something more substantial shows up. In the meantime I wanted to share this video with you

Skills Resume

I never could understand how a resume could be effective at only one page long, it turns out what I though was a resume was really a Curriculum Vitae (CV). To be fair my father always refereed to them as CVs and he probably was the person who taught me how to compile one.

On the other hand, a Skills resume, is designed to target all the buzz words in a job description. Let's say the Job Description is :

• Lead teams of designers, writers and directors to drive the overall creative vision for our games.
• Foster collaborative and successful working partnerships with our clients and departments across the studio.

 So instead of hoping that the HR person would notice the Lead Designer from the list of projects I have on my CV. I would target those bullet points directly.

• Facilitated game design features and requirement for both creative and development team.
• Organized quality assurance for assets shared between collaborating contractors on Disney's Epcot Attractions.

As you see these points are more direct. Point is I am going to start tuning my resume writing process and I suggest you watch the video and do the same.


See you in Twenty Five weeks

Week 15 : OpenCV and PHI

This week I want to show you something neat. There is a number called Phi, the golden ratio that was discovered by the Greeks the Ratio is as follows

(A+B)/A = A/B
Phi turns out to be 1.61803399...

This Ratio was used to build the Pyramids, the Parthenon and is found is good design even today.

So I wanted to see if there was a way I can use this ratio with facial detection. In openCV you can use Haar cascade to find parts of the face

like so

Promising right?!?!

Well unfortunately you are seeing a lot of redundancy and false positives in that images, some of the boxes around the eye might actually be determined when looking for a mouth. Luckily the general face detector is pretty good, and if you use the biggest box you get have a decent start.

By using the face rectangle's height as a starting point I could extrapolate the width of the face with Phi

Coincidentally the line separating A and B tends to lie where the eyes are on the face. So I extrapolated some more.

Here is the breakdown

   Phi A/B = (A+B)/A = 1.618033988749894848204586834

   Outer White lines - Detected Facial Height with Haar Cascades (A+B)

   Teal Lines - Phi derived Facial Width  (Height / phi)  (A)

   Green Lines - Predicted location of eyes  by breaking Height into A + B

   Blue lines - Predicted eye and mouth width (B = A')

   Red + Inner White line - Predicted mouth height  (A'' + B''  = A' = B)   

   Red line - Predicted nose height (A'')

   Purple line - Predicted nose width (B'')

   Teal circles  - Best possible eye locations using Phi in conjunction with Haar Cascades. 

Interesting huh?!?! Most interesting Phi can be used to help find the best rectangle for certain facial features.

If you'd like to see more images check out my Facebook site

Facebook site

Or 

Check out a Presentation I made posted at 

Google Drive Or LinkedIn

See you in Twenty Six Weeks

Week 14 : Applications

Well, with the advent of the leak at the house I have decided to focus my attention on something I can move forward on, applications. That is to say as of last week I submitted my first two applications to TellTale Games, for Interactive Story Designer (the golden job) and Build Engineer. Let's be honest if I can't land a job within these forty weeks this whole adventure is all for naught. I let my boss review the material I was sending, he is a hiring manager, he seemed supportive and used the term 'convincing' so let's hope TellTale's hiring manager feels the same.

As of today I can tell you that I 'may' have passed the first filter for the 'Golden Job', how do I know?
Well I was rejected for the Build Engineer position. Which is fine I am better suited to making game play elements anyway. So instead of looking at it as a loss I am keeping a positive attitude and am acting as thought I made it through round one, I suppose the next round starts with them contacting me.

Meanwhile I also applied to Rockstar's Tools, Game Play and AI programmer positions. Each of these roles I would easily succeed in. As well as applied to Irrational Games, they just have a single programming field to apply to. Heck always keep your options open and aim high, all they can do is say no, but just imagine if they all said yes?!?!

I must admit this is exciting and nerve racking, with each application I imagine how the interview will go. The hard part is the waiting. Granted I am applying just over six months before I am available, but hey after the horrors stories I have hear from the crash of '08 I feel I am right on target.


