Just got my first writing job application that wants to move forward! Pixelberry has asked for a writing assessment to see if I can move onto the interview stage. This is super cool, and I’ve taken the day off school so I can fully focus on it.
I like the artstyle, and I can definitely do this sort of writing, though I hope they assign me to the sci-fi/supernatural/fantasy/not-just-high-school settings. The “every good option is locked behind a premium currency” business model is super frustrating but I bet it makes a fortune
I’ve kinda taken everything else off too, just to send out job applications fulltime. I repurposed my old C++ learning story into an all-purpose story for working on things in the third-person, and it’s got a pretty cute spreadsheet tracking my job applications and their status.
I’ve kinda let my YouTube channel fall by the wayside as I sort this stuff out, but it’ll be there when I get back. My viewers almost exclusively come from my reddit threads, so this might actually be a chance to test whether a brief hiatus even hurts my numbers. Itch.io’s been sitting barren since February, but I’m pretty happy with the game selection already on there tbh.
Just broke my 200th download on itch.io, which is genuinely cool. It warms my heart to check every few days and see a handful of people have downloaded stuff. Almost all of the hits are from TV Tropes, since I wrote full pages for Gamer 2, Find the Cure!, and Oedipus in my Inventory. Any of my future creative content will get its own page no questions asked, it’s great for building steady (if minor) traffic. My Clickteam Fusion tutorials and C++ Projects are steady hitmakers too, the latter of which I don’t really understand but I’m not complaining.
I can’t help but be a little worried overall. Literally no other job I’ve applied to has even written me a rejection letter, so if Pixelberry doesn’t work out I may not have a lot of options going forward. One safety net is that I’m in the running for their Senior Writer position, and if they say no, I can ask if there’s any chance I can downgrade to their Junior Writer position. I mean, you never know.
This might not be my most coherent blog post since I didn’t sleep last night, but at least I spent it being productive, right?
The first big thing that happened was that my article scored the second-to-top comment in a reddit thread dedicated to an insane play performed by the LA Gladiators during the Overwatch League playoffs. A blog called Daily eSports contacted me and asked if I wanted to start writing articles for them at a rate of $1 per 100 words. I agreed mostly because they said I’d get to work with an editor and use their SEO tools, two things I’ve been meaning to get more practice with, things that would teach me valuable skills to making my content marketable. It’s a little depressing because the SEO tools were like “please replace every single interesting word with the most generic synonym” and the readability tool was like “Every sentence over 20 words is too short”. I mean, I assume they’re right since they were literally designed to attract people, but I like my $10 vocab words ;~; But I’ve already written my first article for them, which is officially the first online article I’ve ever been paid to write.
I’ve been strongly considering making a Patreon for my YouTube channel, maybe start getting some pocket change for that pastime too. It’s still humming along, nothing but the Payday videos are getting hits but I expected that when I decided to invest into a single franchise. The only Fortnite video I’ve made is maintaining a steady climb of new viewers despite me phoning in marketing, so I’ll probably more of those. I decided to do my Fortnite vids with a Scottish accent just because I need some way to enjoy myself, the game itself certainly isn’t doing it.
Right: Before aabicus learned Photoshop. Left: After aabicus started learning Photoshop
Look at how goddamn gorgeous those thumbnails on the left are. Sure, they’re not Rembrandt, but they actually qualify as YouTube-worthy thumbnail quality. I’ve finally finally started Photoshop, and I’ve recently passed the threshold where I know enough that it’s just fun and awesome and I look forward to making the thumbnail instead of dreading it. Photoshop is a goddamn miracle and it blows my mind what I’ve been able to accomplish with next to no effort. This makes me really happy because I’ve wanted to know Photoshop for years, but I’ve always put it off because the initial hurdle felt too daunting. That leaves Unity as the one looming beast I’ve never managed to tame. Have made no progress on that front.
Kinda related segue, my new school project is to make a Mixer game with 3 other students (Tyler from Zone Out, Akshay, and Wong). Mixer is Microsoft’s attempt to beat Twitch at their own game and, following their failure to do so, rebrand itself as the leading avenue for crowdplay games (the genre Twitch Plays Pokemon invented). To their credit, they have done a great job of that and there are a bunch of thriving crowdplay games on the channel. Our job is to make one more.
My job specifically is to write the design document and create a mockup in Clickteam Fusion for playtesting purposes. The design document is a work in progress and the school’s private Google Drive is a real twip about sharing stuff outside network, but you can see the mockup via this secret itch.io URL. That’s never going live anywhere else, so consider it a thanks for reading this blog. Hopefully it’s more user-friendly than Hurdles.
