I caved and made a twitter account. I wanted "msghero" but that was taken by "message hero," so I went back to my PSN roots and added the "16." I'll probably post updates and screenshots there, not that I have many updates. I'm sure no one wants to hear me vent about my coding frustrations.

I got my workload down to 2.5 projects in the works, so I figured I'd start on Juggernaut 2 a few weeks early since I'm at the boring parts of the other games. Level design: boring. Waiting for or adding art: boring. That weird moment when there's a hundred things to add to a game but nothing to work on: boring. I animated a guy so far, and the code is already better than the entirety of the first game. I would say it only gets worse from here, but I feel like it'll stay constant for a long time. Adding saving/loading/API, new menus, and voice acting will be where my sanity gets tested.

The iso rpg is coming along. The art is looking sexy so far. The code isn't half bad either. I had to rewrite a couple thousand lines into something readable, but it's looking good now. There are a hundred things to add, but there's only a few things I can do that don't rely on something else being completed. And very little is completed. But there's progress.

The color-based bullet hell game with whatever his name is now is...I don't know. We usually have a week of ideas, art, and code and then a couple weeks of not much. At first, it was going to be a short game, but now it's looking like a paid app. Considering it's being written in haxe/openfl, I could publish it as an app, but there's a small chance we'll be thinking about redoing the UI to fit mobile screens before the game is close to being finished. Maybe next time.

Typing game on hold for a while. Kinda glad since uni starts in a few weeks.

This spritesheet is about as organized as my code used to be, but with the sheet's data file, I figured out a way to reduce the memory usage and coding pains by a lot. Why store multiple copies of each image per npc, ally, and enemy when I can just have one big image that everything gets copy-pasted from? Thanks to TexturePacker, Jordan won't have to try to understand what I want him to do, the game won't run with extra memory usage, and my code gets simpler. I have just enough in my NG bank account to purchase a full license, plus my birthday is soon. It'll be worth it considering the trial version has saved me a ton of headaches already and it's just day one of coding.

...day one of probably 2-3 months (I'm very optimistic about this estimate)...ohboy.

My friend asked me exactly how many games I'm working on. Five. Five games that I've touched in the past month. I just realized how many that is and how far away from completion most of them are.

There's a point in making a game where all you have is an idea. There are probably several game ideas floating around in your head right now, some well-developed, some just a concept. The ideas don't really mean much until you make a prototype of the game, and that's where the fun lies. "How do I turn this idea into something playable?" "How do I make it fun for me to play?" "How can I do this thing that I've never done or seen before?" This part is interesting to me.

Adding menus and interfaces is not interesting to me. At all. There's isn't anything to learn from replacing programmer art with nicer sprites. I think the reason I have so many games in the works is that I really just don't want to spend time adding the art, so I don't give deadlines to artists. Also, I'd feel like a dick if I told some person on the internet that I only know via pms or skype to do something by a certain time, "or else." The only way I could follow up that ultimatum is to kick them from the project, and that just hurts my progress even more. Plus they're all nice people. So I give them a "whenever you want" attitude and move on to the next interesting game idea that pops into my head.

But with five projects I don't think I should really add any more. I want to, but then when I do get art, more projects will get delayed and more ideas will come up in the meantime. Writing down ideas for the future is counterproductive since that constantly reminds me of the fun that I could be having instead of making another menu.

Having a completed game does feel nice, despite all the crap that goes wrong behind the scenes. But I wish I could upload a prototype and have people rate the inventiveness of the concept or the execution rather than how good the artist is and how buggy the game isn't. Getting feedback from the forum is nice, but that's usually 3-5 people commenting rather than hundreds that could say something useful but never visit the reg lounge.

Most people probably don't want to play a game that doesn't even have a win/loss condition, but I think it's fun. The game itself may or may not be fun, but seeing a new game concept and trying to piece together the code behind it is fun for me.

And that is my excuse for being lazy.

or: I made a game and can't understand the code.

JUGGERNAUT: Awakening is the first of four games in the series made with VoidForce and Mattlaaa. It's a turn-based RPG with a few quests and medals to unlock. The story progression is pretty cool if you're into reading (if you've gotten this far, you might be). The code for an RPG usually doesn't have anything complex, just lots of tedious interactions. But when your code is terribly written, it starts to become a headache...