See you in Twenty Seven Weeks

Week 13 : Tenacity

I am always amazed how unpredictable life can be, no matter how hard you plan things out problems crop up. In an effort to make my transition to California as smooth as possible I had started fixing up my house in Kentucky for sale. As of two weeks ago the porch was redone, and it was on the market. However last week my tenets told me about loosing hot water and a rushing sound. Well several plumbers later it seems there is a leak in the slab. Long story short we have to re route the plumbing. Sadly this cuts into my profits but in for a penny in for a pound I suppose. At least now I have a reason to redo the kitchen and in turn I can charge more money. Always look on the bright side!

Let it be a leak in a house or a bug in the code, I have found you must be tenacious. Come up with a plan and execute, if the plan looks like it will fail, time to re plan. There is no one solution, free will and acts of god will always present challenges. But hey if there wasn't these bad times how would you learn to appreciate the good times. Life is a series of peaks and valleys, when you are in a valley keep your head on that next peak and you will get there.



See you in Twenty Eight Weeks

Week 12 : Comics

This week I'd like to talk comics. The fact that Tell Tale Games sees the importance of comics for source material is a HUGE reason I want to work with them. I have read comics all of my life, aside from a small break from high school through my bachelors. Comics taught me to read, manage money and gave me my first feeling of independence. You see Mom couldn't leave the car in the parking lot next to the comic store or it would be towed, so I was given the money and freedom to buy whatever I wanted, quite a lot of responsibility for a seven year old.

In the beginning I was a die hard Marvel fan particularly the X-men, Captain America and Hawkeye. In actuality I loved the costumes, one enemy I really liked was Madcap, he had a clown like suit and could reattach his own limbs and make people crazy if they looked into his eyes. I favored the art so much it started me drawing. I had collected the Marvel Universe volumes, which had all the living and dead characters over the years.I would research any characters that had a sweet outfit and draw them.

My nephew re introduced me to comics with the 'Walking Dead' and Marvel's Ultimate series after college. So you see I was an avid 'Walking Dead' fan well before the show or the game. The writer Robert Kirkman is a fellow Kentuckian, as well as the original artist Tony Moore. I loved their work and wanted to support fellow local artists. At that time I took it upon myself to fill in the gaps in comic lore by reading 'The Watchmen', and 'The Sandman' series. But it was the newer comics that got me hooked again. I realized it wasn't the publisher that I liked it was the writers. So I expanded my Kirkman collection to include 'Invincible'. Next was Bill Willingham and 'Fables', I really like the concept and have read all of them as well as the off shoot comics like 'Jack the Fable'. Then I found Brian K Vaughn who wrote 'Y the Last man', 'Ex Machina' and most currently 'Saga' by far he is my favorite. I cannot stress enough how great Saga is, it is new so go read it.

This summer I chose to fill in the gaps of Marvel's cosmic story lines including; Adam Warlock, Captain Marvel, Thanos, The Eternals, Annihilation War, Guardians of the Galaxy, the Kree and Skrulls as well as catching up with the X-men story lines. As you can see from the image below I read quite a lot this summer. I was hooked again, but I knew I was headed to California and didn't want to lug around another huge box of books, I left most of my collection in Kentucky before I came here. So I switched to kindle, If you took that photo and multiplied it by three you would be close to what I have read since the summer began.

I would like to conclude by saying I have some thoughts on 'The Wolf Among Us' but will reserve them for our interview.

See you In Twenty Nine Weeks

AR

Week 11 : Video Game Security

This week I am referring you to a research paper I just finished about Taxonomy, Authentication and Encryption for online video games

Video Game Security

Enjoy

See you in thirty weeks.

AR

Week 10 : MetaSploit

This was a very fun week, we finally got to do some true penetration tests. Until this week most of the Cyber forensics class was very theoretical with some minor application like port scanning. However we were introduced to metasploit, which is a Security analyst's dream. Metasploit is a program that shows you all the possible exploits on a particular OS. It is open sourced and constantly updated so you have wealth of information to use.

Let me explain the process,  let say you are asked to penetrate a website. Well you use dig to get the IP address of the site, you then use nmap to extract available Ports and potential operating systems. Then you use metasploit to infiltrate the computer. In class we opened up a reverse console on a Windows XP machine. We were then able to navigate, download and upload files . . .  it was very cool. This particular exploit tricked the target computer into starting the TCP connection. You see most firewall protect against incoming connections but not outgoing. So we told the target computer the attacker's IP and it opened a console to us, clever.