In one month, the Into the Black RP series will be celebrating its 5th anniversary! With thousands of posts and almost a dozen different authors, there are a lot of different characters and storylines filling our furry cyberpunk universe. While mainstays like Soren, Marita, Tony, Axel, and Emilena have had plenty of time to leave their mark on the world, I wanted to take this opportunity to celebrate some characters that may not be as well-remembered, but are no less the heroes of their own story. (Click on any image to enlarge)
Patrick Anderson
The complete saga of Patrick Anderson
Who can forget Rocky’s contribution to the canon? He only posted three times, during which his character drove home, fell asleep, and started snoring. Luckily, after real-world days stretched into weeks without the author returning to wake his character up, the rest of the authors made good use of Patrick by detonating a brick of C4 in his bedside cabinet, to give the bad guys a much-needed victory.
Kaien
As yeswonderful’s single-digit post-count might foreshadow, Kaien didn’t stick around very long either. Her author joined the 2nd RP while our heroes were trekking through the dangerous jungles of Bolivia. Kaien emerged from some bushes, asked the heroes why they were in Bolivia, and then bid them adieu and returned to the bush. Some say she’s still there to this day. Personally, I say she was an ignored Grecian chorus, a messenger begging the authors to reflect on that whole nonsensical Bolivia plot and reboot the storyline before it went any further. If only we’d listened.
Winky Face
The only remnant of the late Winky Face. Gone but not forgotten
Not technically a character, but bestariana1girl nipped in once and posted a single emoji after learning she needed 50 posts to qualify for a forum member tag. nick22 quickly deleted it with his admin powers, but Winky will forever live on in Serris’ OOC.
Gittsun
Series regulars bushwacked and nick22 share co-author credit for Gittsun’s brief adventures. bushwacked wrote him as a random drunk who gets gunned down as flavor text during a shootout, but nick22’s characters rose to the occasion and heroically bandaged him up. bushwacked sportingly kept the character around, but he never really knew what to do with him, and Gittsun’s antics, speaking style and general uselessness annoyed everybody…a lot. Finally Pterano had enough, and Gittsun’s appearances ended as violently as they began.
Felix
bushwacked is responsible for this one too. Near the end of the RP, the heroes raid a Purifier factory to try and steal info on the location of the pulse bomb threatening to EMP the city. While searching, they ambush a Purifier hit squad and leave one hapless grunt alive for questioning. bushwacked played the out-of-his-league Felix as he begged for his life and gave the heroes all the info he knew. But since pacing was never our strong suit, the questioning continued on…and on…and Felix slowly slipped into reverse-Stockholm Syndrome until he was suicidally begging the heroes to kill him just so the plot could continue.
Felix’s swan song arrived when LettuceBacon&Tomato posted this. It was the final straw, and the heroes finally dropped Felix off a catwalk and continued the storyline.
And those were just the characters that actually appeared in the RPs! We’ve also got some honorable mentions who never even made the leap from the discussion threads. Put your hands together for these unsung heroes:
Forum newbie Alien Ant Farm joined shortly after Belmont, posting a police chief for a city that he’d just made up. Then he was almost immediately banned from the forum for unrelated violations. At least Chief Joseph got that retirement he wanted so badly.
Dolly and Karl
But it’s not just one-hit-authors whose creations couldn’t quite reach the silver screen! Serris made Into the Black history by posting Dolly, a gene therapy pioneer who doesn’t survive her own character sheet. LettuceBacon&Tomato’s character Karl took a similar bullet for the plot in the Racing the Storm discussion section. At least they’re in good company.
And, last but not least…
Life
Flora, the futa fuchsia folf, was popular among a certain caste of authors. She got a bunch of side stories and even her own spinoff RP where she (and some of nick and Starfall’s characters) could do sexy things while the rest of us were RPing dark and gritty high-octane cyberpunk. But something I never told anyone else was that she had at least one fan who never posted in the RPs or even made a forum account. It was a guy that messaged me and offered to pay me for a private RP with Flora and his OC, an immortal Snivy diety named Life.
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 😀
1) What work did you you contribute to your game/team this quarter (similar to how you’d list it on a resume)?
I designed a website, recorded videos, wrote articles, created social media accounts, posted on said social media accounts, took minutes during sprint reviews, shoutcasted tournaments, and wrote spell descriptions.
2) How do you feel about how your game progressed during the quarter?
Major League Magic progressed extremely well. We’ve made big strides on every level, with the very successful implementation of terrain alteration being the biggest success. We’re getting some decent numbers on social media, but I didn’t do nearly enough marketing. I should have tweeted at least ten times as often, I barely touched the Facebook page, and in general anything I finish should have been done at least a week earlier. We also could have made more success on art, but what we managed to accomplish with the better-looking UI does wonders towards making the game look better.
3) Was there anything that you struggled with?
The sheer volume of content marketers need to release to get anything to happen. I just couldn’t find things to tweet about, and it took me far too long to actually make the social medias to tweet from. My excuse I kept using was “I’m waiting for us to get better art”, but considering we literally just our first few updated art assets yesterday, we’d have been SOL if I’d truly waited that long. Also I never actually started that weekly dev stream I’d been planning due to not being able to come up with stuff to dev stream about. The team never really kept me in the loop as to what they were working on, unlike Medical Necessity and personal projects where I always knew exactly the progress we’d made every week. If this game fails, it will largely be my fault due to shoddy marketing.
