This is one of my least favorite doodles. I expected so much more from it. It was supposed to show how playing video games is not the same as living. Now, don't get me wrong. I play a lot of video games. It's just sometimes when I've played too much, I feel like I could be using that time for better things. You know, like doodling or writing useless paragraphs on nothing.
Every few years, I get the video game bug. This is not the play video game bug, which is a more constant companion. This is the write a video game and become a video game publisher--the dream usually involves lots of bags with hand-drawn dollar signs, and a large house somewhere. I usually see myself sitting on a beach thinking big thoughts, while the programming happens somewhere else, with only small amounts of input from me. That is, once I get it up and running.
This time I attempted to write a game in Javascript. The graphics in this doodle are what's left of the game. I managed to create a large, scrolling map, and fully moveable (and freely rotatable in 360 degrees) Horribles. I even added rudimentary network play, where a server allows multiple Horribles to run around the scrollable map.
What I didn't have the patience for was all the planning and programming that the game needed to work. I also had second thoughts about Javascript. While I did find some interesting games written in Javascript, it does have severe limitations, not to mention platform inconsistencies.
In the end, I decided to return to doodling, and (I keep pretending) writing. And then there's my real job, the one that keeps me knee deep in toys and video games. I need to spend time on that as well.
Until next time I get bit by the game programming bug....
I was going to post another Ziggy doodle, but I decided to spread out the Ziggies. There are only so many Ziggies I can handle, and I imagine you're the same.
Julie, Steven, and I played through Halo 3 last year. This was Julie's first First Person Shooter (FPS) game. FPS games show the world through the character's perspective as if you were looking through her eyes. You use one thumbstick to move the character, and the other thumbstick to aim your gun and shoot bad guys. It takes a bit of coordination and practice to play.
We ended up running through the game twice, first on the normal level and then on the hardest level. We played about one or so levels per night, and It took many nights to get through the game. For the most part, it quite enjoyable. There's a microphone attached to the joystick, so Julie and I could speak to Steven and plan our next attack.
We played through the game cooperatively, that is, us against the computer. There is a story behind the game displayed through cut scenes (like little movies). It is not the game's strong point as it made little sense, and for the most part took away from the experience, particularly when it interrupted the game play. While Julie and I like the occassional competitive game (although our competition sometimes gets vicious), Steven is a co-op-only guy. My favorite games are a combination of the two: a team of players (like the three of us) pitted against other teams of real players.
Steven was a careful, good player. He rarely died and kept the team alive on most occassions, while sitting back and picking off bad guys from a distance. Julie and I didn't have the patience. We ran into the fray and tried to kill everyone, often dying in the process. Luckily, the game respawns the characters near living players, and we rinsed and repeated until all the bad guys died.
This became more problematic after we brought Ziggy home: we'd be in the middle of a very difficult part, and Ziggy would decide that he had spent enough time on the couch and jump off and run around barking. I would have no choice but to chase after him, while Julie and Steven continued on the game, one man down. They somehow managed without me, and Ziggy eventually calmed down and returned to the couch to continue his job as my personal warmer.
We've been looking forward to playing another co-op game, but so far there hasn't been many interesting games available. I'm hoping that changes soon as I've been itching to play video games again.
Today was a beautiful Post-Headache Day. That means, of course, that yesterday was an absolutely painful, over-tired, stop hitting me with a frying pan day. I was miserable. But since I'm an eternal optimist (when not being hit by a frying pan), I want to focus on today's renewed energy.
The house buying continues to move along. We're in negotiations over the inspection contingency. The Castle is getting in shape for showing. We're thinking of listing it next week. We have lots to do before then.
I like to pretend I create worlds: whether they are story worlds or video game worlds. When I create them, I imagine I look like this guy.
A while back, Julie and I went over to our friend Scott's house to play Rock Band. This was our first time playing the game, and we had a great time. (We went for a second visit a few weeks ago.) Besides the three of us, we were joined by Scott's family. I concentrated on the bass, while Julie, not surprisingly, did most of the singing. We created a tour group called the Periodic Elements, in honor of the lead singer's name of Phospherous.
While I keep promising to post photographs of the Villa, I can never seem to find the time to post (or take many) photographs. With the help of some awesome friends, we stayed in the Villa until midnight the past few nights putting stuff together and getting ready for our move in day. The house is shaping up nicely, and once the dog room is complete, we'll be ready to officially move in. It should happen by this weekend at the latest.
I spent too many hours yesterday playing the newest grow game. If you've never tried, a grow game is a simple Flash game where the player has an inventory of items and must successfully choose the items in the correct order. The items interact with one another and the world around them, and the world grows based on the ordering. The goal is to fully grow the world. It's a simple but very challenging concept, and the cute animation and annoyingly playful music carried me to the goal (that and my addictive personality).
