I've decided to start documenting my work on my website. This is the first time I have ever "blogged" and I don't want to get too chatty, or anything, and thee's bound to be some silly grammatical errors and all that, but I will do my best to get better at this as the days, weeks and months go by.

I think over time this could be a cool resource for other up and coming indie developers to hopefully learn something, either how to do or not do something, but since I have used the vast resources of the interwebs to learn just about everything I know, I will contribute back in this small way.  

I am going to start things off by documenting my work on a shader network that creates a metronome material with parameters as part of a 4-track mixer demo I am creating. I'm not sure exactly what it's going to be, but a vision is starting to take shape, so it's going to be my new project. It's going to be a game demo of somekind related to music.  Like Candy Crush Saga, except you mix beats and ok, not much like Candy Crush, Saga, hehe. I will think of something ;)

Inspiration for this comes partly from a project I developed with my twin brother Marc called XNTH, except I want to bring in aspects of DJing, and make it into a game. I am going to start out by building a simple metronome.

A solid beat is critical for this thing to work, so it makes sense to get this very important nail hammered firmly into the 2x4 of accuracy. :)

My first attempt at getting a handle on time in UDK's Material editor..

Yeah. Not to impressive. I want a global BPM and a  BPM multiplier (1x, 2x, 4x, etc)

This served as a place holder to get me going on the metronome dial. After consulting with the Great Oracle of Knowledge (The Google), and some helpful advice from my super smart twin brother Marc, the way to go is to use a frac expression if I want things to be locked in sync.

This first step will let the user input a Master tempo which will drive the graphics throughout this material shader and everything else.

OK, this is officially my first blog post ever! More coming soon...