Birthday Updates

Awesome, it’s my birthday today! I’m feeling more excited about this year than I was last year, and I think it’s because of the amount of things that are occurring at about the same time as my birthday.

In the past two weeks, Monster Hunter Tri and Silent Hill: Shattered Memories both came out, which I can pick up this week finally, plus No More Heroes 2 is finally coming out this month as well.

Steam for the Mac is supposedly coming out in two days, which will eliminate the need for me to restart my computer every time I want to play a game of Team Fortress 2, along with any other game that’ll get put out for Mac as well.

There’s also a few other things in the coming couple of weeks that are gonna be awesome, so, yeah; good year this year.

Even though I only got given one thing so far, it’s automatically the best thing: New battery for my laptop. About a month ago, when I returned from my week long ‘break’, I found that my MacBook’s battery was no longer holding a charge. Basically, if I unplugged it, the power went off. So being able to finally move it away from a wall is nice and was a little surreal when I did it first on Sunday night.

Anyway, I should make another update on the various things I’m doing since last time.

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Writing

All right, all right; even I agree, I need to update something on this. So, let’s look at the timeline:

March – I put up a poll, asking for suggestions to what you think is the best sounding title, which I would then write the story I had planned out for and publish it a month later. The story, now to be called “A Night to Remember”, I realised would not be anywhere near done in one month.

April – I make note on the blog of how it’s going to be done and put up when I’ve finished it and put it up and that I’ll never put a date to expect my work ever again.

May – So now, it’s been two months since I’ve started it. Unfortunately, between distractions, work, my course and whatever else, even working as hard as I can to finish this wasn’t enough. It’s still not even close to done.

I originally intended for this to just be a single file, short story. Noticing that in two months, I’ve written 4,000-ish words in only three scenes and have another 6 or so to go, I’m gonna have to change that. So, within the week — today, even — I’m going to put those first three scenes of the story on the site. Because let’s face it: If I finished this whole story before giving it to you, you’d be here until this time next year.

I had really wanted to do the story in one go and not have to trickle small updates through every now and then like I normally do, but it seems like that’s basically the entire reason you put stuff on the Internet. If I was going to wait until the story was done, I might as well just print it out and sell it hard copy.

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Game Development

Second assignment (Space Invaders) was handed in on Friday. Really want to stress that I said ‘handed in’ and not ‘finished’. Considering I lost two or three of the five available weeks to complete it, I think I did pretty well though. The basic game works — aliens move across and down, you shoot them, they shoot back, they move faster when there’s less left — but I unfortunately didn’t manage to get:

a) Barricades that make the game have some sense of strategy placed into the game

b) There’s only one level

c) High scores do work in the code, but they don’t draw to the screen (along with lives remaining), they don’t save to the file, plus because of b) they’re completely pointless.

d) Mothership doesn’t fly across the screen

So I am going to put it on the site for you all to download, but once the game is actually working fully. Until then… Miniclip? Xgen Studios? Kongregate?

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Something Else

New creative experiment I may be jumping into in the near future. I uploaded a deviation to devianART that should explain it fairly well. LINK

Should I pursue it? Well, if I get bored enough, I guess I’ll find out.

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Everything Else

Now, I swear there was something else I wanted to talk about, but I’m forgetting it. That happens; I deal with it. I made a post on Twitter which I want to expand on, in case it confused some people.

“Y’know the rare moments where you feel, for a short precious while, that things are just falling into place perfectly?”

I posted that at about 10 p.m last night. To put it simply, the majority of times, I don’t have the best of moods; neutral to negative is my average range. No, seriously. However, last night, almost the entire evening and until I went to sleep, I couldn’t feel upset. I just felt happy. With the exception that I’m a little behind in my course, which I can catch up on, everything is golden.

I have no creative buildups that mess with my head, being able to write and possibly even start making a comic; I have a select group of good friends in the real world and there’s several people I’d feel comfortable enough to say that they could be my friends in real life also that I know online; course is going good, I’ve got my health (as far as I’m aware)… Really, all that’s left to seal it is if I can find a partner.

So, yeah; things are going well for me. Like, really well. That just hasn’t happened to me for a long, loooonnnngg time. I feel good about the near future right now. How about you?

So, there you go. Updates are imminent, should everything go well, and the next couple of weeks for me are looking to be great. Lastly, I have recently signed up to USTREAM, so be sure to stay tuned for updates about when I’ll be live streaming. Who knows, you might just see me writing a brand new story…

Regards,

≈Roy