Emptyeye

As I’ve mentioned previously, I recently downloaded Gamemaker Studio and was playing around with it, intending to make a Sylvia-centered Kung Fu remake (A Kung Fu Remix, if you will).

Well, today I can present the first proof-of-concept of this idea, for Windows users. As I get more into how Gamemaker Studio actually works, a Mac version will be made available as well. Sylvia’s Excellent Time Usurping Pugilists (Or “S.E.T.U.P.”, fulfilling a years-old SDA marathon-related joke that “Setup” on the schedules should really be an actual game) is a game in which you control Sylvia, wife of A-Kung-Fu-Master-Thomas (I decided this is his full name in tribute to the arcade version, Kung-Fu Master, in which almost every time Thomas is referred to, the game insists on reminding us he is “A Kung-Fu Master, Thomas…”). After Sylvia realizes that her captors don’t know the difference between “tied on a chair” and “tied to a chair”, she decides to take her rescue into her own hands. As a Taekwondo master herself, free use of her legs is the only thing she needs to get herself out of the temple she’s being held hostage in.

This was an interesting project to start. When I embarked on it, this was basically my first big “milestone” goal, to get one working level out and see if I was still interested in it. Right now, I am, and I want to have it done by Summer Games Done Quick 2013 in the hopes that someone will pick it up and run it. Getting it to this point has been an experience, since I’ve had to do pretty much everything for it, from music (Which I’m actually okay at), to sprite editing (Which, as of yet, I am very much NOT okay at, although I hope to eventually use all original sprites in the game), to whatever programming is required (Which I’m all right at as well, although I didn’t take into account a much easier way of resolving attacks).

Additionally, there’s still a lot of work to do, besides just finishing the levels/enemies/bosses/etc. Because Gamemaker Studio dropped MIDI support for whatever reason, I was forced, for this proof-of-concept, to take the route forged before me by The D (Who, whatever else you want to say about him, has completed three more games than I have as of this writing), and use .WAV-converted-from-MIDIs; for the final music, I’ll either actually record what parts I can or, at the very least, see about using either VST or trying to hook my wife’s cheap keyboard to my computer and get what instruments I need that way. I also need to make the actual intro (For now, selecting “View Intro” just gives you a text synopsis of the plot), and come up with a proper ending and Game Over screen as well.

For now, though, hopefully you’ll enjoy what I have. The proof-of-concept contains one level, a proper title screen, and four songs. There’s also a pre-boss cutscene that can be skipped. Hopefully I’m on the right track to creating something, if not masterpiece-esque, at least fun and playable.

You can download the installer for Windows here.

EDIT: Some notes…If you use Avast! Antivirus (Or Norton, or another Antivirus program), you can ignore it if it tries to put the file into a sandbox or get rid of it. I’m not trying to obliterate your computer. Also, please do read the changelog–it’s less than a page, and it details some of the stuff that has changed and been fixed since the previous version (Mainly, there are now two levels, and the game, or at least the main portion, should now work on Windows XP.).
-EE

So I have a computer I can actually stream from. No more kidnapping my wife’s computer to do so. Hooray! Later on tonight I’ll likely try a stream from this computer and see if it works as well as I hope it does.

Work on Hysterium slowly continues. I have to work out why some stuff isn’t saving exactly the way I want it to. I may have to actually save changes in the items database, now that I think about it.

I haven’t played much Phantasy Star III of late. That’s because I was busy successfully completing the main part of The Final Fantasy V Four Job Fiesta. You can see the final bosses here and here, and my victory over bonus boss Shinryu here. I eventually want to take out Omega, the other bonus boss in the main game.

And that’s about it, really. Next weekend is Connecticon!

I have a number of gaming related things going on, and to actually do them all is going to require that I don’t spend hours watching streams. Let’s go over them all.

On the speedrunning front, I have to finish up Golgo-13: Top Secret Episode. Hopefully I can get that tonight when I stream my own play. After that, sometime in the future will be the sequel, Golgo-13: The Mafat Conspiracy. But again, that’s in the future.

Before that, I have to stream the winner of my poll. Currently, Ninja Gaiden II 360 holds a slim lead, presumably because people want me to suffer. Once I finish whatever game wins, I have another project I want to stream.