First compile: Nov 12, 2012
Last compile: May 31, 2013

We (I) went at a pretty relaxed pace since there was no deadline or anything. A lot of that time was either me trying to figure out how to do something or me fixing what I just broke. During the last few weeks, the game was up on FGL for potential sponsorships, but not many people want an RPG since the reading and filesize deter a lot of viewers, plus the game isn't THAT good. So, we put it in Mochi distribution to get it to spread while uploading it manually to the more popular portals.

Biggest problems:
Game was too hard, few bugs, kinda bland, slow-paced. There were some issues with balance initially, but you kinda get used to the game after a while of creating and testing it. But since every other comment mentioned it was hard, we lowered the levels and buffed the stats some. Not sure if it was enough, I think people are comparing the game to something like Pokemon where you can handle plenty of fights before getting healed up. The game looks and feels like Pokemon, so I guess that's a fair comparison. I'm definitely gonna push for mouse controls next time; part of the reason my code is terrible is that I couldn't use native events to control the flow of the game, and I had to store which button you were currently highlighting rather than the mouse telling me where it was. Apparently the keys are a bit awkward as well, I guess I just got used to them. And there are a few bugs, but I really don't want to look at that code anymore. The other issue was that it was bland, kinda generic. RPGs are all about cliches and tropes, but there wasn't really anything to set this one apart.

What went wrong: (a lot)
When you're making a prototype, it's fine to be a bit unorganized and ignore OOP. That's how it started, a demo of collisions using alpha maps. Then entering and exiting maps/houses. Then NPC interactions. Then quests. Then battle. Then items and the shop. Then cutscenes. Then saving and loading. Then the main menu and preloader. Then sound. Then fixing battles. Individually, a prototype for each of those would be fine since I was always experimenting with how to do them. But at no point did I refactor my prototyped mess. Every other day, someone would bring up a bug, most often in the battle sequence. Then I'd patch it up by adding a boolean or two to account for that corner case. Then those booleans created another corner case, etc. It was the equivalent of ignoring your car's windshield when it has a crack in it, eventually it spreads and you have to replace the whole thing.

Between when I started coding the game and when I thought I was finished, I learned some things. Applying those things while keeping the messy code from before is what confused me the most, to the point where now I can hardly understand what's going on. After getting virtually slapped by PSvils from 5000 miles away and remembering a discussion we had in Flash forum a while back that I kinda ignored (I'm an idiot, I know), I learned how to organize my mess for the future. Initially, I was going to basically reskin the game and add whatever new features for the sequel, but I'm gonna have to rewrite the entire thing to make any sense of the code. Organization, that is the lesson.

Another issue is that I didn't code with the future in mind. The more immediate future, like adding the next function of the game. With more forward thinking, my transitions wouldn't be hacky and all over the place. I would have structure in my code, not having half the variables persist after starting another save file (probably why the game crashes for some people, though I haven't gotten it to happen in 3 months of testing). I would have added functionality for the cutscenes to appear in battle: the pm containing "This cutscene will occur before the battle ends" made my code die. After that one, seeing that I had pms from Jordan in my inbox made me uneasy cuz it usually meant something else broke. And it always took me about a week to replicate the bug, longer to fix it. There are still a few bugs cropping up, but ehhh. I don't think redoing this engine for this game has much of a point: the game will probably be off the front page by the time I redo anything. Of course the next ones in the series will have a much better system. Idk, the code makes me queasy, but I feel like some people want to re-play the game bugless. I can go ahead and shelf it as a lesson learned, but is that selfish? I mean I've known about that bug for 3 months and it hasn't shown up for me once... *also I think some bugs are caused by not using the latest version of Flash player*

What went right:
The ideas that I prototyped are pretty solid. The alpha maps which tell the game about collisions and stuff worked fairly well. Any issues were usually resolved by "making the blue bigger" which was the color of the hitbox for certain things. The extra png per map would have been an issue with filesize, but they only contained like 5 colors tops and png compression is apparently really good. Without music, the game is about 1.5MB. I played around with the compression settings in Flash for a bit, but then I somehow fucked the sound quality to an unrecognizable state and it wouldn't revert. The total file size was under 6MB, but the audio was painful to listen to. But I had everything backed up in the cloud, so my mini heart attack didn't get any worse. So maybe it could have been a smaller filesize without making the audio sound like a dying hyena.

