Brandaravon Interwebnetlog

Semi-Annual Update

2006-07-05T19:25:20Z

So it's been over half a year, I think. Here's a quick run-down.

I did a lot of jorb search stuff in the spring to summer of 2005. At one point, I went around to the IT departments at local municipalities and talked to people. I saw flier about volunteer stuff at one office and I decided to try and do something productive with my computer skills while I searched.

A few months later, I was helpful enough that I was hired on through a temp agency.

In the winter of 2005, I decided to start thinking about graduate school.

In the spring of 2006, I decided to stop thinking and casually applying and implement a more serious plan.

In the summer of 2006, I moved up with my sister in her apartment around college-land and I began using the resources available to me to rekindle my programming skills.

Right now, I'm awaiting responses from people to finalize one more big application for the fall and trying not to be impatient and crazy.

If that doesn't come together, it's back to programming up more fun-filled projects for the spring.

So, what's been going on fun-stuff wise? Not too much new. I've been rendering a lot of short videos and doing other stuff with the computer that has kept me from the old 'City of' addiction, which is a shame, since that new issue is out. Also, the network in the apartment is wireless and prone to random fits of failure and slowness. I watched the ping jump from 74 to 200 to 1000 at random. Waugh.

I made some efforts to contribute story-ideas for an RPG being developed by someone over at the forums for Bonus Stage. It looks like I may get to throw in some battle graphics as well if free time allows. I also may have inadvertently created a new character variant for myself that seems to blend Solid Ekans, Spacehunter Protojive, and NINJAS.

I thought that after that alternate version of the Excel game, I swore off editing from the 2K3 defaults. Oh, the craziness. In space.

The funny thing was, the whole Ninja sub-plot originated from a coincidental similarity between character designs. Still, it's as good an excuse as any to do all sorts of silly ninja-related things.

Besides, when else am I going to have the chance to use sprite rips from Metal Slug and a Naruto GBA game at the same time.

Also, the game I made to re-awaken my C++ ability is technically a fun thing. I don't have any screenshots, but I made a simple 2-D space shooting game with 3-D graphics. I may go back to that later and add actual enemies and power-ups and such.

So yeah. Who knows when this will be posted to again.

"Buy all our playsets and toys!"

2005-11-08T21:48:28Z

I was doing some more 3D experiments at jorb. Also, I think we have some ideas as to how this might be useful.

Anyway, I was doing this stuff in the cheap as free modeler/animator/game thing known as Blender. I first tried my hand at this a few months back when I was trying to develop a model of a robot that a friend of mine was helping high-school aged peoples design for one of those robot-type competitions.

Later on, I decided to try to make a simple robot based not on reality, but on silly cartoons . . . and that was the extent of my attention span.

Now I'm back and trying to create some simple cute stuff that's easily animated. I need to learn how to do the skeletal rigging stuff, but the instructional info I've found has thus far not synced up with the version of the program I have here. Thus, my little creatures have not moved around much.

Anyway, here's a Mario-influenced penguin and another fish.

I recently found that there's now an actual factual legal version of RPG Maker XP out there. The first idea to pop into my head was to make a game about a giant robot space war with a cast of rendered penguins. My head is crazy.

For Good or for Awesome

2005-11-04T16:37:53Z

I've been rather lazy, as usual. I still haven't uploaded the pictures of HSD from the end of the City of Villains Beta. He really did get kicked in the head by Ms Liberty, though.

So yeah, cities of stuff. I had wanted to play City of Heroes ever since I saw Sharkey mess around with the costume designer. However, my computer was very old at the time . . . and perhaps more importantly, I did not want to start up an MMORPG while I didn't have a job. I was afraid that, in such a situation, I would sit around in my mom's basement on the computer all day. Now that I have a job, I sit around in my mom's basement on the computer all weekend.

Actually, we don't have a basement, but I'm still a dork.

At first I was afraid that I'd just sit around making silly characters and never actually playing any of them for very long. In the end, I think it was the character maker that really re-invigorated my interest in MMORPG-ery, since it let me imagine up roles that I was actually interested in playing. I had sort of forgotten that RPG stood for role-playing game as opposed to rare weapon/silly hat-collection simulator.

Imagining new stuff, however, would take a backseat to reliving past internet-adventures when I accidentally discovered that one of the martial arts robes looked a lot like the uniform of the old ATfP-era BrandonTCA. I soon felt the need engage in this silly exercise in nostalgia, complete with special attacks from the time period.