On the non-streaming front, I’m still working through Phantasy Star III (Watch for another installment in The Phantasy Star III Chronicles late tomorrow). Also, in late July, I’ll be taking part in The Speed Gamers Community‘s Final Fantasy marathon, playing through the Dawn of Souls version of the very first game in the series. Currently, I’m scheduled to lead off the entire marathon, although that’s subject to change. Additionally, I signed up for The Final Fantasy V Four Job Fiesta, a challenge playthrough of Final Fantasy V, where you can only use some combination of the jobs given to you by Gilgabot, and people can pledge money to the Child’s Play Charity. While I was a bit old for the target audience, so to speak, when I was in the hospital, the idea of giving kids in the hospital a distraction from whatever treatment they’re going through is something that appeals to me.

Finally, I want to get back into the development of Hysterium, the game I mention in passing in this post (And several other times on the site). For now, I’m going to scale it way down, and basically turn the first quest into the game. I’ll then expand it at a later date.

So yes, busy busy. I’ll try to periodically update on the non-Phantasy Star III stuff as I make progress.

-EE

Here you go.

This run finishes the game in a shade under 13 minutes and 45 seconds. If you happened to watch Japan Relief Done Quick, for reference, it took at least that long to realize I was streaming to the wrong place, at which point I was less than halfway through the game (Which is an excellent indication of just how terribly I played to that point. This contributed to my mood when I finally got streaming to the correct place.). Despite that, there’s still a tiny improvement to be made with a route change, or rather, when I grab food. There’s also some execution improvements to be made, most notably my needlessly going to the menu at the end of the Dungeon because I didn’t know casting Twin took almost no mana at all.

I suppose I should explain why I’ve uploaded this video to Screw Attack (Which is not a porn site; its name comes from a powerup in the Metroid series) and not Youtube. Put simply, Youtube wanted me to link a Google account to use it anymore, and I flipped out and refused to do it for awhile. I’ve since capitulated, but I’m still not putting up any videos on it. Screw Attack is a more gaming-centered site anyway. Yeah, someone who shall remain nameless is correct when they say Screw Attack “is where tens of people will see your video!” But on the other hand, the way I see it, if you’re not willing to do some leg work and promote your video yourself, you don’t deserve to leech off the popularity (Or lack thereof) of the video hosting service you put it on.

Hence, Screw Attack it is. You’ll notice a link to my account on “Emptyeye Elsewhere On the Web” over to the right. Right now, it’s just Magician videos, but I want to eventually put my remaining Youtube videos on there as well.

-EE

Lately, I’ve been putting a lot of effort into the Connecticon Rock Band tournament. I finally finished the spreadsheet of songs for it, containing all 661 songs you can currently play on my Rock Band 3 setup. The spreadsheet will be printed out to help people get a sense of what they can pick, especially for the finals, where the tentative plans are to allow free song selection with the disclaimer that the same song can’t be played more than once throughout the finals. It’ll help for the qualifier too, but I have another weapon up my sleeve for that that might help even better.

That weapon is an OpenOffice.Org database. With this, I feed the spreadsheet into the database, and then, using queries and the like, can spit out the list of allowed songs (Current plans for the preliminaries are one “easy”, one “medium” and one “hard” song, with those adjectives determined by the total number of dots the song has for whatever combination of instruments are in play) for the combination of instruments being used, and the difficulty we’re trying to find a song for.

The other big news is that I’m considering a site redesign. The site, and the look for it, is almost four years old now. It has some quirks I never entirely fixed, and site technology has improved a lot as well. In other words, I don’t need to, EG, list out every single month on the sidebar anymore, I can theoretically just put the years with the number of posts, and then from there you could click and get to the months. So sometime soon, I’ll start looking into themes I can modify for my own purposes, coming up with new categories, and so on. It should be fun.

In less big news, I do still intend to finish a speedrun of Magician. In the meantime, I plan to upload the best run I have so far on my Screw Attack account, where you can currently see a couple “work-in-progress” versions of the run. I’ll make sure to post when that’s done. Really, this time.

-EE

Apologies for any downtime you might have experienced yesterday…Lunarpages was performing some upgrades on their end that apparently brought everything down for a bit (I had wanted to make an update yesterday, but even I was getting an Internal Server Error). We should be back in business now.

Hopefully a proper update will be forthcoming later on.

On the TV Tropes Live Bloginations Forum, I detailed my experiences playing through several games, Wizardry I and Dragon Warrior, both on the NES. More accurately, I turned both playthroughs into a sort of fan-fiction (Yes, there are more types besides “Two male characters mercilessly screw one another’s brains out”), creating an actual story and characters which were rather scarce in both games.

