Category Archives: Videography

Next of Kin Now Live!

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Next of Kin is now being posted on the Gang of Five! New chapter every day! Those of who clicked the Google Doc linked in the last blog post are now tasting karmic justice, since you’ve been spoiled. Serves you right.

If you’re curious what else I’ve been up to these days, I’ve been video editing for MasterClass! They’re kinda like an online course-offering website that has lots of big-name teachers like James Patterson and Gordon Ramsay, who give a series of online lectures based on the field that made them famous. I can’t go into more detail for NDA reasons but it’s been a really great opportunity and I’ve loved working with them. I’d actually taken their Patterson course back in the day, so it’s cool to get a behind-the-scenes look at how they make their courses. Plus it’s forced me to learn a lot of little things about Photoshop and Premiere I hadn’t known previously; Photoshop in particular is consistently surprising me with the amazing features it’s hiding. It’s got this thing called “batch processing” where you can set some parameters and it’ll execute them on every photo in a specific folder, which has been amazing for quickly converting something from PNG to TIFF and ensuring everything has the same resolution. I can see why nobody can quit Photoshop once they’ve learned it.

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didn’t even realize the keys were backlit till I plugged it in, fucking score

Other fun news: I’ve purchased a silent keyboard, since the old one’s Spacebar died due to overuse. See, Overwatch’s Lucio is a jumping machine and so I’m constantly mashing the poor spacebar like it owes me money. This new keyboard has far softer keys, which has resulted in me constantly doubble-tyyping lettters but I think it’ll be a lot nicer on my recordings whenever I have open mic on.

Because I’m planning on going into streaming! I’m getting a second monitor for my birthday, and I literally already own everything I’d need to leap into that pool. I’ll be honest, I plan to stream on Mixer both because I think it’s an up-and-coming platform and because I love the ability to add interactive buttons that viewers can click. My early plan is to create a rudimentary polling system where people can vote on which Overwatch healer I play the next round as (including Soldier 76 of course), and expand from there if it works. Streaming is the main online platform I’m not currently taking advantage of, and it’ll likely be a few months before I can stream regularly but I’m setting the pieces in motion.

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I added transparency to this pic with Photoshop! :3

Also, while I’m calling out purchases and things that exceeded my expectations, my younger brother gifted me a FitBit because he’s way more financially successful than me, and I love it way more than I expected to. It tracks your steps, your sleep, and you can input your meals into the app and find out how many calories above your diet you’re actually eating. The first step in fixing your sleep schedule, eating habits, and exercise routine is to find out just how badly you’re currently doing, so you can just try to beat your progress last week.

Thank you for coming to this week’s episode of Consumer Electronics, I’m your host aabicus, allow me to play you out with 21 seconds of me practicing the Ken Burns effect:

 

 

RIP my wallet

Posted by aabicus on

Usually people are speaking in synecdoche when they write that, jokingly referring to some expensive luxury item or Steam Summer sale they can’t resist, but in this case, my literal wallet has finally died.

wallet.png

Above: my old weatherbeaten wallet. Below: the until-now unused wallet my brother got me last Christmas, with my ID lazily photoshopped over

My wallet is the oldest item I possess by far, even factoring in that I’ve used it every single day of its life. I picked it out after graduating fifth grade, since I was getting library cards and credit cards and other things that required too many slots to fit into my plastic kid’s wallet. It followed me through high school, college, Ohio, Texas, back to California, and now it’s retiring at the very end of my Master’s program. It visited England, Scotland, Norway, Germany, France, Spain, Canada, Mexico, and countless US states. God only knows how many dollars, notes, cards, keys, and coins that have passed through it.

It’s weird to think I’m moving onto the next phase of my life without it. I’ve got a replacement all ready to go courtesy of Jake, but part of me wants to shell out for a wallet restoration place and keep the legend going (especially since the Velcro works perfectly, it’s just the worn-through fabric back that needs replacing). Something I can think about in September, once I’ve graduated and some of these distractions are resolved. Either way I think it’ll appreciate a short break.

If you want to know about some of these other things, I made an apology video for the YouTube channel since I’ve been letting it stagnate as my graduation looms:

 

And finally, its a bust at Pixelberry, but I can’t say I didn’t give it my all. I finished and returned the writing sample, and they sent me a form rejection. So I wrote back asking if I could downgrade to their Junior Writing position. Not content to leave my chances up to one email, I took a day off school and Ubered down there with a hard copy of my application.

Pixelberry was in a large multicorporate building, I had to sneak in at the same time someone exited the front entrance. Pixelberry’s office was locked with a fob, and I think everyone was at lunch so I loitered in the courtyard till 12:45. Then I flagged someone down at the front desk and asked to deliver my application to HR. They let me go in where I gave my printed application directly to the guy in HR. Explained I’d been in the running for Senior Writer and didn’t get it, so now I’m applying for junior and wanted to make sure they had a paper copy. He seemed nice, I think I made a good impression on him. either way, my efforts earned me a personalized rejection, which I genuinely consider a win. They ‘appreciated my persistence’ but they didn’t think my assessment ‘demonstrates the qualities they look for in our writers.’ Which is probably true; in all honesty I had a hell of a time writing it since teen romance is somewhat out of my comfortable writing purview.