As I get deeper into the class I will keep you posted on what I am learning. I am also writing a paper on how to secure video games from hacker's attacks though authentication and encryption, so keep an eye out for that.

See you in thirty one weeks.

Week 9 : Web Formats

The calm before the storm, literally. As I write this Tropical Storm Karen approaches the Gulf coast, coincidentally this week has provided an unexpected lull. The beginning of the week looked as thought it would be full of work. I was put to grading Distributed System projects. It was an interesting project where students had to create a file of data in XML, an XSD for validation and XSLT file to generate a HTML file. I must say I find using W3C standards enjoyable and long for the day when computers are fast enough that everyone is using them. I remember when I was first introduced to XML, validation was strictly DTD (no one was willing to use XSD)  and the only way to use XML seemed to be through SOAP. Granted I was a noob and the only language I had under my belt was HTML and a little JavaScript but it was interesting none the less.

That reminds me of a little story I told this week. A few students were discussing Python with me and were having trouble getting their heads around the syntax. So I told them of how I learned HTML. Officially I learned HTML my last semester for my Bachelors, but I really didn't appreciate that I had learned most of the language in that course. So I bought a book, as I tend to do a lot. It was a pretty think book, a thousand pages or more. So I read it and was still not convinced that I knew HTML. So I bought another and another, about halfway through the third book I realized, hey this is all familiar. It was then that I realized I understood the depth of HTML. Of course you can't really know a language until you teach it. Luckily the first class I taught was HTML. The student body ranged from kids out of high school to an elderly lady. I taught that course for several years, I could catch a missing 'carrot' (< >) from two rows behind a student. I was living breathing HTML interpreter.

Oh well hopefully the rain will hold off long enough for my Tennis clinic.

See you in Thirty Two weeks.

Week 8 : Projects

It has been another busy week in Grad school.

This week I started my Computer Vision Project, an application to determine how beautiful one is based of the Greek Ratio phi. To start am using Haar cascades to locate facial features. Once I have the right facial values I intend to run an algorithm to look for the Golden Ratio.  Phi is thought to be a ratio of beauty, it was used when constructing the Parthenon and many Greek sculptures of the Classical and Hellenistic periods. So if this is true I should be able to find evidence of phi in faces of movie stars.

To go along with that project I have started a paper in my Cyber forensics course focused on security for video games. So far all the academic papers I have read deal with building a taxonomy, while the developer articles deal with implementing authentication and encryption .

This is on top of the normal work load, which has been interesting. We have learned how to acquire IP addresses for websites and will start port scanning next week in forensics class. In computer vision we are doing feature recognition and corner detection. Who would have thought so much interesting information can be learned by running an matrix over an image. I am really enjoying image processing feel free to check out my work as it develops HERE 

Well I still need to work on my Unity Planner and grade some Java projects, so I better get to it, otherwise I'll have no weekend.

Have a great day and see you in
Thirty-Three weeks

Anthony

 

Week 7 : Planning

It was another busy week, which is why this post is coming late in the week. I wanted to talk about my graduate project, but before we delve deep into it I will use this post to describe what a Planner is.

My project is integrating a Planner into Unity. A Planner is an system that takes a set of axioms, operators and tasks to accomplish a goal. The result is a plan which consist of several actions that need to take place in order to accomplish the goal.

Traditionally game AI design focus on the state machine to control the AI agent's behavior. However state machines are fragile because they depend heavily on the game design. If the design changes, the state machine has to change which may result in some unpredictable behavior. It makes maintenance and code reuse very cumbersome for the AI programmer.

Planners on the other hand are different. The planner and the game engine will have a mapping from the planner's primitive tasks to actions in the game engine; such as 'go to object' or 'pick up object'. These actions can be reused in many products which permits code reuse. Similarly once a planner and game engine can communicate, the planner can use the game state for the axioms it needs to develop a plan which the game engine receives and executes. The only thing that needs to be re-coded is the operators for the plan.

