| (no subject) |
[Nov. 21st, 2009|01:02 am] |
Parents paid a surprise visit and confiscated my scanner. My life sucks. |
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| Sob Story Starring Sephy (Subtitle: Sephy's Grammatical Fantasy Wonderland) |
[Nov. 16th, 2009|04:09 am] |
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Wonderful. Last night's Family Guy stole one of the jokes I had written for my touhou doujin that I would've made first if I hadn't have to have cancelled it. My laptop's hard drive crashing cost me a lawsuit that I could've filed if I woulda coulda shoulda. Worst freaking luck ever. |
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| Weekly update |
[Nov. 9th, 2009|12:36 pm] |
I had this horrible sci-fi horror adventure dream last night. Apparently I was on my way from a Wal-mart at night when *aliens* attacked with a virus that made people's limbs arbitrarily turn into stumps. Towards the end I was trying to stuff all the limbless people into a shopping cart so I could walk them over to the hospital, while trying not to touch any of them directly because I don't know how contagious the virus is.
That had nothing to do with the weekly update.
Finally finished the boss theme that I was talking about last week. I've kind of been doing things out of order here and there, so now I'm trying to get started on the battle system. Maybe I'll have some impressive screenshots by next week, if I can figure this damn menu editing thing out. |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 6th, 2009|03:35 pm] |
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fuck daylight savings. i'd rather have an extra hour of sun in the evening than an extra hour of day in the morning. |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 4th, 2009|04:50 pm] |
This is the best boss theme I've heard, like, ever. Or maybe just so far this year, but it almost makes me want to go buy Xenosaga 3, get really confused about the plot and end up buying the first two games as well. Except I won't because I don't have that kind of money, and I've learned my lesson about buying games for the music after that Ar Tonelico 2 disaster. I'll probably try to make a MIDI of this song later this week, for practice. |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 2nd, 2009|06:19 pm] |
Shit, I know I promised to do weekly update logs, but I haven't really gotten much done in the past week what with homework and all. Let's see...
- I spent a lot of time tweaking a boss theme. Technically, version 1 was finished back in September, but I thought it ended kind of abruptly, so I tried writing another ending, which wound up sounding really disorganized and ends even *more* abruptly. I'm going to sleep on this for a bit.
EDIT: Okay, the more I listen to it the less I like it. I don't even feel like linking it here anymore. This week was a waste, folks.
- I drew... a spinny star sprite? It's not much, not really worth showing off here.
In other news, I think I was a much better person back when I was drawing LDM. Nowadays I spend so much time worrying about how to sound smart that I forgot how to just be silly without worrying about stepping on anyone's toes. The college years were kind of a waste like that. |
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| (no subject) |
[Oct. 30th, 2009|01:58 pm] |
I remember way back when I thought there were games that had good stories but horrible gameplay, which is just wrong. If a game really had a good story but mediocre gameplay, people would still think of it as a good game, the same way people think Bliss and Xenogears are good games. Most story-driven games that marginalize the gameplay have shoddy stories as well.
I came up with this scale recently (as in, like, right now) for distinguishing between bad, mediocre, and good works of art. Mind you, I'm talking not so much about the quality of the art itself as about how the audience responds to it. (i.e. a "good" piece of art is something that other people will think is good and vice versa)
- A "bad" work of art is something that actively offends people's senses. In art, this might be a character that's drawn horribly out of proportion. In music, this might be a sequence of out-of-tune notes. It's the sort of thing that you would never want to look at or listen to twice.
- A "mediocre" work of art is something that's devoid of anything bad. People won't throw up looking at or listening to it, but it's not something they would write a great review about either. Art in this category tends to be described as "generic".
- A "good" work of art is something that has at least one really good and unique idea, that makes it stand out from the mediocre category.
It's a bit more complicated than a tier system though. It's actually easy to come up with "good" ideas. Everyone has unique ideas that could work well in a work of art. The hard part is making your art "mediocre" first. You can have a really "good" plot twist and people will think your story sucks if it has "bad" character development and dialogue. You can have a "good" melody for a song, but people won't be able to enjoy it unless you have at least a "mediocre" sense of instrument selection and harmony. I see a lot of games that have "good" ideas, very "good" ideas (lolquotes), but that fall short in the execution department and become "bad" games. If a "mediocre" game has one "good" point about it, people will focus on that good point. But if a "good" game has a single "bad" point in it, people will focus on that bad point. "Good" ideas come from sparks of inspiration, but knowing how to make your game "mediocre" comes from memorizing a bunch rules and concepts. It's like how Einstein's Theory of Relativity was a "good" idea. How formulating it made him a genius, but he needed a mediocre understanding of physics before anyone would take him seriously.