So that’s the end of that story just kidding they recently opened up for a QA Story Tester position and I’m already printing out my application for another trip down there. I’m sure they can’t wait to hear from me again.

 

A Pizza the Action – first look

Posted by aabicus on

I’m working on my next game title! This one’s all about procedural generation, since it started as a final project for my ProcGen class. You can see the video I turned in for said project here:

 

(or the tie-in PowerPoint, which I’m not going to record myself presenting because it’s only a five-minute presentation)

I’m almost immediately taking a two-week break from this game as I survive finals and travel around showcasing Major League Magic at various cool events like Sammy’s Showcase and The Mix, and I don’t suspect I’ll be done with this game any time soon. It’s looking to be something of a complicated endeavor, (I’m learning more about the RandRange command than I ever cared to) but I am excited to finally get to use my “flying angelic pizza sprite” in an actual game 😀

New trailer

Posted by aabicus on

For whatever reason I’m turning into more and more of a videographer. Guess that’s to be expected when my YouTube channel is the only thing taking off of my various creative enterprises, not that I’m complaining.

Interesting conundrum with the new trailer I made for Major League Magic. People who have never seen the game before like it, and people who are familiar with the game have a bunch of things they think I should change. So far I’ve mostly committed to keeping it as it is for that reason, so have a look if you want. Don’t tell anyone though, it hasn’t officially gone live yet:

 

In less than a week we’re going to The Mix, and I’m gonna dress up in a wizard’s costume and drum up hype for the game. We’re gonna have two monitors setup for players to fight each other, and a third bigger monitor letting the crowd see what’s going on. I’m pretty excited, I think this could go super well.

But before that I need to make a press kit, and I’m trying to create a small backlog of Payday videos so my YouTube channel doesn’t take a 2-week break at the same time I do. Gonna travel to see my brother graduate college, then visiting a friend in St. Louis for the rest of the summer off.

More Exciting YouTube Happenstances

Posted by aabicus on

Last time I used this title I wrote about YouTube, programming and LinkedIn. I have more updates on two of those fronts.

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Believe it or not, lowered viewer duration is a good thing when the decision that launched your viewerbase is “my videos do not exceed two minutes”

The YouTube channel is exceeding all my expectations, with a huge boost in subscribers, comments, and views ever since I switched to a Tuesday/Friday schedule and started aggressively promoting it on social media. My main goal right now is to keep this momentum (or, at worse, maintain my current viewerbase) until Overkill releases Overkill’s The Walking Dead, and try to get my foot in that door on the ground floor. Best case scenario for me is that the game has an initially disappointing response, but Overkill saves it through consistent hard work and frequent patches (which is what happened with Payday 2 and RAID WWII, so odds are good that’s how it’s going to pan out). Runner-up situation is that the game is just straight good from the word go, but that’ll mean I have a lot more competition (like what happened to me with Overwatch.) Either way, I’m just super happy that after two years of releasing videos, they’ve finally started gaining traction.

In other news, the newest C++ assignment was kicking my ass until I spoke to the professor. It’s called “the flocking assignment” because it involves creating a bunch of birds (aka triangles) that chill in a big cloud and disperse with the press of buttons. It’s another SFML assignment and even the actual programmers are having trouble with it. After about ten hours with the tutors last weekend, I finally just spoke to the professor because I wanted to work on my final exam instead of this. He crunched the numbers, and I can still pass the class even if I get a zero because I’ve turned every other assignment in, so thank god. I’ll still probably turn in what I got for partial credit. Looking forward to the final project, by the way, its a Clickteam Fusion assignment where the player fights enemies in a procedurally-generated environment by grabbing procedural-generated weapons. Or at least that’s the goal. At the moment I’m still working on the procedural-generated environment. Should have more to report later.

Exciting YouTube Happenstances

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Couple of cool things happening on my other social medias:

1. The SPUF of Legend hit its 100th subscriber, which means I finally qualify for a custom URL: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheSPUFofLegend Turns out they actually don’t let you choose that custom URL, you just hit the ‘Enable custom URL’ button and it turns your channel name into a hyperlink. But it’s still lightyears better than that cavalcade of letters and numbers you get by default!

2. Several videos on there are doing surprisingly well! The most notable of which are two presentations which are literally just recordings of lectures I gave for classes at school: Team Fortress Classic: Its Development, Gameplay, and Legacy, and Procedural Content Generation in Left 4 Dead 2. Both of them got triple-digit viewcounts within their first week, and the tie-in reddit threads quickly hit the top of their related subreddits. r/l4d2 even stickied it ^_^ I actually plan to start doing “lectures turned into videos” that are just me talking with a PowerPoint running in the background. God knows they were easier to make than the gameplay-synced-to-voiceovers I normally make.

