My annual post on how little I’ve been posting

Now with more self-resentment over it!

Or not, its been a… well I’d say weird year but it usually is for everyone else too so I can’t use that as an excuse. Truth is I suppose I’ve been in a depressive funk for the better part of a year, as a result of which I end up sitting around rather than doing the stuff I’d prefer to, which naturally enhances the funk, so yeah… that.

In other news I had been pushing myself to get back into VG design, and I think I need to hit a Stencyl project hard and stick with it. I’m trying to get a simple run and jump thing going just to make sure I understand collision mechanics, maybe end up learning Actionscript through this, but then I keep telling myself things like that so time will tell.

I have been getting into DM-ing Dungeons and Dragons of all things though, and I think I’m taking to it pretty well. In fairness I think it’s been obsessing over that for the last month we’ve been doing this, got plotlines and encounters set up for a month or more I think. I imagine we’ve been consuming as much time as we have been because I’ve been doing battles with hordes of minions which take more time to plan around/with. It’s helping me work with world-building, which I think it’s the part of game creation I take to most, so that’s fulfilling.

Even with that, however, I need to keep myself on about learning Photoshop (and by extension most of CS3), Stencyl, and get into writing more.

Myspace

Logging onto MySpace now affords the opportunity to see the way things were only a few years ago, a moment frozen in time from way back when people used to use it. It’s oddly melancholic at that, because even though you recognize everyone, faces, relationships, etc., (it has, after all, only been three years, hasn’t it?) there’s a sort of… I suppose melancholy at the realization that “That used to be me… huh…” and how, even with how little has changed, you still miss such oddly meaningless things from waaayyy back in the long-long-ago of 2007. People who have moved, friends who are gone, and you look back and say in your head to the you from not three years ago “You have no idea what’s going to happen in the next three years, do you…”

I’m sorry, I’m being depressed at the moment. This is the first time I’m posting on this blog in too damn long and I don’t have good news. At this moment I’m unemployed again, waiting to receive a UI payment, likely to start again very soon, but not in a way that I have all that much long-term security or stability. No idea how I’m going to keep bills paid until something comes through, and no idea how we’re doing Christmas. I haven’t made anything like the progress I promised myself I’d make on putting out a proper self-made game within the year, don’t have the free time or focus to do it within the year, should probably just hammer through it I guess. Most of all, haven’t updated the blog in forever except to be all damned emo about everything.

Bleh, its 3AM Thursday morning and I’m feeling depressed for no goddam reason. Go about your day.

Hey, I’m making a post

And it’s only been… well yeah, dang, months since the last one. Wish I had that much to talk about… no real progress on the major game I’m trying to work on, want to get a prototype of it done by the end of the year, given how much I’ve let myself delay this thing… Oh, I’m employed now, so that’s cool. Beyond that, not much. So… there ya go.

Latest Hourgame: Poops and old people

The theme this past Saturday was "I'm Too Old for this Shit." I'd like to say it was completely intentional that I had spent more than 40 minutes on graphics, leaving way less time for coding, and ultimately being late again, but I can't. I'm not more ashamed than usual about how I draw, but I sort of preoccupied myself during the process with something called Life in a Day, which is some sort of documentary of everyone's life on that particular Saturday. That, coupled with the ever-present concept of recording the process of making an hourgame that's mentioned in every thread (though was only ever done twice) gave me the idea to film myself doing it. Naturally, me being me, I took way more than an hour, ran out of tape, couldn't record the music I was trying to, had no end of weird and stupid bugs interrupt what I was doing, and to top it off, CamStudio didn't manage to actually record what I was doing on the screen. Left me with 90 minutes of me staring at the screen which I wasn't going to bother with, plus a marginal complex about putting the video up there and trying to make things look nicer than they needed to be.

Well anyways, the game can be Downloaded Here, and Here's The Forum Thread about it this week.

Football and Squirrels

Alright, heres the latest two Hourgames I've done. Here's one based on the World Cup, which was still ongoing at the time, called A Tale of Feets and Balls. I used this to get some grounding in dialogue trees, as well as basic scripting for characters. This one I'm happy to say I won the trophy for as well, for, evidently, animation more than anything (which I found odd since thats sort of the thing I spent the least time on). Download Here

So the next week I picked the theme of Squirrels, and used the opportunity to play with Dialogue options more. I'm fairly happy with how (and damn but it wasn't easy to) I learned to play with the Dialogue trees, manipulating variables within the dialogue, inventory, etc. The game is One Fine Day Amid a Verdant Field. Download Here

The Winner of the above trophy was SteveMcCrea, who's game, as well as Wyz's, can be found in this Forum Thread.

Towels and Mike Tyson

So here's the next hourgame in sequence that I did: One Fine Day at the Shop. Here I was more sort of experimenting with what I could do with character objects, particularly invisible ones. I'm proud to say that I did win this hourgame as well, and as such won the lovely Towel Trophy, which was designed by Scarab.

Download the Game Here

Following that victory, the next hourgame was held on what turned out to be the five-year anniversary of Mike Tyson's retirement from professional boxing, and the theme became "What has he been doing in the mean time?" I used the opportunity to play around with the graphics editors a bit, use music and such, as well as learning how to put together splash-screens.

