Category Archives: Uncategorized

Day 4 – How to Ask Good Questions

Posted by aabicus on

Okay, so I predicted yesterday that the next video would be installing Unity, you know since we downloaded it, but the next video is actually “How to Ask Good Questions”. Sounds dumb but it’s a fifteen minute video, so the effort answers itself really.

To be honest, I don’t expect to ask many questions. I’m jumping into this class super late, and I bet I’ll be able to use internet searches to find every single question before I’ve even asked it. Udemy comes with its own forums and stuff, and each video is so specific I highly doubt I’ll come across some unique problem so specific that no user ever has had that problem.

Day 3

Posted by aabicus on

Crimony, this series is slower than I expected. Today we downloaded Unity and called it a day. I know I should be overachieving and doing multiple videos a day just to prove how mind-crushingly awesome I am, but I’m enjoying the “days off” while I can. Presumably shit gets real after this and I’m going to have my hands full later in the series.

Happy aabicus’s Birthday Eve

Posted by aabicus on

Yesterday I predicted that we’d download Unity today, and I was wrong 😦 Episode 2, named “Welcome to the Course” involves him reiterating what he covered last episode and going over his own backstory and his skill level. I’m being super sparse, and that’s cause I don’t want Udemy to show up and start CnDing me for revealing too much about the video. If you want to know the nitty gritty you’ll have to go buy the course yourself.

But he ended the video by saying that tomorrow we’ll be downloading Unity, so I can stop doddering around and start some hardcore coding. Wish me luck!

(Also, finished this at 11:56pm means I am NOT late! Ignore WordPress claiming this was posted December 10th, they’re LYING)

Happy Birthday Me!

Posted by aabicus on

It’s aabicus’ birthday! Hooray for aabicus!

Today’s video was the intro video. Nothing happened, the professor went over what to expect from the class. We’ll be programming in C  sharp, which my coding friend said is “nice because you don’t have to worry about pointers” whatever that means. We’ll be making a number of different games, from text adventures to 3D bowling games to first-person shooters, and sharing these games on Gamebucket.

We’ll be starting in Unity 4 but later upgrading to Unity 5. See you tomorrow! I’m predicting tomorrow he makes us download Unity.

Happy Pearl Harbor day! This is not a drill!

Posted by aabicus on

Wow! It’s been a long time since I posted. WordPress has changed a lot since I posted. What the hell is all this?

Well, I don’t need to justify myself to all of you. I bet every one of you waited perfectly patiently for me to post again. Because none of you exist. So I can post whatever I want 😀 And I’m posting my new year’s resolution. In December.

Specifically the day right before my birthday. That’s right, tomorrow’s my birthday! And to celebrate, I’m taking one of these courses every day for the rest of my life. Or at least until the course is over. A tall order, but I’m sick of not being a real game developer. I want those darn ideas in my head to go away by becoming real games, and more importantly, I want to make games for money and quit my customer service job.

So starting tomorrow (lol, don’t want it badly enough to start tonight! \m/ ) I’m doing a video a day. And I’ll kinda like sum up what I learned and stuff on here. So stay tuned.

Failed Project Showcase

Posted by aabicus on

A lot of video game ideas have rolled down the ole hickory trunk on this blog, and to date none have reached the illustrious perch of completion. (All my attempts at written-word projects have though!) Every serious video game attempt has reached chronicling on this blog somewhere, however, except one. So I thought I’d acknowledge its existence so it didn’t feel left out.

Reaching both genesis and cancellation shortly after the AGS project, Seska Donitz was going to be a project starring the titular character, a daughter of (believe it or not) Werner Donitz and Seska on Gaman’s moon. Taking place like 50 years or so after the events of Ship of State, it would follow her life on the merged colony of Verner as she attempts to recover the pieces of the Einstein-Rosen bridge and open it to Earth. Sounded RPG-ey enough, and I was trying out RPG Maker so it seemed a fair starting point. Unfortunately, I got as far as the character creator and got fed up with the incredibly low levels of customization. You could barely adjust anything, at least from what I could tell, and I didn’t even see a way to upload custom sprites. So it never got beyond trying to create the titular character, who also looked nothing like I imagined her.