It took me a while to catch on to the fact that people just blindly invite people onto teams from across the world. I must have seemed rather anti-social at first, since I wouldn't join up with people who I could not see and had never talked to. Thus, I played it mostly solo for the first something-teen levels or so. Eventually, I was invited by someone within line-of-sight, and I began teaming up for justice.

I suppose this was all for the better, since it gave me the chance to learn the game without any of my early tactical blunders endangering people who've been playing for a year.

Now HSD is starting from the bottom in the world of EVIL. After one sinister team-up included a person who began and ended a sentence with "LOL" as if it were some deformed quotation mark, I began to realize that BrandonTCA may have unintentionally imposed some quality control standards by waiting until higher levels to team up.

The good news is, in CoV, I call tell these people to stuff it and honestly call it roleplaying. Now if only there was a way to drop Coke machines on people in PvP.

In other news . . . I was trying to come up with ways to use my weird collection of interests to benefit my work . . . at . . . work. Suddenly, a fish appeared. I MADE IT MYSELF. Hopefully, I'll be able to improve on this and use it for good and for awesome.

I'm also looking for the best way to combine the odd collection of stuff I can do to devise a game-making project that I will actually finish. I did a write-up on my history of making silly games that I may post later for viewing by the extremely bored.

Annual Spectacularamathon

2005-10-27T15:14:25Z

It's been slightly over a year since I used this . . . in fact, the last time I updated this, the Astros were in the playoffs. Wargh. Actually, wait a minute, being unhappy over the results of a baseball game is probably the closest thing to angst I'll ever allow myself to put in a journal. I'd better capitalize on this:

AUGH! I am one step closer to the , and I'm about to !

Okay, now that that's out of my system, what is this thing for again? Oh right, I was talking about making games. I think that game I had shots of last time . . . yeah, I restarted the project from the ground up like, twice, but I never got anywhere with it.

On the other hand, I did actually get a job. Other people play bejeweled and whatnot in-between office projects. I played that Stinkoman mock-NES game and I type nonsense like this.

Oh, and HSD fought the Freedom Phalanx. Ms Liberty kicked him in the head. Twice. More on that later today.

TSUBABABAB-biff

2004-10-21T17:09:16Z

I was looking for NES midis on vgmusic dot the com the other day and somewhere between River City Ransom and Rygar came Roger Clemens' MVP Baseball. Living in Houston and all, it really impressed me that his name and reputation have endured over time, from being an endorsement of software in the NES era to commercials running during his performance in the current playoff series. The same cannot be said of the names attached to other NES games such as, say . . . Mike Tyson's Punch-Out.

But anyway . . . about the actual game makery . . .

I've learned that even when trying to go for an intentionally limited color palette, I still have a lot to learn about making my own tile/chip set things. However, with the exception of those shrubberies, which were taken from the chipset I used from the Zelda Spoof in the Excel Saga game, I think all of this was actually done by me.

This is part of the main town-place in the game. The building with the antenna tower on it will probably be a TV station where you can play mini-games. At some point there will probably be a quiz show mini-game. While you'll really just be selecting one of four answers in the usual RM2K style, my plan is to do my best to create the impression that you're playing against other assorted NPCs from the game. If I can pull it off, said NPCs should give silly answers and commentary in the tradition of SNL's Celebrity Jeopardy.

Speaking of characters who are not the player, I've also been trying to create my own townspeople rather than just pulling them out of a resource bucket. I actually occurred to me that the game may be kept small and simple enough that each person could be unique. After playing Paper Mario a lot, I may add a switch in Harolly's menu where talking to people will instead cause Harolly gives some background and commentary on them.

Here's the interior of the Hoverbike store. There probably won't be any working ones available to our hero at the start of the game, but eventually you can ride one, as shown here.

While on the hoverbike, you don't actually travel any faster right now, but you can shoot missiles and travel over water. Current problems: The missiles can't travel over water. Oh well.

The basic set-up for vehicles is this: You can't open the menu. The action button gets on and off the vehicle and the menu button uses the vehicle's weapon.

The hoverbike uses missiles and I've coded in the airship as a Jetpack from which you can drop grenades. The Jetpack will probably only be usable in a few areas, but who knows . . .

So anyway. Hooray for space lasers in space.

Bees steal cars

2004-09-29T19:50:38Z

Here's some more outerspace adventure game stuff.

