17. Almost there!

I never move, but I deliver.
I have no voice, but I speak often.
I’m full when you visit and empty when you leave.

Alternate riddle:
Take a letter, I’m unchanged.
Take the rest and I’m still the same.

What am I?

(This was a thing I did for my brother’s birthday. My parents had me work on a scavenger hunt with them, and they wanted one of the clue locations online so I decided to put it up on my website.)

The whole console wars thing is just plain stupid.

Right now I really should be doing homework, but it’s somewhat difficult to work with these two guys around the corner arguing over whether the PS3 or 360 is better. “The Trophy system is so much better than the Achievements system! You can level it up!” “We have more memory than y’all!” “Xbox is too fragile!” Etcetera, etcetera.

Really, the whole thing is ridiculous. But at least these two are good-natured about it; online, people seem ready to fight to the death to defend their preferred console. And I just don’t understand why. The PS3 is awesome, but so is the 360. The Wii has a different kind of awesome, but it’s still awesome. And PCs just plain rock. Do we really need to be at each others’ throats over which is more awesome?

Honestly, people, there’s no law against having more than one console. Who says we can’t enjoy Mario, Halo, Half Life AND LittleBigPlanet? Same thing with the portables, it’s not the end of the world if you have both a 3DSi Lite and a PSPVita Go. If you don’t have the money or don’t want to devote the time to other consoles, that’s okay. But that’s no reason to get into petty flame wars!

I know I’m not really contributing anything new to the discussion here, but I just felt like getting it off my chest. Now, back to homework…

Update time! Phantasmaburbia and other stuff

So hey, I figured it’s about time I resurrected this old relic for about a day or two again and wrote up one of those update thingamajiggers you people have been waiting all your lives and then some for.

For those of you who don’t already know (I’ve probably already mentioned this, likely in the last post, but I’m too lazy to check), I’m part of the development team for Phantasmaburbia, Banov’s new upcoming RPG – I’ve been doing the character and enemy portraits for the game. We recently launched a website for the game, www.phantasmaburbia.com, and as of writing this entry Banov is making the game’s new trailer public, which he will soon announce on the site itself. So go check it out already! (PROTIP: Check out the “Media” section of the site and click on the link to “Artwork” for some delicious pixelated goodness!)

In other news, my own personal projects have been moving very slowly (read: not at all) due to many reasons, including, but not limited to: my portrait work, college, generally inconvenient situations and that darned principle of inertia. Some AUS episodes have been recorded a while ago, then computer shenanigans happened. My laptop’s out of order for now but I have the clips, and yet I still want to redo some bits so who knows when the episodes will be up! It’s so frustrating, I keep finding new games I want to LP and yet I’m taking so freaking long to get this one done…

RCC and Rokkit have been all but cancelled. I was really hoping for more stuff to show, a new video perhaps or at least some screens, but the only stuff I’ve made for them are super spoilery. Assuming I’ll ever get them done for the spoileriness to actually mean anything.

So yeah, to reiterate, Phantasmaburbia takes top priority. Go check it out! Tell your friends, neighbors, coworkers, family, kids! Tell their kids if they have any! Tell their kids’ pets! Tell the creepy old guy wearing one too many bowties down the block! Tell the mailman! Tell the cashier at your favorite fast food restaraunt! Tell an inanimate object or two! Just spread the word!

An update!? From ME!? What sort of black magic is this!?

Sonuvamother, my last post on here was BEFORE SPRING BREAK!? So much for updating on a basis that can be considered even remotely regularly!

So here’s what I’ve been doing all this time:

- Working on various things for RCC

- Doing the character portraits for Phantasmaburbia

- Playing Minecraft, Terraria, and Portal 2 multiplayer

- Finishing up my Escape from the Underworld Let’s Play

- Graduating from High School and getting ready for college and summer vacation

- Spending time with family, especially younger cousins whom I won’t be seeing much of in the future because they’re moving to another country

- Discovering a bunch of new animes, watching one or two episodes of them and then forgetting about them

- Starting a few random game projects thinking I’ll make something quick and simple, then forgetting about them

- TV Tropes

- TV Tropes

- TV Tropes

And that’s about it. My current goals involve, in no particular order:

- Digging up some of the random game projects, getting them to a playable state and uploading them to YoYo Games

- Finishing LP AUS so I can move on to new LP’s, including Phantasmaburbia

- Continuing to work on RCC and get a new freaking video uploaded already

- LP’ing Phantasmaburbia

- Updating this website and putting some more stuff up here

- Actually USING my Twitter account

- Breaking my TV Tropes addiction

Runecast Chronicles Content Dump

Okay, it’s 12:09 AM, Thursday morning. I’m a little bit late with this, but here’s that content dump I promised! This is just a bunch of assorted resources for the RPG, now called “Runecast Chronicles”, to give you all a little something before I go on hiatus for 10 days. I think it’s pretty clear by now that this project has developed beyond the whole “tech demo” thing into a full-fledged game (technically, the original plan was to release the tech demo, finish Rokkit, and make a game out of the engine), so the first release of Runecast will be an actual demo of the final game and not just something to show off the engine. After spring break, I’ll make a website for the project, just like I did with Rokkit (which I haven’t abandoned, don’t worry!). Also, be sure to check my Youtube channel, as there are two new episodes of Let’s Play An Untitled Story; I’m close to beating the game, but I need your input on how to proceed!