3. This one isn’t YouTube, but I also scored a killer custom URL on LinkedIn. This time I actually had to type stuff until I found one available, and it blew my mind that my full first and last name were just available. Those other Nicholas Halseys were really sleeping on the job, I don’t know how we got all the way to 2018 without any of us snatching it up.

4. And, as we stray further and further from the point of this post, have an unfinished story where Flora learns C++. It was a failed attempt by me to approach C++ through another lens, to try and view it objectively instead of from the usual ‘oh god I don’t get any of this I’m doomed‘ purview that tends to prevail. With Destler’s class over, I have literally no motivation to ever touch this story again. But who knows, supposedly Whitehead’s class is putting C++ back on the menu, so Flora might be voiding more functions yet.

Edit 9/9/2019: I literally platinum’d someone on reddit to finish the code, so the story is now officially finished. In my defense, I’m long graduated by the time I posted this update.

 

STAR_’s and Bars

Posted by aabicus on

I feel really bad for star these days. He’s a huge inspiration to me and the first Youtuber I ever got addicted to, and a lot of what I’ve accomplished was because he provided the spark. But he seems really sad in his streams, and it shows in the videos he uploads. I don’t think he’d even read a message were I to send it, he probably gets loads due to his hundreds of thousands of subscribers, but I hope he’s doing better than it seems and things improve for him.

Things aren’t doing great over here either. It’s been pretty hard to motivate myself to write. Projects are backlogging themselves, my exercise bike rides are the only daily goal I’ve been able to commit to, and my work starts up again tomorrow at 8:30am.

So this blog post is basically one of those lame apology ones that content creators do when they’re aware of how little they’ve output recently but don’t actually have content to make up for it. I have a job interview with Blizzard in two days, I think I’ve got a pretty good shot of making their Overwatch customer service team, which would literally be a godsend because it’s my current favorite game of choice. Overwatch is basically Team Fortress 3, or as close as we’re ever going to get, so I’d be ecstatic if I made it into even a small part of that franchise. One day I might be able to work my way up to QA testing for them.

A reminder that I’m still cranking out daily articles on The Daily SPUF, it’s a blog kinda like this one except the content is publish-worthy and publicized over there. Otherwise, I’ve made progress on one of my Clickteam Fusion games and it should be coming out in maybe a month, god willing. Haven’t really told any of you anything about it but it’s a 4-level platformer where I practice creating cutscenes, reactive AI, and a Sonic-style ring system for taking damage.

EDIT: ended up sending a message anyway. It’s always worthwhile to thank someone who’s made a difference in your life

Happy April

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We’re getting things back on board. I happily took March off. I was juggling too many things. I still am, but many of them are wrapping up and I’m getting better at juggling my time. Today I had a large list of 8 things that needed to happen and I’m scrambling to get them all done. Also I didn’t get a dream job at Bioware so suddenly this becomes my lifeline for feeling like a real game developer

And another thing happened that’s been keeping me from my work in more ways that just this one:

 

 

My computer fan just arrived today, so I plan on rectifying that problem ASAP. Can’t well do too much until then, however.

Day 61 and 62

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Sorry forgot to post yesterday! Today our 1000th article went live on the Daily SPUF, and Medic and I have been scrambling to get everything done on that front.

Here’s our 24-hour checklist we got COMPLETELY done:

*Daily SPUF 1000th article went live, as did my first video, cross-posted to Reddit
*Daily SPUF now has a Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr that all auto-update everytime we post a new article.
*For tomorrow, I’m gonna write a bunch of tweets that link back to previous Daily SPUF articles and autopost every day, maybe twice a day.
* Twitch account touched up, microphones and speakers are all fixed, somehow it took me two months to do that. Now i can voice chat in games and Skype calls!
*and for the hell of it, two completely dumb little videos posted to my youtube account

Big social media push happening, and its just gonna keep on giving 😀 But I still found time to get some Unity done. Yesterday’s video was on randomizing the guesses so it’s not so predictable in its queries, and today was a one-page script letting me download the sample text for what we’ve done so far. I never have counted that before, but with so much else on my plate I’m letting it slide. Tomorrow we finish off Course 4 and move onto Course 5, Block Breaker! We’re getting dangerously close to the level of experience I need to start making marketable Unity games for Facebook/mobile apps.

Happy 4th of July!

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Two cool things for you today, I finally put together a video of some gameplay from Gamer 2. I haven’t touched this project in months, but as you can see the skeleton pieces are all present.

 

Note that you don’t get the shooty balls for this level, I just wanted to showcase it at the end 😉

One other fun thing for y’all, a short story I wrote as part of a writing challenge for a workshop, where we were supposed to pick a throwaway background character from something else we’d written and write a 1-page flashfic giving them some backstory. I got this character by hitting “Random Page” on the Darwin’s Soldiers Wiki until I hit a character made by me.

Fun fact: Serris was invited to do this challenge as well. I look forward to seeing if he participates, and if so what character he writes about. 😛