Harolly's hint menu works now. In addition to having a number of hints for different points in the story, Harolly can also actively call up the player to give info on stuff in special situations.

This same type of code is also used to allow the player to take incoming codec calls.

If you look in the background, you can see a Metroid-door and some spiny monsters.

Dialog! Here we see an important conversation between an XD Trooper guy and a variant on Melody's add-on fic archetype. She's only character of mine to appear in two add-on story continuities without appearing in All That for Pizza.

Here she invents wacky things, such as Harolly, and she was probably a Lucca-esque old friend of the hero. Durring the game you'll be able to bring her key items as with Roll in the Megaman Legends series to have her construct some of the weapons.

Oh, but right, the weird-looking dialog box. I'm not any good at drawing face graphics, so I came up with these little sprites for expressing emotion and use in cut-scenes. Time will tell as to whether they end up being cute or just awkward.

Their size was based on this one Disgaea sprite on a cell-phone game-related site. The idea of hovering the names over people up above the dialog box was also the result of that game's influence.

Oh yeah, you can see the Kikaider-inspired Burning Justice logo on the shot-up wrecked ship there as well as the menus. I may remove the logo on the boxes around the people on the dialog menu if it makes it hard to read . . .

Now here's the biggest gameplay change I made this week. I was having some frustrations with enemy hit-detection. Originally, all enemies could damage you by touching the player with the standard RM2K code for an event touching the hero. This seemed Zelda-esque and an efficient use of resources. However, if you were in range to 'talk' to an enemy and you pressed the button to both attack and 'talk' it would activate the enemy event and injure the player. I won't get into the rest of the details right now, but I had some annoying issues.

So, I decided to give the monsters active melee attacks like the player, where they actually make an effort to target a tile with an attack. This is even more interesting for enemies with a ranged attack. I coded it in so that they actually calculate the distance to the hero and then decide on either melee or projectile.

That's what we see here, where we have two Troopers with the same AI. One has decided to shoot a missile, and the other is using a combat knife of some sort.

Also, when I had people test one of my early adventure engines, there was some frustration with getting enemies to drop hearts. So, I think I've re-done the enemy item-drop algorithm so that if you have less than full life, there's a 50/50 chance of a heart. Also, the ammo-dropping isn't perfect, but it won't drop ammo for anything you don't have yet.

IT'S A SECRET TO EVERYBODY

2004-09-20T17:46:53Z

Ah, here be some screenshots. It's all done in a fairly simple limited-color style in order to speed-up the process of getting this done and to invoke NES nostalgia.

Here's all the weapons/items I've managed to code in:

The top row is a beam-sword, some sort of electric tazer/stun-thing, and the legendary space guitar.

The next row has missiles, high-explosive super missiles, and . . . a grenade launcher . . . since my plan for a third type of missile didn't program well, and this idea did.

Next are the predictable Metroid references, a normal, ice, and wave beam. Finally, the tools are currently all bombs. A normal bomb, a power bomb, and a remote-detonation bomb.

Mag-like hovering sidekick, mascot, and horrible add-on fic/Gundam pun 'Harolly'. I'm not sure if making a quick mouse-doodle into an integral part of the menu is a good idea, but right now it's the functionality that I'm most concerned with. So far, of these buttons, only the communications menu is coded in . . .

. . . and I'm sure we can all guess the kinds of references this will be used for. So far all it does is allow you to adjust the frequency and attempt to make calls, and one frequency has a little test pop-up of images and dialogue.

This is an NES-ized version of the first map of my demo for the adventure battle experiment from the Excel Saga game. I imagine that most of the cool stuff that will appear in later games that I do will come as a result of wacky experiments conducted during the ES game. That, if nothing else, will probably keep me going on it as time goes on.

The cannon-fodder slimes there are probably all going to be homages to Zeon Mobile suits. One has been ice-beamed here. I'll probably code it in later so that missiles do more damage if you hit a frozen enemy.

There's also a scout-trooper in the employ of what will probably be an HSD-variant bad-guy. At this point, I plan to recycle the naming scheme and from Trigundam Bebop so that the symbol of this evil force will be 'XD'.

I haven't come up with a currency yet, so I still have the rupee up there. Also, the little hero's sprite actually does change if you're holding different weapons.

Of wising and gwaves

2004-09-15T17:04:03Z

Well, last summer, I think I got more done on that crazy game than I did all this year. Woo. I can throw out all kinds of excuses, but it's really not all that important at this point.