Since I’ve done pretty much everything I can do short of actually rehearsing my panel, in order to continue making posts, I’m going to be doing a sort of “Director’s Cut” of those two liveblogs. What I plan on doing is re-posting them here, correcting any misspellings, bad links, etc, but not changing any of the actual content other than that. In addition, I’ll be posting post-entry commentary stating what I was thinking both in terms of the writing and the actual gameplay, and what I think of it now. Hopefully you’ll enjoy this.

Also, after entirely too long, I’ve gotten rid of the “latest song” thing near the top of the site. I also did some minor tweaking to add a space between “and” and the category names on each entry. And the copyright notice has finally been updated too.

-EE

I’ve been holding off on posting anything about this until it was 100% official that I would be doing it, and I got word yesterday that I’m good to go on that front, so here it is:

At Gobble-con, I’ll be giving a panel titled “So You Want to be a Speedrunner: A Leisurely Guide to Playing Video Games in a Frantic Manner”. Those of you who know me are no doubt laughing hysterically at your computers, knowing how confident and outgoing I am.

But in truth, as I mentioned previously, this is something I’ve actually thought about doing for awhile, in part because it’s so contrary to the image of me that most people have of me. That said, the fact that I’ve never lost the Best Vocalist Award at Connecticon‘s Rock Band tournaments, in which performance is a factor, does show that I can fake the confident, outgoing persona for short periods of time when it’s required…and I figure I’ll be fine as long as I keep telling myself “I don’t have to actually be outgoing and confident, I just have to fake it for an hour or so.”

More seriously, the fact that Gobble-con is a small (Don, the guy running it, told me he’s expecting somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 to 300 people. In contrast, Connecticon had roughly 8000 people this year.), first-year convention was what convinced me to take the plunge and try to do the panel there. For one, I figured that, being a first-year convention, they’d be looking for panels (And more willing to grant a panel to someone who has never actually given a panel before), as opposed to something like Connecticon which more or less has its pick of panel submissions. For another, the smaller audience means that if I do badly for whatever reason, not a whole lot of people, relatively speaking, will see my spectacular failure.

Truth be told, I’m excited about this. I’m hoping to use some of the stuff I learned in the How to Run a Panel panel, and I’ve been scouring the Internet for public speaking advice as well, using my judgment whenever I come across any contradictory advice. I also plan to use this site (Yeah, the one I’ve been neglecting for the past six months) a bit more to post my progress in this endeavor. I should really change that “Newest Song” at the top to more or a “Latest Progress” kind of thing, what with not having done any recorded music stuff in about two years.

Until next time..
-EE

Yaaaaaaay!

• In webcomicky news, I’m currently really enjoying the current storyline of Evil Inc., wherein would-be supervillains have been laid off from their evil corporation and forced to find alternate means of employment. In particular, today’s (the 24th) strip illustrates something I wished I could do to certain customers during my days working for Stop & Shop. Go check it out!
• In other webcomicky news, Don’t steal your punchlines from message boards. It won’t end well.
• For some reason, Project Wonderful reports my site as being up and down repeatedly, though it seems okay since Sunday. This may have been due to my messing about on the upcoming-I-swear webcomic, trying to password protect that specific directory (And apparently causing the whole site to come up as not found in the process (Speaking of stealing stuff, does anyone know where that “I has a bucket” picture came from? I know the story of the elephant seal and such, but I’m wondering who first captioned it). Oops. At least I didn’t wreck the database this time…
• Speaking of upcoming-I-swear stuff, I did a bit of work on the Fester’s Quest speedrun last night. It’s become very clear to me that the hardest part of the run is going to be the first 5 to 10 minutes, before I acquire items that let me survive. I’m also going to have to plan exactly how many enemies I plan to kill near the beginning to acquire the items I need (Primarily keys), versus just hoping for them later on in the run. Fortunately, because of a glitch you can use to easily kill the bosses of the game except for the last one, if I can get to the first boss, I’m essentially home free as far as survival goes. Going quickly is another matter…

Yes, after quite awhile, my speedrun on that platforming classic (By which I mean “Game that goes rapidly downhill once you press Start to get beyond the title screen and actually start playing the game”) Chuck Rock has been posted to SDA. Go check it out! And for those of you who found the site via the link in the run’s comments, welcome! Feel free to browse through the blog archive, or check out some of my music. If you’ve got your own site to advertise, consider putting in a bid for the ad-space to your right at Project Wonderful. Thanks, and hopefully you’ll keep checking back!

Oh, and a special shoutout to the people/bots/whatever from Amsterdam who keep trying to spam my Comments. I mention this only because they were the first people since I activated Akismet to actually succeed in getting through it–for about 6 hours, when I blocked any comments coming from their IP block. Hi Amsterdam!