| This journal sucks and is now about Mario |
[Apr. 14th, 2009|04:14 pm] |
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The lost levels (original Super Mario Bros 2) is actually lots of fun, but it's also where Kaizo-esque bullshit like putting invisible blocks in the middle of a jump originate. It's decent if you always get to start on the stage where you last died, but I can't imagine anyone having the patience to beat the whole thing with just five lives, like the first SMB. |
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| (no subject) |
[Mar. 10th, 2009|08:18 am] |
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The other thing that I learned from school is that doing a half-assed job on two things will give you a better result than putting in a full effort on one thing, so maybe it's not such a good model for life. |
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| This journal sucks and is now about paper thin differences |
[Mar. 9th, 2009|04:37 am] |
Something that I've realized recently: For a lot of things, the amount of effort needed to do something *well* is not that much greater than the effort to get something done at all. I learned this more from school than anything else, where I have a bad habit of leaving ridiculous holes in everything I do that could be fixed easily, like writing an essay hours before it's due and not putting in the time to revise simple grammatical mistakes, or studying 90% of the material for a test and then just completely skip the last 10%. It's basically like trying to jog for three miles and then giving up a hundred yards short of the mark, or making an really good game that gets ruined by a glaring yet easily-fixed bug halfway through. lol sephy is an idiot.
So my addendum to my New Years resolution is going to be to put that extra 100 yards back into everything I do! |
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| This journal sucks and is now about plotscripting |
[Mar. 1st, 2009|08:52 pm] |
So, what programs do people like you use for writing scripts in OHR? I've been putting up with HssEd for ten years and I've just about fucking had it with getting asked where Hspeak.exe is every time I compile, all the random runtime errors, and the font reverting to FixedSys every time I start the program up. AFsadtiqejio;jgh
I could use Notepad, but I'd rather use something that lets me compile the program with a single keypress. Any suggestions? |
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| This journal sucks and is now about ice cream |
[Feb. 24th, 2009|08:37 pm] |
I understand now that ice cream cones are made for freezing Winter days. (God damn me. I don't care if it makes me fat or a woman, but I love sweets.) Yes, my hand was ready to snap off by the time I got back to my room because I was holding the ice cream cone instead of sticking it in a pocket, and yes, I had one hell of a head freeze from eating it too fast, but freezing Winter days are the only days you can eat ice cream without having it melt and drip on your shoes. (Seriously, my ice cream not even drop!)
Plus I'm kind of a cold masochist.
Anyways, if you're going to eat ice cream during the summer, buy a vanilla cone or anything else that has a light color, since it'll reflect more of the sunlight and melt more slowly. Chocolate ice cream is horrible for summer. I mean, chocolate bars already melt readily under the sun even without the ice cream, and adding it to ice cream just turns it into something twice as melty. This is called the additive property of ice cream. I'm not sure if that's the exact name (I recall it involved a lot more latin words) but you can probably find it on Wikipedia if you search hard enough. |
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| This journal sucks and is now about the world |
[Feb. 18th, 2009|09:26 pm] |
My own personal cure for boredom and impatience: Whenever I get bored, I think about why stopping time is such an awesome superpower. I'll never have to worry about deadlines, and I can get more drawing done. It'd also be useful for setting up locked-room murders, I bet.
Well actually, I can't watch anime while time is stopped, so maybe it's not that awesome. But on the bright side, I can effectively stay awake 24 hours a day if I only sleep while time is stopped. Or is that not allowed? Speaking of which, do vampires sleep at all? Maybe Dio was pulling an all-nighter (or an all-dayer?) the day before Jotaro showed up, and that was the *real* real reason he lost. I'd pull an all-nighter in that situation too. |
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| This journal sucks and is now about art styles |
[Feb. 17th, 2009|02:02 pm] |
So I've been thinking recently, which I know is rare for me to do. Har har. Hyuk it up, you jerks. >:(
The most important part of a comic art style is flexibility. Having a style that looks pretty might be good for hooking a reader, but what keeps a person reading after that is going to be the writing and panel layouts, and THEN the real value of an art style is gonna be in how well it can accommodate to the varieties of scenes and situations that the script calls for. In the worst case, you end up having a "style" that *restricts* you from drawing what you want to draw.
In general, it might be a bad idea to think too much in terms of "art styles" at all. I mean, it all just starts with photorealism getting whittled down by time constraints.