Julie forced me to take a break for dinner when I felt I was very close. (I beat it when we returned in about 30 minutes.) While we sat at the Japanese restaurant, my brain kept going through the combinations of inventory items, probing for weaknesses in my strategy.
I learned two very important life lessons from this game: (1) balance when you get married with your job: if you work too hard early on, you may never get married; similarly, if you marry too early, you may never get a chance to be the best at your work. And (2) if you don't have adequate sewage, you will become a computer hacker, the bad type.
I don't want to admit how long it took me to beat this game. The earlier grow games took me only an hour or two. Julie is my witness on this one, and I spent most of the afternoon and early evening with the weird music and the world where I needed just one more turn to grow.
Man, I loved Street Fighter II. I was a big Chun Li fan because of the jumping on the heads and the sexy leg.
The new job is going well. I'm busy. It's a strange feeling to arrive at work and actually have stuff waiting for me. And this is good stuff: not just because it's interesting and challenging and we're making lots of monies, but because it's just so damn cool.
Okay, enough gushing.
Summer continues here in the Northwest. The evenings grow cooler, the morning light arrives later, the night descends earlier. But we've definitely hit a sweet spot temperature-wise.
This is certainly not timely. We played and beat Castle Crashers back in September 2008. It's a fun 2.5D romp with four square-masked and armored heroes through a cartoony world filled with damsels in distress and oversized ogres. It was a good three or four night game with a very shallow learning curve. We even had a fourth player, which is rare for us. My fingers were a bit tired at the end, and it reminded me how challenging the old-school games were in finding the proper horizontal plane to attack the enemies.
Skipping around a bit for the Gears of War 2 Horrible. Steven, Julie, and I finally beat the Horde mode on level 50 last night. We had to lower the difficulty to Casual to do so, but we've now completed the game and received the Achievement. It was quite an achievement. It took strong strategy and lots of patience. Not to mention some chainsawing.
I checked, and I don't feel much more violent this morning. I think it takes a while for violent video games to reorganize the brains.
There's a 5k/10k/half marathon going on outside my window this morning. I caught the tail end of the walkers when I woke up. There's now just orange cones to prove it happened. Those will be gone in a few hours as well. So much for healthy Seattle.
Ah, this has been a long time coming. This was one of the first real video games I played: Dungeons of Daggorath. That's how it looked on my Color Computer II hooked up to my television (well, sans the Little Guy). There was an error on the disk, and I never managed to get past a certain part in the game. The game would crash. Such was life with floppies.
I've been blue again. Not sure what's causing these crazy mood swings. It'll hopefully pass before we head to NYC this weekend.
Ah, I've come full circle. This is a mock-up of a video game I started to design. I worked on for a few months, changing the design significantly. After I had it working I realized that it wasn't fun. The graphics were cute, in that Horrible-y way, but the gameplay was terrible.
We had good 70-degree weather this weekend. We did manage a Wallace Falls hike on our Naginata-free weekend (go PNNF!). My legs are still paying for the five mile hike. The last three miles or so were straight uphill. The climb combined with Julie's level-6 complaining left me exhausted and headachy yesterday, and achy today. Thankfully I'm on my PHD today.
Ah, Borderlands, it feels like it's been such a long time since Julie, Steven, and I visited its dystopic world. Besides an occassional dip into the tried and true Horde mode in Gears of War 2, Borderlands was the last serious video game we played. That's something we're hoping to remedy one of these days when someone ships a decent three-player co-op game.
Saturday creeped into the seventies while Sunday teased us with sunshine followed by Houston-style rainstorms. It was a long, relaxing weekend filled with the doodling of too many Horribles, and a startling lack of Naginata (thanks to the Mercer Island Rotary Half Marathon).
Even with daily affirmations, my dream may never be real.
I am in the middle of another project at the moment (regrettably, not a soon-to-fail video game). This explains my complete lack of doodling or writing or doing anything remotely creative (outside of the Project). I'm not sure it will be worth the effort, and I'm very much looking forward to finishing it so I can get back to my other creative pursuits.
Maybe one day I'll even write again. I know, I kid.
The one in the doodle, by the way, was an overehead RPG action game that I may return to one day. The OCI (that's Overly Clever Idea that turns out not to be very clever) was to make the players very small so they can plow through lots of tiny (or large) monsters as they work their way through the dungeons. I even had some rudimentary random map making code up and running (after borrowing the algorithm from the internets), and lots of little monsters making a beeline for the hapless player. Writing about it makes me want to return to it and see why I gave up. After the Project, that is.