4) What you are working to improve next quarter?
I need to apply to more jobs. I need to finish my self-assigned jobs faster (I was more than able to finish things on Ahmet’s or the college’s pace, but the assignments were too slow and I should have finished things long before anyone asked for them.) I need to be more involved with the team and less of a free agent doing his own thing in the corner of the lab. This master’s ends in two months and I have nothing lined up. Again. After five years of not being able to break into the games industry, I’m about ready to give up if this college program ends and even that wasn’t able to turn me into somebody companies would want to hire.
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.
Last time I used this title I wrote about YouTube, programming and LinkedIn. I have more updates on two of those fronts.
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.
Good thing I archived all the Darwin’s Soldiers RPs in Google Drive, because their home forum has bitten the dust as of 10pm tonight. The admins are working on resurrecting all the forum content on a new host, and best of luck to them, but when I have to trawl through the Darwin’s Soldiers Wiki and TV Tropes pages and fix all the hotlinks, I’m making these Google Docs the primary links. At least those (hopefully) aren’t going anywhere.
I took the opportunity to create one with the three posted chapters of f-22’s story “the Disease“. If he ever posts more chapters I’ll have to go paste them here, but it’s been months so I’m not holding my breath
Lot of cool things happened in various directions, so I thought I’d give a little compilation for the record.
First, I shoutcasted a Forzebreak tournament and it went really well!
The Forzebreak team was really appreciative, we got almost 50 people watching on Twitch because various students tweeted their friends, and I get to add another game to my shoutcasting portfolio. I didn’t do half bad considering they literally didn’t have an observer mode, forcing me to cast the game from the sole perspective of Player 4, but overall it was great practice for the upcoming tournament this Friday for Major League Magic.
Forzebreak is lucky they had their tournament when they did, because my YouTube channel recently experienced something of a boon. Two weeks ago, I released yet another video, this time a lightning-fast chronicle of The Only 5 Weapons Worth Using in Payday 2, and for some reason people really, really liked it. I gained 1800 views, 180 thumbs-up and 40 new subscribers overnight, and to capitalize on this new audience I accelerated my videography pace to twice a week. I also nailed down an exact schedule; I’m now releasing a new video every Tuesday and Friday, each one under two minutes and chronicling a top 5 list in Payday 2. I’ve also started promoting my videos on Twitter, Steam, and reddit, and so far its resulted in my videos gaining far more viewers than I’m used to. Overkill contacted me on Discord and added me to their private content-creators channel, where I’m currently talking to other Payday 2 videographers in the hopes of maybe convincing one of them to do a crossover with me. I’ll keep you posted.
In other news, I ran Bay to Breakers naked yesterday, and holy god am I exhausted. I’d only started running about a week prior, and I hadn’t run nearly as far as the 7.5 miles in Bay to Breakers, but I actually completed the marathon without stopping. Sure, there were many times I downgraded from a jog to a basic walk, but I never fully stopped, and completed the marathon in about 2 hours. Afterwards, I followed a bunch of people to the Uber/Lyft pickup point, where my phone cheerfully informed me it would be $200 to drive home. Not even remotely interested in paying that much (and woefully underinformed as to how the Bart works; most people I’ve spoken to said I should have used it to leave the city), I chose to queue up the route home via walking, then just start hiking. I didn’t expect to finish the trip (it was a 14.5 hour walk according to Google Maps), but I knew every step I took would decrease the cost of my Uber, especially as the hours ticked by and everybody else went home and the surge ended. In the end, I walked another 8 miles over the course of two hours, which adds up to a full marathon-length in total. But my Uber home was only $30, so I’m not complaining. I’m not leaving my room today for anything, though, my legs are sore beyond belief.
In order to keep this post at least somewhat programming-focused, I also finished another homework assignment for ProcGen class. This one used a new program called Substance Designer, which created textures with stuff like normals, materials, and roughs. The overall UI was like, connecting squares of data with little lines, which took some understanding but was overall really understandable. I feel motivated to get better with Substance Designer because textures are the sort of thing I don’t have much experience creating, and I don’t like using other people’s content, so it’s something I’ll need to learn if I ever hope to move into the 3D space.
We had to create a rusty metal and a more creative texture. Mine was like golden liquid with a blue moss on top, I guess. Reminds me of UCSB’s colors.
Tried my hand at rapping again, my friend was making a YouTube parody and asked for a Citizen Kane rap because she liked what I’d done for Rap Who Was Mars. Dunno if she’s gonna end up using it, but it was fun to write.
I used someone else’s music for the background, mostly because my microphone picked up this really shrill trill in the background that was unpleasant to listen to without music covering it up. I’m not a huge fan of the song though, it doesn’t really fit my beat at all and I plan on making my own music going forward. I grabbed the free version of Fruity Loops so hopefully my future raps will have original background compositions
Darwin's Soldiers 