The cutscene engine I made is great compared to the rest of the crap that makes this game run. All the commands are in an XML file, and the code just reads the next line and executes the command rather than hardcoding everything (do people actually do that?). It never got to the point where I could tell the writer himself to add cutscene elements to the file; maybe with JSON it would be easier. However, I looked at the cutscenes more than 100 times each, so changing up the positions or how far the characters needed to move was easier for me to do anyway. It got messy towards the end when I needed to play sounds and show attack animations in a cutscene, but besides that, it's excellent.

Somehow it got frontpaged and daily 5th, so I guess that's cool.

And most importantly, I finished it. Since most of the image files were made before I ever needed them, there was never the bottleneck of me not being able to test something since I didn't have the art *cough*RobertSabrinaZachary*cough*. And the lack of a deadline certainly helped, especially since I had no clue what I was doing and Spring was my semester of death at uni. I mean, I still consider myself a fledgling game dev, so I'd say this went fairly well. This was a big learning experience for us (I don't know if Matt learned anything new about making music, but I learned enough to make up for that).

So, what's next? Refactoring the hell out of Juggernaut I's engine is pretty much necessary for the future games to be glitch-free. I think the art is mostly done already for II, so I have plenty of things to work on when we're ready to start it. Though we might go back and add some flair to the sprites.

If you've gotten this far, you definitely don't hate RPGs for all the reading involved. Go play one now. Preferably mine.

My semester of death is over, and my GPA hardly dropped at all. According to my advisor, it only gets easier from here. According to a senior, it doesn't get easier, but you get more used to stressing out. I guess that's ok? I'm gonna try to take an online course if registration would get their act together and let me sign up. Plus maybe I'll do something that forces me to leave this chair. Maybe. Does stretching count?

But anyway, GAMES

Juggernaut: Awakening: the RPG I've been working on with VoidForce and Mattlaaa while my sanity was decreasing is done. It's chilling in FGL right now in case a sponsor wants to pay my housing bill for it. If not, it'll get uploaded eventually. I'm holding off on writing a post mortem about it to see what the initial comments are. I've already half-written it in my head though: talk of what I learned (a lot), what I fucked up on (a lot), and how many damn times I've tested the game (400 since I added saving, so a lot).

I haven't actually played the game without testing something, which is kinda sad, but I have no desire to at this point. I've beaten the game thirty times, gotten everyone to max level, unlocked every medal, listened to the audio more times than Matt, and I know where the plot goes in the next installment. The cons of being a programmer, it seems. But it's had its high points as well. Being the first person to engage in battle, first to watch a cutscene unfold (it crashed after the first block of text, but I'm still first), first to see the ending occur. Bragging rights are mine!

Typing Game: title pending (it'd better change). You type words, they collide with other words, and the words shatter when they hit each other. My thought process was the reverse: "I want things to collide and shatter and look cool at 60fps. Words can collide. You can type words." Sabs will probably do art for it after the rousing 3 star success of Call of Doody. It was more of a port of her game to Flash, so I didn't give as much input on gameplay (and what medals to not add), but hey it front-paged somehow! But yeah, 60fps text explosions (click to reset). That's the main thing in this section.

Princess Wars: title pending. New RPG in the works with Zombie-Pimp. I had a lot of the code done previously, but HOLY CRAP was it unorganized (3000 line main.as...). I hate myself for not organizing that bad boy before, especially when there's something specific I need to use that's strewn about in a hundred places. Some quality time in the Flash reg lounge plus all the stuff I learned in Juggernaut plus hitting my head against the wall has got me on the right path now. Lesson, lesson...

It's looking like it'll be pretty awesome. Gameplay will be like Final Fantasy Tactics Advanced (best game ever). The storyline...well you get to make your own! There will be 3...factions/groups/whatever that you get to choose from, each with its female lead. The quests you go on, the choices you make throughout, and the results of each skirmish will determine where the plot goes (I have no idea how to code that, but it sounds cool). What's interesting is that, at the moment, you can't win or lose until the very end. If you lose a bunch of battles, maybe you don't get the special sword. Maybe the shopkeeper gets offended that you didn't buy his latest equips and hikes the price up. Maybe defeating one faction earlier means that they'll be weaker in a later fight. That's well into the future, though, first step is replacing colored boxes with actual graphics. I have a feeling that voice acting would be great for this, kinda like Bastion in that there's a lot of potential things to say based on your actions. But yeah, for the future. Considering how much we have written for the first cutscene of one of the factions, very well into the future.

The latter two are semi-developed ideas, and Juggernaut is off-limits for a while, so I don't really have much to show =S But it'll all be cool, I promise. Especially the exploding text.

