Category Archives: Writing

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.

 

Ford project conclusion

Posted by aabicus on

In an NDA-friendly nutshell, Ford Motor Company showed up and invited everyone to pitch games that fulfilled very specific criteria. The three winners got three thousand dollars each, and my game was one of the three winners. I’m not gonna lie, it feels weird thinking that I just won three-thousand dollars for making a game.

I’ve been thinking about why I won. There were some great games up against me. Honestly, I think it was my presentation. I printed my cards out on cardstock, the Heroes and Weapons were light blue decks, the Culprits and Catastrophes were pink, and The President was yellow. The font was professional and the text was properly spaced. and I brought a sheet full of 40 card artworks I paid $120 for, just to hammer home that I was serious about my game looking spick and span. Most of my competitors were using hand-drawn cards or, even worse, scraps of papers.

Update: I talked to the prof, and he says the reason I won was because of how flexible I demonstrated the concept was. How you could basically delete the entire game’s content and replace it with an entirely original frame narrative with all-new keywords. Considering I added that in last-minute, it’s nice to hear that helped. 

The other reason I won, IMO, was that my opponents forgot a few of the requirements. Ford said they needed a game playable by 2-5 players, and several of the other games were not two-player compatible (granted, neither was mine, but that’s why I added a 2-player variant in the ‘alternate rulesets’ section). Ford said the game needed to stimulate natural conversation, so half of my opponents made codeword-based games. This was the wrong call on their part, codewords are the exact opposite of natural conversation.

The real question is what happens next. I’ve spoken to the other two winners, they’re buying iPhones with their winnings. I want to invest it into this game, because everyone is telling me this game is amazing. Most people seem to think I should start a Kickstarter, and I’m not against the idea in theory. So I guess let’s cover that option first.

Option 1: Self-publish. In this day and age, self-published board games are downright commonplace. More than any other creative industry, the board game industry has loads of support for the developer who wants to skip the rat race and market to consumers directly. My battle strategy would probably look like “create a public domain prototype (not a normal step, but mandatory in this case because the 66 cards in my Ford prototype are required to be public domain) –> market it through the Daily SPUF, reddit, twitter etc –> people fall in love with the free version hopefully as hard as all my playtesters do –> create kickstarter and make money –> use money to pay artists and, uh, I guess that’s it until –> use an online card-printing company so people can order decks printed on demand and sent to their house. ”

Pros: I make way more money than option 2. I retain full creative control. I have many different groups who can market for me, from Mom and her businesspeople to my internet circles and UCSC. Also, I can technically skip the part where I earn startup money because the costs are extremely minimal for this particular project.

Cons: Fuckton of work. High chance of failure due to the nature of the industry. Will never reach as many customers as option 2.

Option 2: Pitch game to a publisher. Use the extremely positive reception from my playtesters to sell the game to Milton Bradley or Parker Brothers. Far as I can tell, I basically hand them the game, they do whatever they like and I just get a slice of the sales forever.

Pros: It’ll be in Targets and Wal*Marts and shit for free. They’ll do marketing and other stuff for me.

Cons: I’ll have to explain the public domain thing. I will lose a bunch of creative control. I’ll make less money in the end of the day (unless it takes off beyond my wildest dreams. But even then I’m not sure how much money I’d get after corporate takes their cuts)

Other issues: Not sure The Just Us League title is going to pass legal, but I’m having a lot of trouble thinking of a name with the same punch. Heroes of Just Us is best but has the “Begging To If you Seek Amy” problem. As previously mentioned, the core cards are mandatory public domain since they won the contest. (I retain no rights to them, but Ford doesn’t either). My only option for selling is to make a bunch more cards and sell those as like “expansion packs” to the free-to-play base game, or to make dapper glossy artwork’ed versions and justify a price on those extra bits. Ford’s gotta be okay with that, right?

This is all something to worry about after the Greenlight pitches. Luckily I’m not even fussed about whether I win or not. Gimme a choice and I’ll take $3K and working on someone else’s game for the rest of the year.

STAR_’s and Bars

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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

day 72

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Rewatched the video on Blender art. I really need to get back to those Blender videos. Wouldn’t it be cool to know how to create assets like that? I’ve just been pretty downtrodden these past few days. Hard to get back into the swing of things. But I’ll get there. Eventually. 🙂

So my friend tried to show me Flashpoint and I was legitimately interested in what sounded like an interesting premise for a show. Plus the main character is Nick from Left 4 Dead 2.