Anyway, summer's over, and it's time to at least pretend to be productive.

I haven't been able to get back in the Excel groove, but I have managed to at least poke myself into doing RM2K stuff. I have this idea for a side-project that gathers up some of my add-on story archetypes in this quasi-retro Zelda/Metroid homage adventure.

I'll toss up some screens or silly sprites later.

Anyway, I haven't forgotten the power of the Puchuu Gundam . . . I'd wager that my motivation on that'll kick back into gear soon. In space.

Hot soup is in my eye

2004-06-14T04:59:27Z

So, one of the things I realized playing DW4:R was that I had neglected to put in eyecatch commercial-break card-things as part of my anime reference craziness.

I couldn't get a clear picture of the actual wood-grain pattern from the real Excel Saga eyecatch, so I grabbed one via google. ~~HOORAY FOR GOOGLE~~. I also managed to get the font from the DVD covers photochoped in there. Woo.

Of course, goofy internet fanfics don't have commercials, but I'm sure I can come up with some excuse to use this.

In other news . . .

Heck, I don't know . . . every so often, I feel like I've forgotten what we do on the internet . . . but I guess that's really my fault for not doing stuff . . . but whatever. I'm sure that many more battle scenes will soon be available. READY?

Inverted pull-ups are really tough

2004-06-12T04:48:29Z

My computer just devoured a rather long entry about last week's adventures with some friends from the wacky dorm days, [disclaimer: Ivan draws the sex, but I think he has his own disclaimer.] and other silliness.

Since I want to sleep at some point, I'll make things quick. We had many funs. As is my tradition, I acquired more little Gundam models of the Super-Deformed variety in an effort to gradually convert my living-space into a scene out of a Super Robot Wars game. As Jay has already mentioned, Do As Infinity rocked us like . . . something . . . that rocks . . . a lot. I had been up since like, 4:40-something in the morning, and the concert began at midnight, so I was concerned that if the performance was all in the mood of the closing theme to Inu-Yasha, it might end up being my stand-up lullaby. Lucky for me, they had a contagious energy that got the crowd fired up and made it the highlight of the trip.

In other music-related news, I grabbed the 1st FLCL soundtrack CD. Partly because I greatly enjoy the show, and partly because if there's going to be a band called The Pillows, I, of all people, should probably go buy some music by them. To do otherwise would be a travishamockery of my liking pillow and whatnot.

But anyway, on to game progress- Let's see . . . not much . . . I've been trying to better balance the flow of both the gameplay and the story. So, I've been experimenting trying to tune the exp and cash money levels as well as planning out some additional scenes to help better illustrate the story.

In the last few weeks I re-played large parts of both Xenosaga and 'gears to refresh my memory before I lay down the crazy -foreshadowing- of -obvious parody- -plot points- for the super outer space chapter (probably 6). I do this now, since I imagine that the Puchuu invasion sub-plot, which really gets moving in the Earthbound spoof of chapter 3, will reach it's climax IN SPACE.

In doing this, I also re-learned the sometimes-painful lessons of the second half of Xenogears: That I should never tell what I can show, and never show what I can let the player play. I also learned that giant combining super robots are still awesome.

Metal slime runs awa-YEEEARRGHHH!

2004-05-18T00:04:10Z

So anyway, Indogutsu and his band of Brasingtonian doctors of fun have put together the second release of their Dragon Warrior IV Tributastic Spectacuaramathon. I believe it's now up at G to the G to the Z. It's the sort of thing that reminds me that I'm supposed to be actually getting work done on games and such. Especially since I also planned on releasing a second demo once I added two more chapters to the first release. I want to get this silly third chapter wrapped up, but it's been slow going. I think it's bigger than the first two, though.

So, today I did this:

Ha HA! Color coding.

Super Electromagnetic Yo-Yo

2004-04-29T07:05:56Z

Let's cut to the chase: The good news is that I actually opened up RM2K and did stuff on the Excel Game.

The bad news is, I've gone completely insane.

I think the lazy sprite edit may actually be more disturbing than it would have been if I had put more effort into it . . .

As far as those robots from before go. I tried to see how long it would take to create an overly complicated special attack. I got this, in which hands are burning red and telling people to explode stuff.

