No recent updates. Surprised?
Well, it’s happened again. I’ve stopped writing as much. Believe me, I’ve npt forgotten, I’ve just been incredibly busy/stressed. Currently I’m updating from my iPhone because the power went out. Knoxville has been experiencing flooding of fucking biblical proportions. Also, I watched a few episodes of Lost for the first time. As a result, I’ve had to watch pretty much the entire series, which has left me too distracted to write. As usual I am behind the times. Anyway, a few quick updates before I start working on regular posts:
• I am still working on reviewing games. I actually have a few written, and as soon as I have lightning in the lightning holes that power my computer box again, I’ll work on getting them posted. Upcoming reviews include the Kirby series, some Genesis fighters, and a feature-length Mario Paint article/review.
• I’m also still working on my game. I’ll have some more diary articles on some stuff, including story info!
• I’m working on an article on game music that may be fleshed out into a series of articles. Anyone who knows me personally (as well as anyone smart enough to read this website and realize how much of a fucking dweeb I am) knows that I’m a virulent defender of game music as a genre, and that I have a massive collection of it at my disposal. I’m writing the article as a treatise on how much incredible music has been released in this format and then ignored because people won’t take the medium seriously, the few successes the genre has had, and how the genre as a whole has changed in the last few years. It should be pretty good, I guess, whatever.
• I’m going to try to do some work with news that’s actually current. I joke about living in the past, and really I do, but the main reason I stopped doing news-based updates is because I mostly wrote at work, and their fucking dystopian web filter prevented me from getting to any gaming-related sites (except G4, presumably because they own it, but hell, even I have standards). Now that I’m unemployed that shouldn’t be a problem. Hurray economic problems!
• Lastly, I’ve been writing some reviews to be used in… AN UPCOMING VIDEO FEATURE. That’s all I’ll say right now though.
Feel free to bitch at me if you want. I’ll just start writing now.
Developer’s Diary, 5/5/09: My Writing Process and Maps
Still chugging away on the story elements.
In the meantime, I thought you might like to see my writing process.
There isn’t one.
I start at the beginning and when I’m done, I’ll know it. I’ve always written everything like this. Ever since I was a young boy I’ve been told that the correct way to write is to work out an outline, then a rough draft, then an edited copy, then a final copy. I’ve always felt like that’s total bullshit. Yeah, it might make some things a little better, but when I take the time to sit and work all of it out, it hurts the work overall. Nothing fits together as well, and it’s much easier to write (dialogue especially) when it feels like I’m finding out things at the same time as characters. It’s hard to explain, but it’s a lot easier to think of the way people would react to someting that’s happening if I don’t know everything that will ever happen to them.
One result of this is that my maps don’t get made until they’re necessary. Check out the current world map:
It seems a bit sparse.
As the story moves on, I will of course add more to it. I just don’t need any more continents at the moment. My continent bag is full.
There is a reason for the peculiar shape of the island up top, though. It’ll all be revealed soon enough.
Developer’s Diary, 4/29/09: Yo, FUCK doors.
Goddamn, I can’t believe it’s been a month.
Anyway, I’ve been chugging away at the game, mostly with behind-the-scenes stuff. I’ve been working on some different event-scripting skills with the help of the friendly folks over at RMVX. Sad as it is to say, considering how easy the engine is, I didn’t really know what the hell I was doing beyond some basic stuff. Thanks to RMVX member Aindra’s RPG School game/tutorial (the bunneh rocks), I’ve learned how to do a lot of basic stuff. Through practice I’ve actually gotten to the point where I can write my own cutscenes, which is good, because otherwise the game would have sucked. I’ve made a video on the Your Tubes internets website demostrating a little bit of what I learned (don’t worry, it’s spoiler free, not that you cared):
It’s embarrassing to say that everything in this video took me about an hour to actually do. It’s some fairly complicated scripting, though, and with what I’ve learned, I shouldn’t need to take time out from story development to learn anything else for a while.
I’ve also updated my town, which you may remember from this post. In addition to some general updates and changes, I’ve also added an entire new part of town, which I haven’t totally finished yet.
Here’s the new northern side of town:
As of right now, the town is called Foxtrot, but that (as is everything) is subject to change. That big house up top belongs to a rich fucker who will be a catalyst for the beginning of the story. Other than that, there is an armor shop run by a paranoid old dwarf-man, and a couple of houses.
In addition to all this, I’ve completely finished all of the transfer events that lead to you actually being able to go inside of a building, which isn’t a major step, but is necessary. Here’s a piteous little aside regarding my skill as a “programmer”: One feature of RMVX is the “quick event”, which allows you to add a commonly used event quickly without having to actually add anything to it yourself. One of the quick events is the “door” event, which adds the graphic of a door, then the scripting to have it open upon touch. I added this event to every building in town, then went into the event scripting and added the locations I wanted to move to. This worked fine until I actually came back out, at which time, for some reason, the character would take a step forward, freeze, then teleport back under the door’s graphic. I couldn’t figure out why it would do that, because the character isn’t literally coming out of the door, he just touches a tile from the inside of the building that teleports him back out. I worked for a fucking hour to realize that what I had done was I had added a transfer function at the end of the first page of events, which concluded with a switch which, when triggered, moved your character forward, then teleported him to a location that was supposed to have been chosen when I created the quick event. So, in effect, I caused this problem myself by just not paying attention, just like the time I crashed my car through a Walgreens because I hadn’t noticed I had drank 28 beers. The cool side of this problem, however, is that I realized that, with a little modification, I could use that second page of events to make it look like the character was walking back out the door, which has already saved me a lot of time.
Now that I have all this mapping bidness finished, I’m going to move on to finishing the first part of the story.
Look for an update soon with my first dungeon. It will be drawn in crayon. I’m sure you can’t wait.