Granted, this is all in generalization. People all have different sense about what's "good" or what's "bad", but this usually only extends between two tiers. People might argue about what's good and what's mediocre, or what's mediocre and what's bad, but in general there aren't any confusion between what's "good" and what's "bad". People who like Xenogears think it had a great story and mediocre gameplay. People who don't like it probably think it had a mediocre story and bad gameplay. |
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| resolution for the last two months |
[Oct. 26th, 2009|05:27 pm] |
From now until the end of the year, I'm not going to waste a second of my free time doing anything other than drawing comics, making games, and writing LJ entries about me drawing comics or making games. Going to make at most weekly progress reports to keep myself on track.
- Sephy |
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| A public service message |
[Oct. 23rd, 2009|12:46 am] |
A Witch's Tale sucks. It's 20 hours of wasting your time.
Listen, game designers. When you give your character an ability, make a situation where it would be extra effective, and then make a situation where it wouldn't be as effective, and then make a situation where it would backfire on the player.
Those are the basics, okay? |
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| RMSephy wants a manlier voice |
[Oct. 22nd, 2009|02:56 pm] |
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My voice sucks, blah blah blah. Did I really click on Edit Message instead of Post a New Message? D: |
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| Sengoku Rance (戦国ランス) |
[Oct. 21st, 2009|12:31 am] |
I could hardly believe it myself that something like this exists, but it's an adult dating sim crossed with a Koei-style strategy game. And the real cincher is that the game itself is actually really well designed and fun, even without all the hard-core porn. It actually makes you think several moves ahead during battles and use different strategies for playing offensively and defensively.
But oh my god is this such a timesink. Plus, it's a porn game, so maybe it's not everybody's cup of cake. |
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| (no subject) |
[Oct. 15th, 2009|01:15 am] |
New laptop came in the mail today (or old laptop, depending on how you want to look at it. My parents sent me the laptop that I used during high school). The rubber thing under the right key is gone, so I stuck in a piece of an eraser to compensate for the moment. This should be interesting for the next two months.
Yes, the right key. I'll have a hard time playing sidescrollers where the primary direction of movement is left to right. Anyone know of any titles where you move from the right to the left? 8D |
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| This journal sucks and is now about SRPGs |
[Oct. 11th, 2009|12:43 pm] |
It kind of feels like there's some sort of misconception out there, one that can only be address here by me: the great Sephy-whop.
Anyways, I get the idea that there are people who think Final Fantasy Tactics is a good game because it's a strategy RPG.
Okay, fine. Maybe I'm the only one who ever thought that, but it's not the case. What makes Final Fantasy Tactics great is its jobs and ability system, and the flexibility it gives the player in developing his character. Yet instead of keeping what was great about the jobs system and maybe trying it out in other types of games, they threw it out and kept making more SRPGs.
What's great about FFT's job system is that it gives you total freedom from the very start as to how you want to develop your characters. Immediately after the third battle, you can start grinding to unlock all the classes and learn any ability you want. It's like picking out toys from a store where everything is on display. In this sense, it's like the original Zelda for the NES, that gives you the whole map to explore from the get-go.
FFTA gives you slightly less freedom, since you learn your job abilities from weapons you buy from the shop. You have a limited supply of toys to pick from, but you can also be fairly confident that any toy that you need will be on sale when you need it. Of course, the law system (which is really what ruins the game) means that you can't use any toy you want when you want to use it. So maybe it's like a more recent Zelda game that gradually gives you more places to explore, but that arbitrarily disables your sword, your bombs, or your arrows while you play.