Still from Juggernaut I.

My rendition of a potential intro scene to Princess Wars (it gave me like 6 colors leave me alone).

First and foremost, Breaking Bad is awesome.

$econdly, I got my first paycheck. INFINITE MONEY IS MINE AT LAST. But really, money is cool.

Thirdly, I'm like...something between 93 and 97% done this RPG. I think last time I said I was at 85% which might have been not true. Or maybe it was true and it just takes a month to progress 10% at this point. Saving and loading, cutscenes, and one more powerup thing and I'm done I hope. It'd be cool if it got sponsored, because money. But also because lots of people will get to see my game. According to Mochi, my last published game (so long ago, wow) has like 40k views overall, which seems like too much considering the quality wasn't very good. So I'm expecting this one to get more. But, y'know, progress. I'm gonna push for completion this month, which should be fairly easy. Next on the pipeline is hopefully a small game.

Fourthly, I'm helping Sabtastic make a game about poop. For me, it was to learn Newgrounds' API, which doesn't have the best documentation. And networking. Job searching has taught me that networking is sometimes more important than grades and stuff. Plus, she's an artist; and after my artist dry spell, I always want one within a PM's reach. Which is why I'm working with 3 now :)

College has picked up some, and it'll get worse soon. Work + class + homework and studying + building things for class + making games + Breaking Bad. If I survive this semester, the rest of college will be a breeze.

My first game in a long time is almost done. I want to say about 80-85% finished, with those last %s flying by. It's been fun. It's been irritating. I've learned a lot about efficiency and cheating while coding, which will definitely help later on.
I only code casually, like maybe for an hour in the afternoon and a bit later on, so it's taking longer than a more committed dev would take, but WHO GIVES A FUCK? It'll be good. It'll have sequels. The sequels' code will be very close to the original's, so yay me!

This semester is so stressful, and I'm taking the minimum number of hours. My advisor said "If you don't die this semester, the rest of your college career will fly by." In one class, I have to build stuff and use power tools, like mills, lathes, a scary-ass looking water jet, and laser cutter.
Then I'm taking fluid dynamics, in which the teacher expects us to know thermo and deformable bodies; thermo, where we had a sub for the first few weeks and I miss him; and deformable bodies, which is statics, which I hate.
I don't have class Fri-Mon, which is glorious; but Tue/Thurs are hell. My 8am classes aren't even that bad any more, it's the fucking homework. We have to talk about the thermo hw in groups and eventually just look at the damn solutions manual because the new teacher hasn't explained much (half the class stopped coming after the new prof got here).

After this game, I'm gonna take a break and start drawing again, maybe learn animating. I have a few ideas for games that I might work on every now and then, though: some kind of survival and maybe puzzle platformer where instead of hp you have to keep your body temp, hydration, and hunger satiated; and a bullet hell game where you have to change the color of your bullets in order to hit enemies of that color. That one is inspired by invoker from dota2, cuz I'm planning on making the mechanics kinda like his orbs (q = red, qw = purple, w = blue, etc) and because bullet hell games look fun.

12 more weeks, then the worst is behind me.

or: A Series of Unfortunate Events
To be frank, we got boned.

There was no one posting in the jam thread, and I surely wasn't about to start pming random people from around the site to join me, so I got Tom to front page the thread. A flood of people posted, and I felt pumped. I got an artist (for once) and musician to accompany me and my writer. Buono. Then I get a text from my parents: "Remember you're flying in Saturday, not Friday." No buono. Like, no one even told me I was coming home this weekend. I figured my parents would leave me alone enough so that I could get all the work done. I was naïve.

The sequence of events, according to how I remember it:

Friday:
6:00 pm: Artist has work until whenever he's done at some late-ass hour, rest of us are waiting.
6:57 pm: Theme is announced
7:00 pm: Realize the theme has already been announced and bitch about those 3 minutes I'll never get back
11:30 pm: Engine is done, works like a charm. Call it quits for the night.

