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
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.
Inflatable Elder Gods
Now that our family is recovering from the bronchitis attack, we finally got around to celebrating Kirk’s birthday. So we went out to IHOP for breakfast and Kirk was asked if he wanted a balloon animal.
And so the ballon twister made him a Balloonthulhu.
That woman needs a freaking raise.
EDIT: Balloonthulhu popped… let us all take a moment of silence for the poor abomination…
EDIT 2: After reading kirk’s twitter, it has become apparent that the Balloonthulhu we popped before was actually his evil twin cousin, twice-removed. But now the real one has been popped… RIP, real Balloonthulhu…
Could ya spare a brother a cough drop?
It’s time for me to apologize… I waited too long to tell everyone why I haven’t uploaded anything new in a while.
Various members of family, myself included, caught some sort of throat virus a sometime between Christmas and when I uploaded the sidebar video (hence the music). Sore throat, congestion, occasional nausea… I didn’t want to ruin the next episode of LPAUS or LPEftU with a screwed-up voice and constant sniffling, coughing and sneezing. I never mentioned it because I kept telling myself that “I’ll be better tommorow, I can do the video then”. Now, it’s the final day of winter break (at least for us) and I’m still sniffling, coughing and sneezing.
So during all this time I’ve been either sleeping or working on Chaos Quest, seeing as that’s the only project I’m working on at the moment that doesn’t require voice acting. I’m getting closer to the next preview: I’m aiming for fixing most, if not all of the battle glitches and implementing the inventory, equipment, and shops, which shouldn’t be too much of a problem considering the fact that I FINALLY got giving NPC’s items to work correctly! (I know I said it was working the last preview video. It stopped working after I made that >_<) Random encounters enemy encounters (you can see them on the overworld ala Mario & Luigi, Dragon Quest IX… and, yes, Dubloon) have been implemented, although at the moment there’s only two monsters you can fight this way, along with the mimic in the last video and the “baddie box” in the first one.
So, yeah, I’ll start uploading again when I’m feeling better, whenever that may be. Happy New Year, everyone! Hope it started out better for you guys than it did for me!
*achoo*,*sniff*,*cough*!
Oh, hey, look! He finally got with the times!
Since nobody seems to read/respond to updates on this blog or my bulletin on YouTube, I finally went and made me a Twitter account.
http://twitter.com/rockythechao
So, yeah. This is just gonna be for updates and stuff, nothing too personal (I know what happens when things get too personal, seering clear of that!) Now I just gotta add the widget to this blog…
The Gaming Gems Indie Games Marathon
Yeah, this is a bit of a last-minute update, but Kirk, our cousin Nick and I are having an indie game marathon tommorow at around 10 AM. We’ll be playing a bunch of indie classics and ending with some Minecraft Beta gameplay, so be sure to check it out! Kirk’s also contacted some popular LP’ers — Raocow, TraskNari, and NakaTeleeli to name a few — to see if they’d join in on the fun.
You’ll be able to watch the marathon at Ustream or www.thegaminggems.org. Don’t miss out!
Well, we did some of the games, the one person who was going to help play and comment wasn’t able to get his stream working, I talked too much during Touhou, and then Kirk put the rest of the games on hold for a week for some unknown reason before cancelling them due to nobody watching the stream…
*sigh*
Video games are more than just toys
Well, I’m a little late to the party, but I just found out about the recent Supreme Court case between the Entertainment Merchants Association (EMA) and the state of California, in which the issue of whether video games should be considered art, and thus protected under the Constitution. It’s about dang time the industry stood up for itself!
For so long, video games have taken all sorts of crap from politicians, moral guardians and the news media. They treat them as childrens’ toys, and when something controversial pops up in them that they don’t like, they bawl and complain about it until something’s done about it, even moreso it seems than other mediums. But video games, just like other mediums, can serve a variety of purposes besides just being entertaining: to educate, to tell gripping and involving stories, to raise awareness of social, moral, and political issues, to document important events or moments, and to look really dang pretty, among other things. So to categorize and treat them differently than movies, books, and other forms of art just doesn’t make sense.
Likewise, video games aren’t the only medium that contains controvertial content (Anyone remember Kick-Ass?), and it seems much of the controversy over certain games’ content is the result of ignorance: remember the whole “Hot Coffee” controversy over a minigame accessible in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas through a mod? Let me say that again: THROUGH A MOD. The minigame was normally inaccessible to players, even though it was still in the game’s code, because the company removed the ability to get to it through normal gameplay. People had to intentionally alter the source code of the game to unlock that minigame. This happened again with The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion when someone made a mod that showed female characters topless using a texture hidden away within the game’s code. Once again, the key words here are MOD and HIDDEN AWAY WITHIN THE GAME’S CODE. So, if these things were the result of intentional player actions that violated the EULA’s of the respective games, and the developers actually took steps to prevent players from accessing the stuff, why the **** are the DEVELOPERS being punished for it!?
Because they never bother to stand up for their creations. They’re in the right in these cases, and if they stick to their guns they should come out on top! But instead they just try to avoid conflict and let the ignorant masses trample all over them. This doesn’t fix the problem, it makes it worse; A hungry dog won’t leave if you keep feeding it. If the commercial gaming industry is to truly gain the respect it deserves, then the top companies like Rockstar and Bethesda need to listen to this guy, because he says it much better than me:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFsQM6o4uoY&p=FA6389395ACC2E42
Thank you, Daniel Floyd, for bringing sense into this world of insanity and inanity.