[The first episode opens with a hostage situation. A man in a busy street has a woman held hostage, a gun pointed at her temple. Police have roadblocks but are keeping their guns lowered.]
Man: Don’t you come any closer or I’ll shoot!
Police: Don’t do anything rash now etc etc
[Cut to Nick perched on a rooftop. He’s got a sniper rifle and the crazy guy in his sights. But the guy’s waving his arms and making it a difficult shot with the hostage.]
Man: That’s it! I’m gonna shoot her!
Police guy (through radio): Nick, take the shot!
[Nick starts to squeeze the trigger as the music crescendos–]
[Immediate cut to Nick’s happy family eating breakfast with him. Caption: Two days earlier.

Aaand I turned it off. I hate that narrative copout so much, and so many shows use it. I remember first seeing it used in the “Tabula Rasa” episode of Stargate Atlantis when I was 17 and hating it there too. It’s a cheap ploy to start the story with something exciting and then dial it back to the “real” beginning which is boring tripe that would make everyone change the channel were it the actual beginning. In that case, maybe consider writing a decent beginning instead using more creative ways to display the character dynamics and information. Otherwise you’re wasting your audience’s time with the plot equivalent of clickbait “Number 15 will shock you!” titles. They’re riding entirely on the audience sitting through bullcrap thinking “I don’t care what’s happening right now, I just want to see how that forced cliffhanger is resolved!”

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.

Day 38

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So I got home from work and for some reason i was feeling inspired. So I wrote twice as much content for the game as originally planned. It’s a full game now, not exactly a super long game, but it meets the requirement for being an actual game, not a demo. And I’m pretty proud of myself cause I had to code the whole darn thing in Unity.

So the game’s done. I know I said it was done yesterday, but that before adding 13 new scenes, more than doubling the amount of content. There are even two different endings!

So tomorrow’s when we keep moving forward and finish the game, since it’s midnight 30 right now and I’ve got work tomorrow. But I don’t have work the two days after that! 😀 (It’s been so nice to abuse the ‘one video per day’ rule with the 00:57 second Course 3 closing video. I’ll be sad when I’m done with Course 3.

Day 37

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So I added all the new text for the game, but I hit a completely unrelated snag. My computer restarted itself last night, and while MonoDevelop was completely saved, apparently the game wasn’t and my base game is gone, lol. Easy fix really, just rewatch that earlier video and put the few things back in. But I can’t do it tonight, got work in six hours. Video done for the night, its happening tomorrow. Same time same bat-channel.

Day 36

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For an eleven minute video, very little happened today. He dropped the bombshell that (gasp!) he expects us to make more story so that our game doesn’t consist of literally a single puzzle. To that effect I have mapped out one more problem for our intrepid Traveller to solve before he may find the cure:

Find the Cure flow chart 2

The rest of the video was streamlining the code, which I mostly did before the video even happened. He taught some tricks for testing your code, but I knew them well after Oedipus in my Inventory and Electra City. 

Looks like tomorrow’s assignment is to make said flowchart into content. I can handle that, not even turning over a new leaf. All his video does is the same,. we can watch him put his code together. In that case Im going to bed early, maybe I can wake up and get said video done before work and enjoy the night.

Day 33

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All problems fixed! Ultimately I decided to stick with the Darwin’s Soldiers plot. Even if it turns out the Unity version is more of a demo than anything else, it’s better than having a hamfisted plot I don’t care about.

Speaking of which, today and tomorrow I’ve been putting together the story, and it should be done by tomorrow. I’ve got the roadmap laid out, and to prevent any possible hype from building here it is:

Find the Cure flow chart

So you gotta divide your game into stages, and each stage need to lead to another stage. In the Twine edition of this game, more plot will happen after you escape the first room, aka you can go find the cure and turn on the bridge. But we’re making progress! 😀

Day 30

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Ignore that last post; There’s not enough space to post honking huge paragraphs into Unity so I had to keep the intro short in-game. I’ll go back later once it’s complete and integrate that backstory into the text adventure. But yeah, that’s gonna be the plot to the text adventure. Set in the Darwin’s Soldiers universe, not that you need to know that because you literally just read the entire backstory to the game. (But if you’d like to read more of the lore, Card of Ten -> Ground One -> Chasing Seconds is the story progression you’d need to understand everything.) The game is told from anti-matter Earth’s perspective and takes place after Ground One.

The first half of today’s video was almost entirely taken up by learning how to truncate lines so you can read your code without having to scroll left or right. Seems kinda pointless but I bet I won’t think that in the future so I’m taking his word for it and learning how.

Rest of the video was spent creating more text. Sadly I don’t have the space to view all my text currently but I bet we’re gonna fix that later so I’m leaving it as is.

Starting it up

IT’S HAPPENING!!!11!! ;D  :’D  D:  XD

Update: Crap I realized how to make paragraphs, just use new print functions, one after the other. Derrrr. That is NOT how you do it, he covered it in the video. Just add /n to your content to line break.