Well, it's do-able, but not a priority at the moment. I don't really have ideas for a full-blown game based on just my own ~~original~~ reference-derived stuff. When I last looked into it, the plan was some sort of wacky crossover between every add-on story ever, and there isn't a lot of interest in the whole wacky add-on story thing right now.

However, that could be all the more reason to do it. It could be part of an effort to revive the spirit of message board wackiness and general internet silly-fun that went along with old add-on stories. The challenge then becomes figuring out who I can track down to get character use permission and robot statistics.

After all, the Super Robot Wars games still include stuff from old 70s Super Robot Shows, so bringing back robots from add-on fanfics no older than 1998 seems pretty current by comparison . . .

WE ARE FIGHTING DREAMERS

2004-04-17T16:54:19Z

All right, I'm going to give another test-run at picture-posting using another free interweb-net-thing system.

Here's a map of the bottom two floors of the F City Mall for the Excel Fangame.

Wait, that's too huge.
Click Me

Okay, now spot the silly Suikoden / Pop Culture pun. The actual contents of the stores may be subject to change. The majority of the third floor will probably be closed off by those little roadblocks until the controversial crime drama chapter, during which you'll be able to buy more stuff up there.

Here's a rather silly edit of a SRW Alpha sprite. I still don't think the face looks quite right, but I got out a screenshot of the Puchuu Gundam and I think I got the colors to match up pretty well.

I don't remember the exact color-scheme for BrandonTCA's El-Kaiser re-design number whatever-it-was, but this was the sprite I found in my bag of sprites. It does have the horn on top of the little green thing on it's head, but it's fairly shiny. Mostly just an R-1 palette-swap, but hey, it's something I can upload.

This would be an R-2 palette-swap with some slight edits to create Rolly's machine, which is tentatively referred to as Griever Gatling, after the silver lion pendant / boss monster in FFVIII, and those huge guns on it's back, which I will edit more when I'm feeling less lazy.

In theory, it should transform into some sort of Zoid-esque second mode. This still looks pretty weird, since the R-2 isn't meant to transform except to create SRX, and I had to re-size one of the Dancougar units, so it's kinda distorted.

I'm working on Kera's machine. It'll be an edit of R-3, but I want to have a notably different way of storing the Funnels/Bits/Whatever.

I'm so glad the Cheat is not dead

2004-04-15T20:43:09Z

Well I think this journal thing is probably read a lot less often that most of the other internet things I make with the talking on, so this message really doesn't accomplish much on the whole 'proving I'm not dead' angle.

Anyway, I've reached exciting new levels of spaced-out distracted. What the heck was I doing on that game I was making . . . oh yeah! I built the mall. I did some playing around with a chipset that Indogutsu had developed, so that you can actually see people walking around inside the stores before looking inside.

I think I last got bored while trying to plan out the tree of options for the inevitable Love Puny Watanabe & Hyatt date sequence. This should be amusing since the player will actually be making the choices, and thus I have to come up with some way to avoid collision with wrong in the event that they select 'put it in'. Either way, I'll be sure to have some variable store how fond the two are of each other so that it can effect some plot point way on down the line.

Speaking of Indogutsu, I found this disk of NES emulation stuff that my friends at college were kind enough to leave with my Dreamcast when I graduated, and I decided to play through Dragon Warrior IV to get the full background on Brasington's latest project. Anyway, I came up with a silly reference to said game that helps fill in the blanks for the Puchuu Space War sub-thread. Also, Digimon, The Matrix, and Nintendo Power's Starfox comic are involved . . . or I could just be saying that to try and sound more insane that I really am.

In other news, Jones started talking about Super Robot Wars, and got me interested in that all over again. There's been a few times that I tried to make my own Robot Scenario with the web-based scenario development-thing that this anime desktop themeamajig site created. Sooo . . . I took a look to see if it had been updated, and there's now custom animated gif-ery.

I took out my bucket of SRW Sprite rips and I poked around in animation shop to see how hard it was to create decent-looking robot shooting a laser, and lasers did indeed shoot. However, I'm not sure how big a game full of animated gifs would be. That could be a cumbersome download . . .

I still have a bunch of sprite edits that people did back when I planned to do a 'Ref Power Robot Wars' game, that would be a big SRW-esque crossover strategery game that would re-enact various battles from silly add-on stories. I feel kinda bad that I never got very far with that. At some point I may have to poke around and see if people would still be willing to offer up robot stats and permission to use characters and stuff. However, for now, I've just edited a few El-Kaiser sprites since I was bored and stuck on other things.