FFTA2 is a wreck, in this respect (and lots more). You still learn abilities from weapons, but you don't get the weapons from an automatically updated store anymore. Instead, you send items to a bazaar, and they give you a (seemingly random) weapon. So now they make you earn your toys, only they're not going to tell you which toy they'll give you. You'll see other kids playing with their toys, and you'll wonder how you can get those same toys, but the game won't tell you. Even the jobs themselves have to be gotten from quests, so for the first half of the game you'll pick up a ton of weapons for a job that you have no idea how to get. You'll have a bunch of toys around you that look kind of fun but you can't play with them until you're older. |
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| October 10 |
[Oct. 10th, 2009|08:31 pm] |
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- Last night's dream involved me being on a field trip at CNN's headquarters when it gets attacked by ESPN's military forces. We started out on a huge boat when a helicopter suddenly comes into view and starts firing missiles at the front of the ship. While we were still coming to our senses, a bunch of submarines entered the port and started firing torpedos at us. Once we finally got off the ship, giant blimps start passing by overhead and dropping warheads. We started evacuating to an underground escape tunnel (taking the stairs, of course, because I've wisened up to the way elevators work in my dreams). Surprisingly, the only people who died during all of this were the people who worked at CNN. |
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| This journal sucks and my lappy is dead |
[Oct. 9th, 2009|03:44 pm] |
My life is fantastic.
The very first hour of Fall Break I got home to see my laptop sputtering on the brink of death. Tried restarting it only to get a "disk read error". The tech guy basically said that the hard drive is dead and needs to be replaced. This is like an exact rerun of what happened two years ago, including the fact that my laptop died on the very first day of some break or other. I'm almost positive that I wrote a rant whining about it on LJ, but I can't find that post so I probably just whined a lot on IRC.
So, this means I won't be able to finish the doujin on time for the October 15 deadline, which I had already drawn halfway and was *planning* to finish up over fall break. I was literally skipping on the way back to my room because I had just thought up a good joke.
It means I've lost all of my progress on my OHR projects but LOLOLOL that's okay because I never finish any of my games anyways. Most of the time because something ALWAYS happens to my data whenever I dare to spend more than three weeks on a game. Freaking hell.
AND I've lost all of my e-mails, including ones that tell me when some upcoming assignments are due and WHAT those assignments ARE. So I can rule out this incident being an act of God to try to get me to stop wasting my time drawing comics and spend more time studying.
My life sucks. I'd make an emo userpic for this LJ post but ROFLMAO I don't have photoshop anymore (and I'm too lazy). I mean, sure, it's kind of out of place to use a laughing blue-haired chick for this post, but she's also crying, and that's good enough for me.
EDIT:
The actual repair people aren't going to pick up the laptop until Monday, so in the meantime I'm going to try doing naughty things to it to see if I can bring it back to life. |
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| (no subject) |
[Sep. 29th, 2009|02:44 am] |
I discovered Carlos Huante's drawings today (through a CP post, incidentally). I think he's a character designer for a bunch of monster movies, but there's no wiki article on the guy so someone's going to have to confirm that for me. The guy's pictures are freaking gorgeous.
Haha, I jest. His pictures are hideous (they're mostly monster designs and the like, after all), but they're the good sort of hideous. One thing I really like to see in an art style is the ability to come up with something completely fantastic and make it look like something that could exist in real life. This is one of the things I like about Berserk and JoJo's (later) art styles, and something I want to learn to imitate myself.
Anyways, I have some references to practice with for a couple of months. |
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| Mystic Ark again |
[Sep. 24th, 2009|04:17 am] |
Dear LJ. I'm sorry for jumping to conclusions after playing through half of the first world and then using emulator hax to raise all of my characters to level 60. The battles aren't tedious and boring. They're fun and awesome. And the game doesn't force you to grind. The game shoves gold and EXP down your throat like a businessman strangling a cheap whore. That said, the game is perfect in every way I can imagine.
Anyways, Aeon Genesis just released *their* translation of Mystic Ark a few days ago, and I promised myself that I'd play it again when the patch came out. To be honest, I like Dynamic-Design's patch a little better, despite all the hyping over AGTP's translation. They both have their ups and down, but I think D-D's dialogue had a lot more charm and personality. The only big thing AGTP's managed to do differently is make the talking fireplace sound like a retard. I used to look forward to getting hints from it after each world, and now it only gives me a headache.
I'll play through to the end and see if it gets any better. |
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| Mario and Luigi |
[Sep. 20th, 2009|05:49 pm] |
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There's something really satisfying about countering attacks with a Bowser punch. |
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