Pictured: Literally the complete output of my attempts to make something in RPG Maker.

Pictured: Literally the complete output of my attempts to make a game in RPG Maker.

Now the only thing I loved about this project was the story. It’s got a great story behind it, and while nobody else liked the Gaman series, I’ve always wanted to jump back in and give it something that felt like an ending. If I ever revive this project, though, it will most assuredly happen in Multimedia Fusion 2, since I recently learned about ctrl-K which lets you add layers (for example, a HUD) which can operate independently of the camera. So this one may see a revival some day. You never know.

No, I’m not Dead.

Posted by aabicus on

I just can’t figure out how to make a video showcasing the first level.

I have actually been working on Gamer 2, I swear, and I’ve finished a decent chunk of the city level (to tie in with the story leaving off with Hailey in a city.) I just can’t get FRAPS to recognize the game as the primary window, and I’m used to FRAPSing everything. I’m working with learning Livestream, if I can get that you can expect a video on the next week. (Ha!)

But for now, here are some screenshots of what will be in that video:

Hailey 1 Hailey 2 Hailey 3

Everything you see is ready to play; everyone is fully animated and gameplay is (while currently simplistic) functional. The game just needs to be a bit longer, methinks.

What you should know about me

Posted by aabicus on

I hand-write everything before I transcribe it onto the computer.

I know that’s probably unusual in this era of technology but I find I get too distracted when trying to write something on the computer. T challenge myself, I drafted this post on the computer; I stopped and screwed around t least 3 times while writing it and finished in 3 hours. Yeah.

Anyway, this matters because Episodes 1, 2, and 3 are completed in writing, but haven’t been transcribed. Just thought I’d clarify what it means when I say when I’ve written it but can’t post it yet.

The Main Character

Posted by aabicus on

For the purpose of the video game, there is very little you need to know about ROSS, The protagonist of this still-unnamed video game. He escaped his prior lodgings, which are insinuated to be rather unpleasant, and now travels the Internet as a fugitive program. The first thing he’ll do is break into a secure server by impersonating a human being, his specialty at his former lodgings. (For all zero of you interested in the actual canon, this takes place between Drake’s demonstration at New Peenemunde and ROSS meeting Shelton at that fishing town).

I’m not going crazy on the personality, as this is my first game, and AI have always struck me as more straightforward in their emotions (if you could call them that) than organic beings. ROSS will be hesitant to trust others and a pretty straightforward ‘loner’ type who learns to trust others…if ‘Memento’ taught me anything its that you need a really simple premise if you plan on changing the world in any unrecognizable way. admittedly my changes to the world order aren’t nearly as big as Nolan’s, but I’m playing it safe for my first game. For a class I read a ‘comic’ book recently called “Meanwhile” by Jason Shiga, and while I enjoyed it a fair amount of the class didn’t get it, and I think it’s because his plot (which involved time travel and mind reading and a machine that can kill everyone on the planet) was just as confusing and complicated as his narrative structure, and people need something to grasp onto to anchor them in the world. Since I barely understand how the world of the video game works, I’m making that the variable and keeping story (something I understand) anchorable.

Take Two

Posted by aabicus on

I bet all zero of you reading this are noticing the significant timestamp between now and the last post and have given up on this blog. While I’m sorry to have let you nonexistent people down, I’m back in the saddle and working on a game. It’s just not the same game.

I finished the Javascript class and made a checkers game, but I didn’t really learn enough to make the game I hoped to. So this quarter, I plan to take this blog a different direction; I’m going to make a bunch of games, each using a different popular ‘game maker’ on the internet. The first up is “Adventure Game Studio”, and in order to keep my interest peaked in the project most games will expand on some story in the Darwin’s Soldiers canon.