Still, any work I do on robot-related side-projects won't be total loss for the Excel Game. I could use some practice for Chapter 6, in which I will have to create battle animations for all the playable robots.

At the very least, I know I'll have to animate the Puchuu Gundam and some huge goofy combiner robot for the Daitenjin. Since recycling is usually good for the . . . something . . . there's also a good chance that Ermich may pilot BrandonTCA's El-Kaiser. As for Nabeshin . . . I've heard rumors that Space Butler may be maintaining some sort of machine underground . . .

Nin nin nin ~<3

2004-03-17T19:59:55Z

Game progress! Well, yesterday afternoon, I think I finally came out of the rather blah game-making mood I've been in, and I actually moved forward on the Excel fangame. I think I may be about to wrap up what could be the halfway point of the 3rd chapter. A key ingredient in this was unearthing an old Mugen utility so that I didn't have to rely on a sea of broken emulation links to try and rip fighting game sprites.

Anyway, I did a cut-scene involving the generic cyborg ninja last night and this morning leading up to his second boss battle. I really need to go get some good Narutoesque smoke graphics. Right now I just have the RTP cloud in there, which looks kind of silly.

He actually manages to do the duplication thing more effectively in this battle, and he actually gets a shell game factor in there, randomizing which is the real ninja. Still, the whole Kage Bunshin multiple attacks thing is rendered useless if you use attacks that hit all enemies, since he doesn't attack on the turn that he replicates himself. Oh well. It's more for reference fun than difficulty.

In random bloggity news . . . heck, I don't know . . . it's St. Patrick's day . . . and thus . . . google is rather shiny . . .

Keep on Zeenin'!

Golden Bird Holy Flower Dragon Tooth Glory Punch

2004-03-15T03:35:07Z

So . . . game progress . . . I put together a little test package for the experimental adventure engine thing. So far all feedback has been good and helpful, but so far I've only got I've been shooting the lightning in the brain about ideas. But it's been slow and pillowy.

In other more bloggy stuff . . . I've been putting a link to high score in my aim profile recently along with silly quotes from it. The Bonus Stages reminded me of my high school days when I used a screensaver program to do this Space Ghost C2C-esque show . . . mainly due to the sudden appearance of the credits.

I never thought someone else would be the first one to mix pizza and G Gundam references. Also, the very last two lines of dialog in that one apply pretty well to just about everything I've done on the internet ever.

In other, even more bizarre news, I only know of the existence of that Milkshake song through silly references on the internet and the Daily Show. I have yet to actually hear the original artist sing it, assuming that the original artist is, in fact, this mysterious Kelis person and not Jon Stewart. Take that, top [number] radio and ~~Music~~ ~~awful reality dating show~~ Music Television!

OooOooh no! You shanked my Jengaship!

2004-03-07T22:27:42Z

Very little game work last week. I've been trying to improve the adventure thing control scheme, but I haven't had much luck. I should probably let some people play it as it is now before I decide that the controls need fixing. So, anyway, I'm been poking around with making a little test scenario in which you get the different weapons and use them to open up a path forward. In doing so, I also figured out that it's pretty easy to make enemies invincible to different attacks.

That sounds like I've been making progress, but really I've been astoundingly lazy this week as far as the computer machine goes.

Usually, when I get into a slump on RPG-making, I go and actually play games for a bit, and that usually gets stuff going again. So I've done some of that.

Next when I'm thinking of actually putting some sort of schedule into effect that might ensure some degree of progress on various stuff next week. Don't worry, I know that forced humor is teh s uck.

That's odd . . . it looks like livejournal's spell-checker has no qualms about f-bombing it's users when reading that [adult swim] reference. Don't look, Meatwad!

My head is full of flowers

2004-03-03T01:42:17Z

The last couple of days I think I've had allergic head-stuffyness. So I haven't been feeling bad enough to deem it a headache and take a nap, but not good enough to get much done.

So, I've just been trying to use what part of the brain that is still active to come up with ideas to use when I'm feeling more better. So, if you're wondering if I have any plan at all for where I'm going with the Excel fangame . . . well . . . kind of.

