AIiiiiie

A lot of work since last time, but not enough! I've gotten to the point where I need to code AI stuff, and there's a terrible niggling bug somewhere in the way the program loads AI strings into structures. I'd hoped to figure it out before posting this, but no luck, and I gotta do other stuff now. Here are some shots:

This is the prototype for a game design that hopefully can be made into something with maybe commercial legs. Since it's more important to get the central systems right than to do something super polished, I decided to approach this as a series of short games with progressively more complex designs. The first of which is pretty easy, basically a puzzle/tutorial, but getting it working requires having a lot of basic systems at least sort of operational. This image represents the ENTIRE MAP for the first game, and the ENTIRE CAST.

Here's new concept art via character artist Xerxes Verdammt, dropped wholesale into the game. Note the new big red arrow indicating which menu thing you've selected.

There are still a lot of bugs, however.

Stuff remaining to do on WOL 1 before I call it "done":

• finish the rest of the AI string loading
• debug the existing AI string loading
• finish writing, revising, and AI-coding the dialogue so the game is "complete" start to finish
• add whatever art comes in to the game
• make fun Pac-Man style title and ending screens

Then I think of a more complex design to make for WOL 2. I don't know how many it will take before I figure that the design is (1) done, and (2) fun. But right now it's enjoyable to work on!

(Oh, for those interested, I got interviewed. Mostly it's about like Scientology and Tarot cards.)

Rainbow Dash

I've been away, moving apartments, working on paying freelance projects, working on getting some really overdue creative stuff to various agents/associates. So here is some more of Mystery Project WOL. Not that much is impressive looking/visible, but some new stuff:

Slightly better use of old Chocolate Sauce tiles; brightening up the test map!

Why is there a menu full of random colors? What is this supposed to mean?

And finally, COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT IS CREATIVITY. Some kind of status menu, or possibly battle screen? What is this game going to be?

OH HEY ALSO: I've published a novel since last post! You can buy it here from the publisher, O/R Books! It's about quasi-Scientology cults and girls in love, and Eileen Myles likes it.

Menu + mean girl

Some work, not much. Here is a menu and a mean girl.

W. O. L., working title

COMPETITION ISN'T OVER

I got out of making video games altogether and mostly did some comics and such things. BUT a friend of mine is running a pretty neat game company and I have a pretty neat game idea, so I need to build a quick and dirty prototype to test out game logic and build up some sense of how the game will feel. WHAT BETTER TECHNOLOGY THAN VERGE?

As you can see I'm using old Chocolate Sauce assets and code like crazy. What does it mean that these people are rainbow colored? I have to remain more secret about this one, but will post screen shots here and stuff.

Let's Cut Our Losses

Sometime after the last post here my computer stopped booting forever, taking with it (1) my entire novel and (2) all of Chocolate Sauce RPG. After three months or so plus numerous attempts to get the data off of the hard drive and onto a bunch of temporary computers, I got together the money for data retrieval. The answer: if I pay $3,000 and have the hard drive shipped upstate to a clean room, there's a chance of recovering maybe 30% of the data in a raw format, meaning no directory structure, no file names, no file types. Basically fuck that.

Since that time I've managed to go through an additional temporary computer (still works, the screen just doesn't work.) I've reconstructed the novel, but there doesn't seem to be any point in working on a project like Chocolate Sauce when I can't afford a computer that doesn't completely bite and that will fail in a matter of months. I did have two backups: one on a USB drive that is now lost, and one on the Fiction Circus web server which is missing the last month or so of work I did on the game, mostly on graphics, maps, and fine-tuning battle/enemy spawn code. Basically a massively incomplete mess.

It's the latter that I'm releasing for the public curiosity as of this post, here.

Be advised:

• The battle system doesn't work at all. It looks like the only reason for this is that the enemy art directory is missing, so I guess if you edit enemies.dat (which contains the names of the image files for the enemies) you could try it out. Just change the lines that start with @ to any .pcx image file, ideally one around 40x40 px, and put that image file into a subdirectory of /gfx called /enemies.
  
• None of the title screen options other than "New Game" and "Debug Game" work.
  