I definitely went the wrong way somewhere around here, spending too much time looking at how other people draw things and not enough time practicing general techniques for drawing anything. |
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| (no subject) |
[Feb. 11th, 2009|08:13 pm] |
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Oh good, 250free is back again. I was getting worried for a sec there. Anyways, no net progress has occurred. I tried writing a smart and clever pathfinding script and it doesn't work. So now I'm writing a tedious and cumbersome script instead. Not now, I mean. A week from now. I have midterms this week. |
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| This journal sucks and is now about dreams |
[Feb. 7th, 2009|03:17 pm] |
I had a dream about an awesome Earthbound-ish RPG last night. It wasn't Earthbound-ish graphics wise. The graphics in battles, surprisingly, was completely made up of cartoon cutscenes like the ones from Professor Layton. However, it was Earthbound-ish humorwise and in the sense that all the enemies are wandering around on the map and you can see them before getting into a fight. What was fresh and unique, though, is that both of you also gets weapons you can use against the enemy and that they could use against you, like a bubble-gum shooter that ties up your opponents' arms. I got hit by one of those, but fortunately one of my characters had knife feet, so I had him yell expletives at the enemies and kick them in the neck when they got too close. The heroes eventually got out of the bubble-gum bindings by getting chewed on by a dragon and then blown into a bubble. Later there was a mist enemy that you can freeze into an ice cube, but depending on where the mist is you might freeze some other enemies or yourself in the process.
This is actually based on an idea I had a long time ago, so for once a dream stole an idea from me, rather than the other way around. Instead of a game where you try to figure out the enemy's "stats" and "weaknesses" and try to exploit them, it would be a game where you figure out an enemy's "habits" and how that enemy responds to each of your attacks and try to take advantage of that. I tried to do this in that series contest game involving some Martins or Pentamos or somesuch characters, where one of the characters had a "Taunt" move that was critical in several boss battles. Early in the game when you weren't actually supposed to have any elemental spells, you were supposed to "Taunt" the various slimes you find in the first area to cast those spells for you. Against the final boss, you can "Taunt" the center eye to have it prematurely shoot off its ultimate attack before it's charged up to full power (lol premature ejaculation). I maintain that all the battle designs were solid. The main reason why it flopped is that I ran out of time and didn't add any normal battles, and as a consequence all the boss battles were nonsensical and confusing instead of awesome.
But seriously, I added a walkthrough.txt to the zip file that *tells* you what you're supposed to do for each boss battle. You have no excuse. |
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| Day 2 |
[Feb. 6th, 2009|02:58 am] |
More stuff about Dracula's Castle Management.
For the moment, I'm compensating for "Bug 700" by reducing the dungeon's width. For the most part, tile-editing and unit-editing are working as they should. The next task would probably be writing a pathfinding script, and I've got a pretty good idea on how I want to do that. |
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| This journal sucks and is now about Dracula's Castle Management |
[Feb. 4th, 2009|10:30 pm] |
So I thought I'd try making a game or at least a demo for the Gameathon (partly inspired from that youtube video that Konami linked to a while ago involving "GOD DAMMIT" and "HYDRO STORM"). Barely anything's done yet, but I'm announcing it now anyways so that anyone else who's planning on or currently making a game called Dracula's Castle Management is stealing my idea and is liable to get his pants sued off.
What's done so far is basically just a variation of OHR Paint. Currently, each dungeon layout can be saved and brought back each time the game is loaded. I'm particularly happy about the OHR's global variable limits getting raised up to 2,000,000,000 (except it turns out that it doesn't actually work all that great. See: Bug 700).
So it's going to be a demo. It's just not worth it for me to work around the bug when it's just going to get fixed at some point down the line anyways. |
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| This journal sucks and is now about chess |
[Feb. 1st, 2009|01:36 am] |
I'm thinking about taking up chess. It seems like a fairly exciting game, and almost every sort of epic ingenuous strategem used in a manga battle can be related in someway to a chess technique.
Any type of combination whatsoever involves doing something seemingly unprofitable that ends up turning the tables. (Or, "A normal person when drowning would only think about swimming to the surface, but [So and so main character] is different! He does the opposite!")
The pin! (Or, "I have a sword at your son's throat, so you have no choice but to get mauled by a giant hippo and a dilapidated horse!")
The fork! (Or, "I have here in my right hand a car full of kids, and in my left is your girlfriend. You can only save one of them.)
The skewer! (Or, "It may seem like my attack missed, but I was actually aiming for this important plot device behind you!")
Of course, for a complicated manga battle you'd probably need a lot of background knowledge as well, such as the fact that there are air bubbles under the loose rocks at the bottom of a riverbed or the fact that you have the option of throwing rocks or knives at an opponent if he's outside the effective range of your Stand, but the basic strategic principles behind chess is bound to come in handy in lots of ventures, like war and love and etc.
I would really like to see more video games involve some of this as well. There's a good deal of calculations and number-crunching involved with most games, but that's the topic of a future post, "This journal sucks and is now about ingenuity vs calculation". |
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| This journal sucks and is now about airplanes |
[Jan. 18th, 2009|03:17 pm] |
Yesterday was the first time I ever got an airplane seat where the view wasn't blocked by the wings. AND it was on a day where the skies were clear too. Whoo~
On an unrelated note, yesterday was the first time I ever got motion sick on an airplane and threw up into a bag. |
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rmsephy's journal