Jay's Arcade

Media Development

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  • MAKE A 2D VIDEO GAME!

    I’ve been using C# for over 20 years now, primarily for making games. I am using Visual Studio Community and Monogame (formerly XNA) these days, which allows deployment on most desktop systems today. Here are the instructions to get set up ready to start programming a 2D video game.

    INSTALLING VISUAL STUDIO COMMUNITY

    CLick this link https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/downloads/ to download Visual Studio Community for PC. Once the download is complete, double click it to start the installation process. You should end up at the following screen.

    Make sure you have “.NET desktop development” selected. Unless you need anything else, just click “Install”. Once that’s done, click the launch button and you should see something like this…

    If you click “Create a new project”, you should be able to select the type of project you want from the list. But the Monogame project options won’t be there right now. We need to fix that, so just click “Continue without code” for now.

    Once Visual Studio is loaded, click the “Extensions” menu and then “Manage Extensions”. This should open the Extension Manager window. You should see a search bar in the top left corner of the window. Use it to search for “Monogame”, and then select “MonoGame Framework C# project templates” and click “Install”, then close Visual Studio.

    Next time you open Visual Studio and get back to the start screen, choose “Create a new project” and this time the list of project types will appear but now it will also contain the Monogame templates. Browse the list until you find “MonoGame Cross-Platform Desktop Application”. Click that, and then click “Next”.

    You should now see this window here…

    Always make sure you click “Place solution and project in the same directory”. You will thank me one day, I promise. Give the project the same name as the game if you want to keep things simple (I called my example “KillThemAll” but you can of course choose whatever you want). When you are done, click “Create”.

    When ready, your screen should now look something like this…

    What you are looking at is the start point for any game project. If you like we can just hit the run button (the green arrow) at the top of the screen on the toolbar, and it will run the project. All you will see is a blue window and all you will be able to do is press escape to close the program.

    Alright, that’s where you are going to be starting any new game from. It sure would be nice if we had a nice easy tutorial to make a cool game with, though, right?

    Well, this kind of thing is very large in scope, so if I am to do any kind of tutorial I would want it on its own site so it has its own breathing space. Use this link to visit; https://jaypescifaab040331-qwpor.wordpress.com/

  • SITES TO MAKE MONEY FROM

    I have decided to try my hand at freelancing, using my skills and talent as an avid games programmer and content creator. Over the last 20+ years I have developed many skills that hopefully I can use to make money from. After a little research I found the following list of freelancing sites.

    • Workana
    • Zeerk
    • Microworkers
    • Fiverr
    • PeoplePerHour
    • Freelancer

    In order to properly fill out my profile on each site, however, I need to get some content uploaded. Which I don’t currently have. So I will be using this blog to upload images of my current projects in order to have a place to reference them from. I will also be starting another blog (hopefully; it might just end up being a part of this blog but who knows) for games programming, specifically in C# using Monogame. I will keep things simple for now as I get to grips with WordPress and learn all its features and capabilities.

    WORKANA

    WORKANA appears to be a good website, although it seems that some of the control on the website is out of my hands; after asking me various questions regarding my skills and abilities, the site automatically filled out my profile with the text “Freelancer expert in design and multimedia” which,
    frankly, is not strictly true. I’m not sure how to change it and I will look closer at this soon, as I do not want to be dishonest when portraying myself and my skillset. Other than that, the site does not appear to be very intuitive, and I have already taken a dislike to this particular site as a result but I will still try to use it if it yields good results. I’ve already found an issue that I am unhappy with; there are numerous tests that can be selected to authenticate your skillset but for some reason all of the tests are in another language (I think Spanish). I have selected UK as the default language but it did not change the language the tests were written in. I’ve sent them an email enquiring about this, but there is another problem; I have to wait, possibly up to 2 weeks, for my account to be “verified” before going any further.