Operators are the rules for forming the plan. Once the AI programmer has a working system they can focus on the Agent's behavior by changing the operators. If a new feature is requested the programmer simply considers what game state information is needed, if any, and works to incorporate the features into the planner's operators.

The greatest part about planners is the opportunity for unpredictable plans. Unlike the state machine where the agent must go through a series of steps to accomplish a goal, an agent's plan might deviate. This unpredictable behavior is more in keeping with human behavior, which makes the experience more enjoyable for the users.

Now you have the basics of planner technology, there are plenty of books on planners, I encourage you to read more on it if this is new to you. We will revisit this topic in later posts.

See you in Thirty Four Weeks.

AR

Week 6 : Convolution

Just a short a sweet post this week, school is in full swing.

I wanted to say that I did a Canny edge detector, which means I had to do Gaussian blur, and develop a convolution algorithm. I am very proud of myself, I can finally take those crazy formulas and translate them to code. It seems last years intense math studies have paid off.


Until next week

See you in thirty five weeks

Week 5 : Education

 I would like to talk education, I was originally trained as an artist and for the next twelve years I taught myself programming. I was lucky to be apprenticed by Paul Dana, President/Owner/Programming Guru of Plastic Games. Paul has been programming for 30 years, he was passionate about computer graphics before they were common vernacular. Paul taught me a lot about software engineering and debugging, particularly debugging. We work well together, how else could we release outstanding attractions for the Disney Theme parks.

As I became more engrossed in programming it became clear to me that I was missing some engineering concepts, particularly Calculus and Physics. One of my personal goals when returning to school for my masters was to fill in the gaps in my education. Over the years I had collected the Game Programming Gems and AI Game Programming Wisdom Series. Although I attempted to read them I but could never understand them.Once I returned to school I revisited my library and began reading them along with my studies. I was shocked to find that all the software principals Paul had taught me were being preached in these books. Sure there were concepts I was not quite aware of but I 'put a pin' in them and kept reading. As  Calc 3 concluded it became clear that those topics that I had 'pinned' were part of the fundamentals of Calculus. While many students were learning something for a test I was learning something that could be applied directly to my work, it was inspiring.

Graduate school has provided me a wealth of topics to use in future work. In this post lets look at data and databases,  most undergraduates should know about databases upon graduation, but many are unaware of how the database engine works, or how it recovers when it breaks. Sure undergrads know about SQL and ACID databases, but what of BASE databases? Cloud computing is just a fancy term for providing ways to store and operate on data remotely. Do you store it in a datastore (BASE), a cloud SQL service (ACID) what are the cost associated with each? Games are recording a wealth of data for each product. What does that data really mean? Perhaps using semantic technology can help. Certainly you need to extract nuggets of knowledge through clustering, apiori or correlation. While most undergraduates are learning one of these topics as a graduate student we are expected to know them all.

We will pick up this discussion in later posts.

Finally, I was able to get another TellTaler to LinkIn with me, thank you!

See you in Thirty Six Weeks!

Week 4 : LinkedIn Response

I was lucky enough to have a new contact on LinkedIn connect me to the Talent Agent at TellTale. She encouraged me to apply directly through the website, as is the plan come Christmas. More importantly classes started up with Computer Vision, Cyber Forensics and the 2nd half of my Graduate Planner Project. Oh and I am making progress on some contract work (writing technical design docs). I don't know how you software engineers do it! All in all it is a good week.

See you in Thirty Seven Weeks
Anthony

Week 3 : LinkedIn Round 2

This week is short and sweet, I did another round on linkedin


I am a huge fan of TellTale Games, 0ver the remaining 39 weeks of my education I intend to show you that I am the perfect candidate to work at TellTale Games.


Please follow my exploits at telltaleinfortyweeks(dot)blogspot(dot)com


- Anthony Rosenbaum


I am up to 5 TellTalers



School resumes next week!



Thirty eight weeks left!

Desoto toy done

Well I wrapped up Sam & Max's Desoto, I did the paint job to match the game's interior as best I could.

 Who would have thought a 50 year old toy kit could look so sharp.

