Monthly Archives: January 2018

Dev Diary #0

Posted by aabicus on

New quarter, new set of dev diaries! They didn’t actually assign one this week, but I’m writing one anything just for recordkeeping purposes. These upcoming Dev Diaries are gonna have a slightly different tone from the old ones because we need to write them as if they were press releases. So kinda like the “What We Are Up To” updates the Killing Floor 2 devs love to release. And I don’t think a press release would talk about the first (and, honestly, only) hurdle we had to tackle: somehow it wasn’t until our third meeting as a team that I finally discovered none of them played shooters. Like, there were fundamental elements to the core concept of shooters that they were really missing. So yesterday, we skipped our daily meeting and all played Team Fortress 2 together on a server full of bots. They had a blast, learned a lot about the relationship between different classifications of firearm, and I’m hoping I can get them to play Counter-Strike next, even if it probably won’t be as fun and accessible.

And on every other front, we’re ahead of the 8-ball. San Jose University dropped a bombshell that they won’t be sharing their artists with us next year, which affects every team except us because we already have Will and his art degree. Unity decided to restrict free Unity Collab to teams of three or less, which all the teams are freaking out about. Luckily, my team is only four people and I don’t program, so the other three just made a Collab and we’re off to the races. Me, I’ve been working on a design wiki, since I love making wikis and I’ve found it a great way to sort my thoughts out in a clear, understandable way. Enjoy looking at what you see, because my team requested that I port everything to a private wiki so we aren’t forced to commit to everything I write down. A reasonable concern, I just have an uncontrollable urge to publish everything I ever work on so the hypothetical masses can see it. I really need to work on reining that in.

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Had fun making these little filler icons too. They’re not Rembrandt, but I do think I’m getting better at pixel art. 

 

I was cited in an academic book!

Posted by aabicus on

So I was googling my username, and on like the seventh page of Google I found this: Kings of Greek Mythology by Burton Menomi. For whatever ungodly reason, he decided to cite the Wikipedia page about Odysseus, and include the names of every single user who’d edited the page up to that point. I don’t even know what edit I made, but now I can say my writings have been cited in an academic publication.

aabicus citation.png

Update: Went and checked my contributions history, looks like it was this sentence about Mrs. Dalloway. At least I wasn’t just fixing a missing comma or something.

 

That’ll go nicely with my other dubious achievements, which include ordained minister of the Church of Universal Life, only verified Overwatch player to level-up three times after a single match, winner of the first PvP duel in Legends of Equestria history, and the existence of this bizarre video that someone made to show how to (incorrectly) pronounce my username.

Happy New Year! I drew a box

Posted by aabicus on

Last year’s new year’s resolution was to give up sugar drinks and candy. I’ve been doing really well, and I’ve lost a bunch of weight. Down to 210, only ten pounds over what I’m supposed to weigh at my age, and this year I’m taking the next step and doing meal prep Sunday. I need to eat healthier, this is the only life I’m going to get, and I’m not going back to the chronic heart pains that used to haunt me since I finished undergraduate.

But this isn’t my New Years’ resolution: instead I’m spending it learning how to art good. Drawabox is an ongoing art lesson made by a programmer who wanted to apply the same practical and analytical coding mindset to learning art. I’m really attracted by that attitude, so my New year’s resolution is to make progress on drawabox every day. (It was originally 1 lesson a day, but the website stresses that you shouldn’t put solid deadlines and schedules, and instead just focus on never falling completely off the boat.)

That being said, I blitzed through the first lesson because I’m not a complete newcomer to art. It was entirely drawing lines, something I’ve been doing in the margins of my schoolnotes since first grade. I was working in pencil right up until the part where he mentioned you’re supposed to work in pen, and it’s in a lined spiral notebook because I don’t have a sketchbook at my parent’s house. You’re supposed to turn your work into the subreddit, but I’ll redo the lesson on proper blank paper tomorrow and turn that in. I can’t properly do the work until I’m back home in Santa Clara.

But you nonexistant readers can still see it!

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WordPress keeps forcibly rotating the image. It’s oriented properly when I upload it, I promise

 

Seriously took me like five minutes. The hardest part was the “ghosting” lines, where you place two lines and then draw a line connecting the two. I’ll put in more time tomorrow, this is really just to get the ball rolling. No time like the first of January, right?