• There's a major gameplay bug on choosing New Game: the controls won't be hooked up correctly after the opening scenes are over and the game gives you control. To see the menus/to use the map spells, go talk to the shopkeeper one house to the left of your starting location: once the shop script runs the controls get hooked up normally.
  
• You can play through the game up to the point where Illcup gives you your first assignment. After that you'll almost certainly end up getting into fights in the desert and the game will crash. If you want to see the rest of the story for this installment, cruise through the text_data folder; text_church.dat and text_cutscenes.dat have I think all of the story text and dialogue in the game.
  
• The map tiles aren't entirely finished for most maps and look terrible. The sprites aren't finished, most glaringly on Cass.
  
• The music files are copyright Long Dao; do not use them without asking him. If the enemy graphics are somewhere in this zip file at all, they're copyright Xerxes Verdammt and shouldn't be used without asking her. (Some of them are just ripped temporary Dragon Quest art.) I don't mind if you use my images or code.
  

I don't know when I'm going to work on this project again--it's a hugely ambitious thing, something I was obsessed with working on for a few months, and I'm not sure when I'll be similarly obsessed again. I'd like to put at least a temporary cap on it while I worry about money, writing, and my other projects. Losing my novel and a lot of work on Chocolate Sauce was horrible, but given the choice to work on restoring one or the other, I worked on the novel, and that probably has to count for something.

Goodness Gracious

So again we're experiencing major computer problems which gives the game a frame rate of something like 2 fps. This is obviously bullshit, but until I can get a new computer or somehow fix this one, I can't really do the stuff that's remaining on Chocolate Sauce for the first release. I have some new enemy art to load in, and that's about it.

One thing that has been done or is about to be done: I was talking with Paul about wanting to write a cutscene parser for VERGE as part of the work on Demon Lord Adventure III, which I could then use for all future cutscenes on Chocolate Sauce since writing cutscenes is horrible. He came up with an idea for a better "wait for entity" function that's pixel-perfect rather than relying on the entity movecode strings, which cause problems when you do a lot of things where entities stagger backward one step, etc. I've been writing cutscenes just by choosing an arbitrary number of ticks to pause the engine for entities to move and then trial-and-erroring that number, which is senselessly tedious. A parser is the ultimate goal, but implementing it would be crazy since it involves some kind of metacode. I'll figure it out.

That's mostly it--I've been busy with other stuff lately, mostly a new internship and the revival of my webcomic, The Man Who Hates Fun. I have so little stuff left to do on Chocolate Sauce Part I that it's stupid I haven't yet done it--until I can somehow get a computer setup that lets me check things at a reasonable frame rate, though, there's not really a point. That's not a good excuse but it remains an excuse.

Art I can do at least. I'll try to at least make the maps look cooler/finished by next week.

Junction City

Another bad week, though not as bad as last week, and at least one critical milestone reached: the story sequence right in the middle of the game is coded, which means the game's now playable from start to finish.



By "coded" I mean "mostly coded": I still have the stupid habit of putting characters into traps without figuring out how they'll escape, so the end of this scene is, um, a little bit weak. I also need to throw in/steal some little visual effects like a "quake" function and a "trail bloody footsteps as you stagger to your death" function (or something reasonably similar.) And by "playable" I meant "not actually playable", since there's a critical bug if you don't have Cass with you in the final sequences and I haven't yet thrown in the code to have Cass join up with you after you leave town--which means that you can get to the game's ending and then you can't actually see it. Rad!

Still: it's some kind of tangibly right-direction step. I don't know what it is lately--once I stop worrying about money this is going to go faster. When will I stop worrying about money? Will I ever?

Oh also: a new battle theme is in the game, courtesy of Long! I kind of need to get used to it like I'm used to vangelis.mod as battle music, but the new battle music is (1) better and (2) not stolen from probably multiple sources.

I was having dinner with my writer friend Billy on Wednesday and he asked about this game, surprisingly, since I think the last time I talked to him about it was back in July or something. I said that I was still working on it, and that coding story sequences was like writing novels, except instead of just writing what the characters do, you have to construct robots of the characters and program them to function in simple ways, and then assemble the film stock of them functioning in simple ways yourself. I said you can work for hours to create a one minute scene which you will then watch over and over again forever with joy and love that no one else in the world will share. Lord love video games