There will probably be only about 10 chapter units. Right now, I think the progression will go . . . and don't read this is you want to keep it a total secret to everybody . . . like this:

1. Intro (done) -> 2. Excelvania (done) -> 3. Earthbound parody (working on it) -> 4. Legend of Menchi (engine's almost done) -> 5. Ratings increase week: Controversial Crime Drama (experimenting with cars and radio) -> 6. Space Robot Bonanzogears / Puchuu-Char's Counter Attack (I have some ideas) -> 7. Wild Arms spoof . . . probably with lots of Trigun references (A few ideas) -> 8. MYSTERY (insane but specific ideas) -> 9. Big last dungeon (no clue) -> 10. Optional sub-quest bonanza (some silly ideas).

Anyway, I'll probably try to build a mini-demo for the Menchi engine and try and get that tested before I get too far into that chapter. If it works, I may also start working on that quasi-original adventure game idea. I don't want to bog myself down so that these things never get released, but with my attention span, I'd rather be sporadically working on a few different projects than making a little progress on one and then staring into space for a while, which seems to be what is happening now.

Great crested booka, it's full of stars.

Ja! Mein leapen!

2004-02-29T16:20:56Z

At some point, I need to run around and figure out who all I know from assorted message boards, new and old, has a journal thing so I can compose a list of FRIENDSHIP. However, I'm lazy, so for now I'm just waiting for people to find me and then returning. Wait a minute . . . crackwater? I may have to investigate that. In space.

But, back to me making silly games . . .

It turns out that it was pretty easy to make the enemies shoot projectiles in the Menchi Zelda parody. The hitting and getting hit is a little buggy, but I can't seem to get the errors to occur consistently. This sort of thing has apparently happened to people in the Excelvania level on the collapsing bridge as well. There seems to be a problem getting a whole sequence of movement commands to run, so a character winds up not animating or walking through walls. However, I can never get the error to happen more than once. There's like a split-second where the error can occur. I'm not sure how to go about fixing it, since I'm not sure what the conditions are at that moment. I'll try and come up with something, though.

Oh yeah, about the other project that may do if the adventure engine works . . . it still doesn't have a name, since I haven't named the characters yet. It may be somewhat original, but a lot of them will probably be based on assorted add-on fic cast members. After all, the world of rpg-makery needs a villain who drops Coke machines on people.

Linkin Park's Lobster Rodeo

2004-02-27T22:35:39Z

The main plot of the Excel Game has been delayed a bit since I seem to have left my Ninjas on another computer that I no longer have. I'm still doing that silly high-tech Earthbound dungeon.

So, I filled in some missing pieces to the 'Legend of Menchi' chapter engine. I'm not sure what the most effcient way is to do this, but this is a crazy experiment, so it'll be a learning experience.

Anyway, I'm now going to experiment with cheating at the internet to upload an image . . .

[today's experiment . . . failed]

Well . . . fluff. Well, you can see it here but I'm not sure if that isn't cheating too . . . shouldn't there be some advertisements on there? Heck, I don't know.

My current limit for on-map enemies is 7. That's all I bothered to run hit-detection for. My current gameplay is to copy a template map for every battle-oriented map in the chapter. Different templates and customizations thereof will give the enemies different properties.

My next goal will be to make the enemies more complex. These ones just wander around aimlessly. Then again, all most of the old Zelda monsters did was wander around and then launch a projectile every so often. I'll try and get to work on the projectile-tossing next.

State of the silly stuff in my head

2004-02-25T03:23:12Z

So anyway, one of the main things I hope to log here is my progress or lack thereof on a bunch of wacky hobby game projects. Since I have a whole lot more ideas than I have time to implement them, and no attention span, it seems like a good idea to record as many as I can. Then I can come collect all the good ones when the time comes to put them into practice. Also, let's not forget, people can poke me if I'm slacking off.

Just for the record, there may be spoilers for the games here. I'm not planning to give away major plot twists on purpose, but I'll be talking about what I'm doing. In space.

Excel Saga fangame [RPG Maker 2000]

I neglected the game this past fall semester, but I managed to pick up the project again pretty recently. When I last left it, I had the first two chapter/episode things done, and I had started mapping out the center of the third.

Since the game had, thus far, offered little in the way of exploration in the actual Excel Saga world, I decided that the third chapter should actually occur in F City, but I wasn't ready for a total departure from traditional RPG-ing yet. So, in order to mix a modern setting with traditional RPG-ery and maintain near-total insanity, the third chapter will be a parody on the Earthbound / Mother series of RPGs.

Anyway, this will feature the second class-change for Kabapu's team, as they once again form a four-person mock-RPG team, only this time aided not by wacky costumes, but by some sort of psychic energy boosting device. Also bottle rockets.

