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.

Electra City is out!

Posted by aabicus on

Update 9/23/16: Game is now updated and playable on itch.io! Check it out there!

Good news! That project I’ve been working on has gone through so many iterations, that I recently checked it out and none of the code from the proof-of-concept ended up in the final product. Which means I can release that proof of concept to all of you!

I held onto this for a while to add a few things that I’d always wanted in there. Specifically, special attacks, stat-altering rages, and a few tweaks to fix blocking being able to indefinitely stall the game

The post below this one does a fine job of teasing the game, so without further ado here it is to download! If you find any bugs, I probably already know about them, but if they’re particularly bothersome (and you ask ardently enough) I’ll feel motivated to patch them. Which fighter is your favorite?

And finally, an apology. I don’t post for you guys nearly as often as I should, I’ve been devoting the lion’s share of my internet time to my other two blogs. If you want more regular posts, you should come read my analyses and video game reviews on the Daily SPUF, which as it’s name implies has a new article every day! I’m also an occasional columnist on Lambda Generation, a news site dedicated to Valve games. But I’m planning on things picking up over here as soon as this big secretive paid project is done. I can’t say much, but since Electra City was a proof of concept, you should be able to piece together at least the genre. 🙂

A Good Shepherd Knows His King

Posted by aabicus on

Whoo, been a while since I posted on this ole thing, hasn’t it? What on Earth could aabicus have been up to?

Well, I recently made the jump from “literally doesn’t even count as a game dev” to “arguably a professional in the loosest sense of the word” because I’ve been hired to program a game in Multimedia Fusion! Or Clickteam Fusion as they’ve rebranded it. It’s gonna have art and music by other people, my job is simply to take their assets and bid them up into something playable. So while I wait for that project to start I’ve been coding* a proof of concept game and it’s pretty far along!

*all real programmers should scoff derisively right here

I’m not sure what aspects of it I’ll be allowed to release but I have been given permission to show some screenshots:


#policebrutality

Even if I’m never allowed to release the game, it’s taught me a lot about what MMF2.5 can do, and I plan on incorporating all of it into my next project. Also, I feel bad because my first update post in almost a year didn’t provide you guys with any new content so here’s a game I made in under two hours as part of a workshop where we all tried to make a full game in under an hour. I kinda lost track of time.

OedipusInMyInventory

 

Happy 5th of July!

Posted by aabicus on

As these holiday greetings grow ever further from the actual day it happened, I thought I’d just jump in and do some archiving. Truth be told I got scared when The Catacombs, the greatest Team Fortress Classic forum on the internet, got deleted and its data sold to some anonymous ad mining company. What if that were to happen to the majority of the Darwin’s Soldiers stories on the web? Well, to belay that tragedy I’ve uploaded every original document containing stories, role-plays, and other people’s stories I saved for further reading. Just go check out all these attached documents if you so fancy.

Ship of State · Darwin’s Soldiers v.2 in full · Card of Ten · pavlov’s checkmate · nietzsche’s soldiers · nietzsche’s soldiers 3; super men · Nietzsche’s Soldiers 2 · Darwin’s Soldiers (complete) · darwin’s soldiers;Zero hour · Darwin’s Soldiers;Schroedinger’s Prisoners · darwin’s soldiers;aftermath · darwin’s soldiers; fools gold · Darwin’s Soldiers; Gamer · Geneses · darwin’s soldiers; ground one darwin’s soldiers; new divide Darwin’s Soldiers; Survival of the Fittest · Byte Me · darwins-soldiers-disruptive-selection · Shelton’s Last Day · the Disease · Next of Kin · Werner’s First Day

Note that I didn’t go through these with a fine-toothed comb; they’re full of typos and things I changed later, so they aren’t exactly correct. The ones currently readable on the Gang of Five are better, cleaner and considered the canonical versions of what went down. But in case those ever go down, we’ll always have these. And if you’re absolutely insane you could even glean a bit of whatever creative processes I went through in writing them, they’ve still got notes and everything wherever those go.

The only documents currently missing are Kinsey’s Mimic (because Serris is still writing it) and Disruptive Selection, because it’s so %$#@%^&%#@ing long. Some day in the future I’ll go ahead and finish archiving that doorstopper, at the moment my younger self reached Aimee receiving a phone call in a Platanna hotel, and I’m not even sure where that took place in the thread.