Download the Game Here

As for the contest itself, Here you can find the thread, and the compilation file of all the entrants, including that of the winner, Wyz, you can Download Here

Warcraft Adventures

So about 15 years ago I get a copy of PCGamer magazine plugging a WarCraft themed Adventure game. This was, it goes without saying, big stuff. Then, over about four years of development hell, wherein, if the comment section of reddit is to be trusted, the Russian animation studio was constantly late and behind on their production, causing absurd delays, Blizzard eventually said screw it and cancelled the project. My understanding is that it eventually was nearly finished, waiting on animation still, when they axed it. It was a 1995 adventure trying to make waves in a 1999 FPS market, their decision was sensible.

It turns out now, though, that alphas of the game were completed and apparently somebody got a hold of one. Some ten years after the project was cancelled someone got a hold of it and posted a few videos. Words alone cannot express how much I want more of this. More specifically, a copy of the alpha itself to dinker around with. If someone managed to successfully locate and distribute the abandoned Duckman adventure game, I have to believe this is doable.

Next two hourgames wot I done did

The next Hourgame's theme was "Underwater, to wit I made this thing, just carrying on the theme from previous games of the shoe and the smiley, and some joke in IRC at the time about dogs and half-blood princes, and about here I just started getting stupid exhausted with the whole thing. Download Here, though I don't really recommend it.

The next time I didn't even participate, I think I was busy or something, or probably just lazy.

Anyhows the next competition I put more effort into things, and am actually a little proud of what I got done. The theme is "2 cups 1..." anything basically. Perhaps unsurprisingly most of the entries were "2 cups 1 cup," as was mine, I freely confess, though it did involve the shoe as well. I think it was my most involved puzzle string to date, requiring talking to the girl twice for two different responses, using items on the scenery, combining inventory, etc. I'm really quite pleased with how it came out, and only somewhat frustrated that I lost to Scarab's superior game, which was also his first ever, and was on time, which mine, as per usual, wasn't. Fun fact, he created the trophy for that weeks winner as well, before he was declared to have won. His can be found here, and as for mine, you can Download Here.

Headline that pertains to Political Disaffectation

A lot of people would begin a post such as this pretending they get numerous questions about why they've stopped following politics on their blog, but I have chosen instead to begin this post with an absurdly meta-reference to it because I think that makes me smart and oh what a fool I am.

So anyway, yeah I'm basically not going to follow politics much on this blog anymore. Not because I'm done with politics personally but because there are already people doing that well enough as it is elsewhere on the web, and I'm not going to pretend you, my audience, whoever you are and presuming you even exist, much give a tinker's cuss what my opinion is on things at the moment. Also I've come to the realization that the only reason I ever went to single-person political blogs was to howl in the comments section, and I need to find better ways to spend my days.

However, since people tend to gravitate to where they can howl the loudest here in the blogosphere, I realize that this will significantly limit the size of my audience. Nevertheless, as easy as I recognize it would be to build bogus drama by throwing out another Lieberman Sucks post, I can't be bothered. That is all.

My Next Three Hourgames, and one I sorta inspired.

The following Hourgame Theme was "The Future," And to wit I wrote Future Ho. At this point I started trying to use the Hourgame events as an excuse to learn something specific about the AGS Engine, and in this game it was the elusive, and yet so plot-essential, cut scene. Also about this point I was trying to incorporate some weird time-space spanning super-meta-plot for all my eventual and terrible future hourgames, something about the Sour Smiley and the Shoe being in some level of eternal conflict, something, I dunno... At any rate, Download Here.

Next was the followup game, in which I tried to further complicate the plot in spite of the theme, which was "Paint," which spanned paint itself to MS-Paint or, in my case, Paint.Net and its various graphical filters. As a result most of the graphics in this game are blurry beyond necessity because I was planning on using them to be... I'm actually not sure. I think the plot was supposed to be that there was this painter who was somehow the cause behind the whole Shoe v Smiley mess because of a painting of his, and you had to destroy the painting, but it turns out you didnt and dun-dun-duuuunnnn... Yeah it didn't work out, so I was mainly screwing with the graphics filters. Oh, also I recorded a really lame song for the game, me on guitar as well as making a silly kazoo sound with my mouth. I recommend playing the game with Mute on. Download Here.

Final game in this post is Adventures in Time and Safes, where the theme was "Safes." With this one I was just trying to be more clever than not with the puzzle, where the combination is written on the vertical blinds. Not alot else about this one in particular, with the notable exception that it was the first time I actually won one of these Hourgames, and I'm not to ashamed about the puzzle, though I feel the graphics are a fairly low point for me. Nevertheless, a winner. Download Here.

As I won this one, I got to run the next hourgame, and made a damn pathetic mess of it, since I didn't even show up on time (confound you, daylight savings, my old nemesis) the theme became where the hell I went. SteveMcrea was the only one to complete one, so I'm linking to his game here, as well as the trophy he won for it. Download Steve's Game Here.