Welcome

So just who is Jennifer Hoffman?

I'm a 3D animator by trade and a gamer girl by lifestyle, but I think I'm best summed up as a good old Renaissance Man ...er, Woman. While I'm usually employed in the visual arts fields, I do quite a bit of programming for my own purposes. This site was built with a text editor (hooray SciTE!), and so were the various projects under the 'design' section. I also occassionally write, though not as much anymore.

I guess you could just say I'm eager for anything that will challenge my mind.

The Order of the Griffin

Friday, July 25th 2008 at 11:10 AM My game is now in open beta!

This game aims to give young children, or those just young at heart, an interest in genetics. It offers basic information about genetics as well, so that that interest can be turned into the basis of further learning.

While simple to play, the interactions between the different genes in each griffin's set of 12 are complicated enough to keep even an expert geneticist guessing... especially considering the random nature of meiosis.

I'm not bluffing with that either. I was fortunate enough to have a geneticist as one of my alpha testers.

Despite the sometimes unexpected results that come from these complex genetic interactions, the basic patterns of inheritance are easy to observe and work into simple Punnett squares for those learning basic genetic concepts.

The game is integrated into a vBulletin forum to make sharing your griffins with other players easy.

Site Upgrades and Moving

Monday, July 21st 2008 at 2:12 PM I've updated my site's structure yet again, and decided to throw a new face on it while I was at it. I did it partly because I'm preparing to move to a new host, but also partly because I wanted to have more video display flexibility and control in my gallery.

Moving to a new host means that I'm getting ready to open my griffins game up to the public. I still have three more features I'd like to add, but they're going to wait. As I hinted at before, I was really debating if I wanted to delay opening my game up for these new features. No matter how cool they might be, I decided I want the thing to go live now. I can always add in more features later.

Besides, I've been coding this thing for 4 months now: two for the initial building and two for the closed testing. I want to work on some art again! Thus, I'm going to move to a new host, open the game up to the public, and start hitting portfolio work again. The first hint of new portfolio material can be found in my three new tiger animations. They're just simple loops, but they felt good to make.

Hopefully my next posting will be to say that the game is live and everyone should go check it out.

Checking In

Monday, July 14th 2008 at 2:22 PM

My game testing is going well! It's always amazing to see how much a game will grow and change once you start getting user feed-back. I'm hoping to open the game up to the public soon. I do have one final feature I'd like to add, but am currently debating. It always gets interesting to decide which new ideas you can try implementing or not as a project gets closer to release.

For the next few days, however, that's going to be put on the back burner: I'm whipping up a couple of animation cycles to add to my portfolio. In the mean time, have a taste of the graphics!

I'd also like to say that Sony's keynote at E3 tomorrow had better be pretty good. Today was a spectacular day for Microsoft with the announcement that FFXIII will no longer be PS3 exclusive. Does Sony have a card up their sleeve too? At this point, finally giving Home a release date just won't cut it, I'm afraid.

Worky work, Busy Bee!

Thursday, May 1st 2008 at 11:43 AM

After just under two months of work, the small internet game that I've been quietly building has now gone into alpha testing. How excited and nervous I am, like a parent fearfully watching a child take her first steps and hoping she doesn't fall down!So far so good.

It's hard to believe it's only been 7 1/2 weeks. For as quickly as the time has flown, it's also become a long and rewarding road in my memory. Knowing that it was a one-person, two-month project should give most people a good idea of the limited scope of the game, but despite being small, I feel as though I've accomplished a great deal with it.

I'm not sure how long I'll keep the game in closed testing, but you can rest assured that when it opens to the public it'll be posted here.

Guild Wars Antique Map

Saturday, February 23rd 2008 at 12:49 PM

There are certain things that every gamer must know, like what your play style is. You can't really start discussing games with other people until you know yourself and how you tend to approach games. Well, I suppose you could, but it would devolve into arguments over the meaning of the word "fun." That, to me, is anything but fun.

In any case, I wasn't too surprised when I came up as a "toymaker." The Strategist-Creator. Need to know all the nuances of a game? Check. Need to constantly be making things for the game? Check. Can't have fun unless you somehow leave your mark on the game (community)? Unfortunately, check.

Staying true to my nature, I recently made another contribution to the Guild Wars fandom, this time in the form of an antique map. Images, links, and full details after the jump.