Update 2/16/2017: I finally did it! Some guy on reddit made a thing for me that let me download Disruptive Selection in all twelve-hundred pages of its glory! Learn more on the blogpost from that day.

Update 4/17/2019: Since this is the only blog post whose name I ever remember when looking for these old copies, gonna keep archive copies of the Into the Black RPs and The Approaching Light here. Most of these RPs are incomplete, since the franchise hasn’t had nearly as consistent a history as Darwin’s Soldiers, but it’s better than nothing if the GoF ever goes down permanently.

Scorched Earth · Into the Black · Racing the Storm (epilogue) · After the Storm · Around the Folf · Blanking the Slate (epilogue)

Happy 4th of July!

Posted by aabicus on

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. 😛

New Story!

Posted by aabicus on

Dashed this out in a few days, a full-length story starring ROSS that takes place between his debut in Disruptive Selection and his first message to Shelton in the fishing town.

In case you have to guess, this was originally going to be a video game but ultimately I decided to write it in story form to take a break from all the quests I’ve been writing for Legends of Equestria.

Enjoy!

Following the Family Business

Posted by aabicus on

Now announcing a new Darwin’s Soldiers work that isn’t mine! “Following the Family Business” is a new story that will be uploaded by nick22 sometime in the future on the Gang of Five. He’s permitted me to leak a teaser trailer of the upcoming story:

—————————————————————————————-
The morning sun broke into the windows as Micah sat at the table.  the eldest of the three Landon kids, Micah  was, like his father, geared towards the medical profession, although he dealt with cancers, rather than internal injuries like his father. He looked at the morning paper as his younger sister Zya, who was the youngest of the three came in. Zya was a stellar athlete and had excelled in basketball at school. “morning sis’ Micah said. Morning Micah’ Zya said’ mom and dad at work again huh. Donald, his younger brother, soon entered from upstairs. All 3 had their mother’s dark hair and dark skin color, Donald and Micah were tall, like their father. Donald had played football in high school, and was playing it in college as well. . A note left on the fridge was a reminder from their mother Zyanya that they had to go over to Aishas to watch her three kids-,Susie Puxx and Aidan, who were the kids of Aisha with her lesbian lovers Roux and Nixx, who once was a rival to their mother. Puxx took more after his mother Roux with the vulpine fur, and magical abilities while Aidan and Susie looked like normal humans- on the outside. The kids were still quite young, as nixx , Aisha and Roux had only had them within the last 5 years. ‘ so when do we have to leave for Aishas? Donald asked as he poured a bowl of ‘ Secret Plots’ cereal, which included ‘ glowing alien’ marshmallows and ‘ secret file’ pieces. ‘ I can’t believe you actually like that garbage’ Zya said as she looked at the box ‘ its basically sugar drenched on top of sugar, and sugar tossed in for good measure.’  Donad ignored her as Micah answered the question. We have to be over there by nine, bro, which means we have to leave in 15 minutes if we want to get there on time. And zya, I saw you sneak a bag of brownios’ Micah said. ’so don’t go picking on Donald.. that’s my job, I’m the oldest after all. ‘ By two whole years.’ Yeah I know. ‘ Zya rolled her eyes. Micah was 21, Donald 19 and Zya 17.  The three got along well enough, for their parents quickly put a stop to any serious squabble. ‘zyanya opened the door to the house and headed inside ‘ everyone up and eating? good. I need to drive you over there so I have time to go get my nails done and then get your father at the clinic.. aisha is paying the three of you very nicely. 50 an hour, each is a lot of money.. you should thank her if you see her.
– Sure thing mom ‘ Micah said as he pulled a couple pop-tarts out of the toaster.’ One question I have mom. If Aisha is a lesbian, how can she have a son?” Zya asked. ‘ well dear, advances in genetics can take any of piece of dna- such as hair= and it can be converted and usable in making biological kids. And then of course, roux has magical abilities as well, so she can do things with magic that don’t happen naturally. Of course, I don’t want to hear about any disparaging remarks about Aisha, Roux, Nixx or the kids. Do I make myself clear?’ mom, you fought against Nixx fir many many years. You two hated each other..” zya began but Zyanya cut her off.  ‘ well that was then, this is now. We have become real good friends since your father married me and Nixx married Aisha and Roux. Now enough questions. We need to get moving. Donald finish your cereal and lets go. The cars is idling waiting for us to get in..

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.