Before the fall semester, I began building a map of the central area of F City. The highlight of this is probably that the sewers actually do lead to the hidden ACROSS base, and you can operate the trap door yourself if Ilpalazzo isn't around. I still haven't built all those offices from episode 5, but Kabapu's office is in the tower and the newspaper is next door.

So, anyway, the first mini-dungeon here appears to be the result of a local chapter of Earthbound's strange happy-happyism cult. A strange crossover caused to disrupt the plot? Could be . . .

I'm currently working on the next mini-dungeon, which will be a high-tech area reminiscent of the Belch base or the lower levels of the stonehenge maze.

The Excel Saga anime already has an alien invasion sub-plot thanks to the Puchuus, and the Earthbound parody will be used to set that aspect of the story into motion, and it'll probably run throughout the story of the game until eventually there is a giant robot space war between evil invading and heroic defending Puchuu factions. In addition to giving me an excuse to break out the Puchuu Gundam, that chapter will probably be used to make fun of Xenogears and/or Xenosaga . . . IN SPACE.

While working on this chapter, I'm also doing some experimental programing to see where I can go in future chapters. If I can pull it off, next chapter will be the 'Menchi Episode' side story and use a different gameplay system. I've tried putting together a simple Zelda-parody system. If Menchi can wield that gattling gun in the anime, I'm sure she can figure out a clever way to manipulate a bow and arrow. I managed to code in a basic attack as well as some explosives and a limited-ammo projectile.

This all started after I looked at the original Zelda again on the Gamecube collector's disk and I thought, "Hey, this doesn't look so hard . . . " and I tossed up a few hearts and had Menchi bark and knock-back monsters, and a mini-game was born.

So, my current plan is to come out with some sort of new release after the next two chapters. I may come out with something sooner just to get feedback on the 'Legend of Menchi' engine as to whether it's actually fun to play or not.

Other Ideas [RPG Maker 2000]

I haven't even finished the Menchi engine, and I already had ideas for some sort of crazy outer-space adventure game. I'll probably wait to see if the Menchi thing is any fun before I put in any programing time on this. However, I am comming up with some character, story, and gameplay ideas. Right now, I think the concept is made of references to Zelda and Metroid, but with a Disgaea-ish mood.

You'd get a lot of missles, and you'd beat a dungeon-boss, and then there'd be a goofy 'Next Episode' bit. YES. But seriously, I've had a lot of ideas about this, and I'm sure I'll ramble on about it more later.

Just the other day, I was thinking that if/when I finish the Excel Saga game, if I would do any other wacky internet anime fanfiction in RPG-Format. I've been stealing Get Backers from Almasy, and if there were a fangame in which you really could only use the jyagan 3 times in each episode / chapter / adventure . . . it could make for a very interesting game.

Think about it, in each mission, there would be a number of battles, and you could use the ability to instantly 'win' a number of them ( assuming this is in in RM2K, it would use a 'switch' ability that would check some variables via forks ). No battles would be impossible if you're out of uses, but some might come close. The story could branch depending on how the player chooses to handle each challenge, making the game more or less difficult depending on the choices. I would imagine that most episodes would probably have to have a fairly linear start and end, but there could be a variety of ways to get through each episode, and a number of secrets to discover if particularly hard paths are taken. There may even be a path where our heroes don't end up broke again at the end of the episode . . . but probably not.

Just another crazy idea.

Well, that's all for now. Actually, outside of RPG-Makery, I was thinking that I need to break out my computer graphics-ing skills from college and do some sort of 3-D Graphic-ed 2-D shooter. I have enough silly engrish in my head to be the inventor of the next Radiant Silvergun or Ikaruga, but I don't have a good shmup gimmick yet.

Okay, that's enough for now. Woo. If I had realized how long this was going to be, I probably would have limited the scope a bit . . . oh well.

Pill-O! Showtime!

2004-02-24T16:24:48Z

mic check mic check

[dancing is forbidden]

mic check mic check

Okay, so it seems that if this works when I push that large button down there, I'll have made my entry into the increasingly popular world of logging events onto the internet.

Now while I can't promise the people reading this (yes, both of them) a look into the intimate details of my personal life, I will be keeping a record of my progress on various silly projects, as well as some attempts at humorous commentary on whatever I feel like commenting on.

So, let's push the button and then I'll play around with all those switches trying to make it look good.