Saturday:
9:30 am: Wake up early cuz the bus doesn't run very often on weekends.
11:00 am: At the airport
11:58 am: Get settled in my spot at the terminal and crack out the code
12:04 pm: Get a smoothie
12:07 pm: Get back to coding, still haven't heard from the artist
3:00 pm or something cuz of the hour time zone change: Back home, FAMILY TIME!
9:00 pm: Find out the musician's computer just fucking died, finally some art
9:01 pm: Art is from the wrong perspective
9:30 pm: Make a blitting (spritesheet) engine to avoid the lag from movieclips
10:30 pm: Realize it's way too late for the artist to start making spritesheets, CTRL-Z
10:32 pm: Finish holding CTRL-Z
11:00 pm: Artist realizes a single dot was causing an issue that I spent a half hour trying to figure out, I ragequit

Sunday:
9:30 am: Wake up to start hard-core coding.
9:30:15 am: Realize it's nine fucking thirty in the morning, go back to sleep
11:00 am: Wake up, start coding
11:15 am: FAMILY TIME!
3:30 pm: I call it quits, no audio, half the art required, some weird rotation problem in the code
8:30 pm: Realize there's a Halloween-themed event going on, decide to make the game for that instead
8:45 pm: Start bitching about my weekend
9:22 pm: Finish bitching about my weekend

Lady Luck may be a whore, but she's a classy whore and doesn't sleep with us :(

Why hello there.

So I teamed up with another writer since my current one is taking the SATs today (GOOD LUCK!) and is generally a busy bee. We tossed around some good ideas, including an apocalyptic shooter-platformer. Honestly, I'd take any idea since any idea would be better than what I've published so far. But, of course, no matter how good the ideas are, I STILL NEED A RELIABLE ARTIST!!! This has been holding me back from coding seriously for a long time now. My RPG is still on hiatus until I finally get something better than a cube to represent my characters. That plus tons of AutoCAD projects for school (but, hey, it's better than learning MATLAB). I've been looking at a few Draw With Jazza tutorials so I can take the role of game-beautifier as well, but I'd need plenty of time and practice before I'd be able to make anything I'd want in a game.

Also, my desk sucks. There's no space for a tablet. Last year in my crappy dorm, I had extra space where I could put it. This year in my crappy apartment, there's no space. Because good desks cost money, and tens of thousands of dollars per student and millions from alumni can't get you a decent desk. Nor can it fix the elevators, which half the time skip my floor. Nor can it get you decent food. The food is keeping me alive, but it's also taking months off my life every time I eat there. It can afford godly internet, though. Fastest WiFi in southeast US plus ethernet that's 10-15 times faster is pretty nice. Until it stops working. Which has happened multiple times this year for no reason. But fast internet means nothing when the virtual desktops you have to use in class use Windows 8 Beta WHICH SUCKS SO MUCH. When the teacher and 80% of the class don't have computer access, it's time you switch back to Windows 7 WHICH WORKED FINE AND CHROME DOWNLOADS DIDN'T TAKE 5 MINUTES BECAUSE WINDOWS HATES GOOGLE AND FORCES ME TO USE INTERNET EXPLORER.
/college rant

Downloading programs and patches only takes 10 seconds though, that's pretty cool

And Game Jam. I participated in GJ6, but that didn't go very well...BUT I know what I'm doing now (I hope), so it should go much better this time. I figure my writer can join me, but I'd still need a musician and animator (big surprise there). Very few people have even posted in that thread as well...I assume because it's not AustinBreed's thread and IT TOOK ME A FRIGGIN WEEK TO FIND IT. It needs to be front paged or something... Since I couldn't join GJ7, I decided to test myself a bit with programming a lot in a short amount of time. It took me less than 12 hours each to make a platformer and some typing game thing, so that's very reassuring, considering I had only been making menus and stuff for my RPG and not entirely new concepts.

It's so nice to write something that doesn't focus on Wuthering Heights. It was a good book, but it was so painful to read, man.

TL;DR
College sucks, make art for me PLEASE

When I started this RPG, I had 16 things on my todo list. Two lazy months and 6000 lines of code in, I still have exactly 16 things on my todo list. It started with stuff like
Make it move
Make more than one
Make it attack

Now there's
Finish linking machine states
AI: give units priorities based on the current influence, tension, and vulnerability maps
Figure out how the hell graphics get added...and find out where my artist has been >=(

This'll be my first game after having learned how to properly code and how not to make games. I have no idea what the current percent completed is, mainly since I haven't had a clue what the final product will look like (just letting the code drive me to my destination). I feel pressured to make everything perfect, but I do realize that I can't make everyone happy. I guess if no one whines about glitches and bugs, then I did my job well.

I really hate adding more shit to my todo list at this point, but I feel this is important:
Todo #17: Finish this game

If you see this post any time soon...hey