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