Okay, first up is a quick logo I whipped up for the game. It’s not necessarily the final version, but I’m pretty satisfied with it for now.

Next is the face graphics. From Left to right: Reft, Kevin (yes, he’ll get shading later), and Jess. When I get back I’ll elaborate a bit on who these characters are.

Some new sprites: Professor Custard, The Incorporealist enemy and the Rouge Rogue, NPCs and Jess. (Dangit, just noticed I made the old lady way too small…)

The current party/stat screen. 

And I finally fixed a bug in the choice menu that cause the button text to disappear, so…

Last, but certainly not least, a remix of the boss theme using a Sega Genesis soundfont! Not sure if I’ll actually use it in the game, but I don’t want to waste it, so have a listen.

I’ll organize all of this stuff when I get back. Bye everyone, and have a great Spring Break!

Spring Break Hiatus

Turns out I will probably be on hiatus from the 10th through the 20th. I might have a few moments during that period to get online, but I won’t be able to do much other than watch Youtube videos and update this blog and my Twitter account. With that in mind, I’m going to do a bit of a content dump tommorow: I’ve got two new episodes of LP AUS almost ready to make public and a few things for CQ- well, actually, that’s not the name of the game anymore. Yep, I’ve come up with the final name for the game! But yeah, expect some stuff tommorow, then not much for another week and a half. Sorry for such short notice!

Dagnabbit, Google!

Argh, is it too much to ask to have a single freaking email account of my own choice!? They made it mandatory to connect your Google account in order to keep using Youtube, so now I’ll be recieving my Youtube updates on my old gmail account, which by now is filled with spam and doesn’t have any of my Yahoo contacts or anything… Google, we understand you want to streamline everything, but by doing this you’re really screwing over a lot of your consumers! Haven’t you ever considered that maybe, just maybe, making it more inconvenient for a good number of your users to use your product ISN’T the best business model!?

[/angry rant]

Edit: Okay, it’s not that bad after all; I was able to set up Gmail to forward messages to my Yahoo mail account! =D

Test

Testing wordpress to twitter…

More on CQ, Heatwave visit thingy, other stuff

Well, it’s almost time for that internship with the game company- Heatwave Interactive - I was talking about–although I don’t know if that’s the right word for it, I’m not getting paid for it, I’ll just be doing some minor volunteer work (of which I will NOT go into specifics, as I’m going to honor the non-disclosure agreement) and learning about the different aspects of commercial game development and the daily procedures in the company. Basically, job shadowing and stuff like that. It’s going to take place this following week, the 7th through 11th.

In-between preparing for that and doing homework, I’ve made some minor progress on the CQ project. I’ve finally got a “rough draft” of sorts for the normal battle music, which I’ll put up when I have the chance. (done!) I’m also working on some promotional art featuring a few party members, and I’ll put that up when it’s done. (The player character is done, still need to do the others) As for the game itself, I’m still doing pretty much what I said last post. As I’ve said before, the goal is to get the engine and a short tech demo finished, then finish Rokkit and make CQ into a full game after Rokkit’s done. EDIT: I’ve just hastily uploaded another gameplay video to Youtube featuring the battle music (although the audio quality got screwed up, so just listen to the music in the CQ section on this site). Go watch it in all it’s untested glory!

Haven’t gotten around to recording any new episodes of my LP’s, although I really need to catch up on that considering all the new subscribers that have been patiently waiting for a new episode (or whatever it is they subscribed for). I’ve got a lot of jokes and stuff prepared to make sure the next few videos will be worth the wait.

Can’t think of a good title for this post

EftU Ep. 2 was uploaded yesterday, and I wanna know if you guys prefer shorter videos (7-9 minutes) or longer (10-15 at most). So far 2 people said longer. Voice your opinions on the EftU Ep. 2 video page. Regardless, it seems like the LP will last at most 2 more episodes.

Progress on Chaos Quest is being made slowly but surely – mostly working out kinks in gameplay and planning out story events, dialogue scripts and sidequests (stuff that isn’t really even important until it becomes a full game!), but also some bugfixes, a few new and revised menus, a fancy dialogue system with overflow scrolling (or whatever it’s called) and Simlish, a new battle transition, and some new graphics and enemies. So basically, a good deal of the recent additions to the actual engine are for aesthetic purposes.

Since formatting the music page is pretty much fighting a losing battle, I’m splitting it up into several subpages. And while I’m at it, I uploaded 3 new music tracks: two for the CQ demo (boss and town music), one undecided but possibly gonna be used in the final version of CQ (Phoenix Spirit – Rise From the Ashes; it’s in the standalone section for now).

Also, as part of a school activity I may be spending a week in February doing an internship for a local game company, so we’ll see how that turns out. I’ll update this post later detailing which week and who I’ll be working for.