    ZEERK

    ZEERK looks like a good freelancing website too, but I am alarmed at how focussed the site seems to be regarding money/payment. Maybe it’s just a design thing but it seems like the site creators are obsessed with money. After browsing the marketplace I am impressed with the adverts there; the market seems very vibrant. It will take time to learn the interface and build my own offers (“gigs”) and I will also need to have an impressive looking profile in order to be chosen for any gigs I apply for. Right now I don’t have anything to prove my skills with so I will have to put some content up on this blog in order to reference the work in my profile; It seems easy enough to set up a work request or work offer using the same account but they both need to be filled with examples of work.

    MICROWORKERS

    MICROWORKERS has made a good impression on me. It is beautiful in its simplicity, in that it provides all of the work in a simple easy to read list, complete with statistics on the right that you can use to order the search, such as how successful each job is (so a percentage of 100 means that everyone who did that task was paid). I have browsed the job list and it would seem that there is a HUGE variety of work there. A lot of it is unskilled or menial labour and low paid but the site still looks very promising regardless. I will be sure to focus a lot of my attention on this site in the near future. I have already received notifications on my phone for this site (interestingly, none of the other sites have sent me anything in the last week), but unfortunately by the time I got online the offers were gone; so it would seem that I will have to move very fast in future if I am to bid on available work. I guess we shall see.

    FIVERR

    FIVERR was the original site that gave me the idea to follow this approach to finding work. However, after the signup process I am a little disappointed. It seems that the site expects me to advertise my skills in the form of a “gig” which is slang term for how I offer my services; On the other sites I can just pick a job with little to no extra input of any kind from myself, but on Fiverr I am supposed to advertise myself with a fully fledged sales pitch for myself and my skills. This is fine but again I need content to fill each gig with and the other issue is that the site forces the scope of the gig to be extremely narrow; while I would like to simply advertise my artistic skills, the site categorises EVERYTHING which means I can’t just advertise my skills in a broad manner; I am forced to subcategorise and subcategorise until the “gig” ends up with a very narrow context. For example, I selected
    “Illustration” as my “category” and then was forced to limit myself to a subcategory (the subcategory was called “Illustration style” and I had to pick from “anime and manga”, “Chibi”, “Doodle”, “Technical”, “Calligraphy”, “Caricature”, “Pixel art” and so on). This essentially means that I will have to write a new
    “gig” for each and every kind of artwork I can make. To be honest I expect the same categorisation procedure to occur no matter what skill I choose to sell, and so it has become incumbent to plan in advance and choose my gigs wisely if I am to use this site. I wish I could simply state that I am an artist for hire but that is simply not the case and I will have to create a separate “gig” for each subcategory; this is fine but I also need to add examples of work for each category and so I will be using my WordPress site to showcase some of my work so that in future I can use the URLs of the pictures there on the Fiverr site to reference the images. Therefore it will likely be a little while before I can properly utilise this website but it certainly seems like one of the most promising sites here, despite the difficulties I have found so far.

    FREELANCER

    FREELANCER appears to be the one of the best freelancing website I have found. The signup was very straightforward and my bank details are now stored on the site so that I can be paid for any tasks there. However I still need to give examples of work in order to fill out my profile to make it look more
    attractive to other users of the site. I will be using WordPress to upload images of the kind of work I can do so that I can put the URL to those images onto my profile in order to showcase my work on the site. The best part about this site is that there is a drop-down list of all the latest jobs within the interests I’ve set which is extremely convenient. I will definitely be using this site as one of my primary sources of work in future; I just need to upload some examples of what I can do.

    I’ve been looking at a few other sites but these are the ones I will be concentrating on in the near future. For my next post I need to do SOMETHING that will allow me to post some work examples but I am not sure what to put up next. I actually have precious little content after I had 8 system failures in 2 years (Windows 10; I am on Windows 11 now and it seems to work fine) which essentially robbed me of pretty much everything I ever had. I will have to get to work on a few projects and make them presentable so that I can post the results on this blog. Watch this space, I guess :s