Week 2 : Background

This week I'd like to talk about my background in game development. Originally I was an artist, graduating with a Bachelors in Art History.Tribes 2 introduced me to modding, not long after, the same engine, Torque, was released as tool. Torque provided me a start into the gaming industry by being Indie. At the time I was teaching Graphics Design and learning as much as I could from the Torque community. It didn't take long to realize that the engine needed modification to make the game I envisioned. So the next step was learning programming. I audited some classes at the local University and learned a lot from the community. 

My first project was Dark Horizon's Lore for Max Gaming, it was an IGF finalist in 2005. Simply being nominated was an honor, I felt like this is what I was meant to do. A year later I had joined Plastic Games, it was that year which solidified my passion for games. In the fall of 2006 Plastic Game was approached by Disney's Imagineers to build some interactive attractions. Since then we have had several contract helping make the magic for Disney.

It is ten years later, I consider myself a programmer, though in an indie company we wear many hats. I still do art when needed but my passion is in coding. Over the past few years I have filled in the engineering gaps and will be topping it off my education with a Master in Computer Science. Having studied game development my whole life I believe it is fair to say I love making games. I hope that I can contribute to TellTale's next creation.

Oh yes, an update on the Desoto, well it seems the Kinect will not provide adequate resolution to scan in the Desoto model, looks like some 3d modeling will be in order. In the meantime I have decided to build the toy model with a custom Sam & Max paint job.

The first pass of painting is pretty good.

Hope to see you in thirty nine weeks.

Desoto

So I was writing down ideas for things to do over the next forty weeks and to be honest it wasn't very compelling. So I started drifting and thinking how can I make this something special for me as well. Then my eyes drifted to my RC cars. . . . .  "make TellTale sponsor stickers for cars, no. . .  two cars. . .  Sam and Max. . . .stickers for that . . .no . . . .what did they drive it was an old car.  I wonder if they have a body for Sam & Max Desoto?

Guess what, they don't!

Then I see my kinect and think about my new scanning tools (Brekel), maybe I can find a toy, scan it then use the scan to print a body. Heck I can add Sam and Max to the model. Now this is sounding interesting.

Where to start?!?! Need  the car.

Turns out the Sam and Max car was modeled after a 1960 Chrysler Desoto. The grill is very distinct, oh and by the way in 1960 it lost the convertible options. Looks like I will be tweaking the scan more than I thought.

Do a google for that car, I'll wait. . .  I can guess that aside from some very expensive instances on ebay you will have little luck finding that model and year. Plenty of 1961 Desoto toys but they look different FYI 1961 was the last production year of the Desoto.

Luckily there are a few people who collect antique toys one of which Gasoline Ally Antiques there site is pretty old school (like 1996) but they had the toy and a phone call later I have a model on its way. I think it is still in pieces. There is no way I am going to break a 1960's toy, BUT who needs to I can scan it in and print up copies right!

So this is the Core project, build a Sam & Max Desoto. It will tie all my neat new hobbies together and give me something cool in the long run.

Now I am excited!

Week 1 : 

Attempt Linked-In Connection

I am a huge fan of TellTale Games and love the how you have re envisioned comics as games. Game Developer said you may be working on a Fable game soon. Over the remaining 40 weeks of school I intend to show you that I am the perfect candidate to work at TellTale.

- Anthony Rosenbaum

I have come to a conclusion, in forty weeks, when school is up and I have my Masters in Computer Science I will move to California. That is where the industry is, particularly Marin County home to Robin Williams, Sky Walker Ranch and TellTale Games.

I have spent thirteen years in the Indie market learning how to make games, it is time I joined the professionals. Of all the games I play, it has been TellTale Games' products that have exceeded expectations. They are remaking the industry, they have brought back the classic adventure game and coupled it with great story telling. TellTale has succeeded in melding literature with interactivity, something I predicted eleven  years ago.

Above all these are the guys who brought back Sam & Max. The Sam & Max episodic model proved that triple A games could be sold in small parts, it was a game changer. Now with the success of Walking Dead I foresee great things for TellTale. Over the next forty weeks I will reach out to TellTale and record my efforts here for posterity.

Hopefully in Forty One weeks I will walking into the best job of my life.

Anthony Rosenbaum