Hysteria Studios

Ehhhh....

I suppose that I should, like, do something with this site, or at least make a new one.. But that costs money... That I don't actually have at the minute. But I'll do up a design of some type for you all to admire, while you, the viewers, which are actually in numbers lower than 3, sit back in awe.

PS. I find out if I got a job today, or at least some time this week, which means I might be able to correct these things rather promptly! [teeth].

Insanity Code

My good developer friend Shannon has created his very own website! Keep track of it at http://www.insanitycode.com/ and show your support.

New Hosting

Moving to new hosting within the next two weeks (probablt before the first week), meaning the site will be down at some point for a little while. Good features on the hosting that I am going with though, which is good. Other than that, my computer died today.. I managed to retrieve Crimson and this site from the hard drive, but that was all.. So won't be much getting done for a while I suppose..

Crimson Progress

Crimson is coming along pretty well, I'll keep uploading screenshots of it as I go, so check up on those for sure and leave comments on whatever you think needs to change, etc. Let me know if you wanna be involved in testing this game as well.

It's Over..!?!

These are the last two days of holidays until the big final exams to complete high school.. After the end of the next two weeks; I can do whatever I want. The rest of my life is going to be built on whatever choices I make from now. Okey dokey then...[worried]. Not so bad though.. I'm gonna start some kind of programming or media course at TAFE because those areas are ones that I am obviously capable in. Get some credentials, and then a related job like a Flex programmer or something similar. Well, that's the way I hope it's going to turn out anyways.

As for this site, and my projects.. TAFE isn't full time..! Which means I have far more time to work on my beloved Hysteria Studios and flash work. Also, the site is going to be moving to new hosting sometime in the next month when I get paid from Kongregate and MochiAds. Meaning there will be permissions for file uploading (YES!). This means that users can upload their own flash games, photos, blogs, etc as the site grows. Which it's going to be doing very rapidly once the move is complete. During the move, Grey Life data will be lost, and inaccessible until the move is complete again. I'll make a backup of the users table in MySQL, so that those aren't lost.

Hysteria Studios is going to get a massive makeover (without the loss of content). And the objective of the site will shift from a small blog and portfolio, to a large network of people uploading flash games, photography and writing their own blogs. I'll also be trying hard to think of a suitable logo for Hysteria Studios (ideas please!), alongside a new intro sequence for my flash projects, and if I start making videos, those as well.

So for the next two weeks - I'm out. After that, prepare yourself for big things in regards to this initially small setup: Hysteria Studios.

New Project

Today I started work on a new massive project which I've called Crimson for now until I think of a ore suitable and better sounding name for it.

The main concept is that you are exploring the world from top-view where you can interact with many things such as training animals, mining, shopping, opening chests, etc. Battle will be done from a side-view and turn-based much like Sonny but with many more features and obviously tweaked considerably, probably to become more of a side-view Final Fantasy X, or something similar. I am thinking that all enemies, npcs, etc will be placed on the world map, and from there you can select enemies and engage them in a battle (where the perspective will then change to side-view).

As for interesting elements, the game will have a lot of database communication for things like mail between players, leader boards of level/kills. More importantly though, I'm going to (hopefully) include a large engine for setting up businesses within the game. Players who set up a business will have their business appear in a listing, along with the products you allocate for that business to sell; and from here players can then buy goods from your business. The money spent will then be given to the player who owns that business.

Thinking that I will make the player create one avatar which is unique to the player, and from there you can hire up to perhaps 4 additional NPC characters, which you will issue commands in battles as well.

Holidays!

It's the school holidays at the end of thid week which gives me a fair amount of time to work on various things like this site, and hopefully a new game! I'm not entirely sure on what kind of game I want to make - well that's not true, I want to make an RPG but it's so time consuming to even get one of those up and running, and I need some money soon.. That brings Grey Life 2 or something similar into my head, but they are so boring to make..

Memories Demo

This afternoon, I think I am going to construct a small series of levels in Memories, and release it as it (without SFX/music, generally incomplete). No one had an interest in sponsoring this game.. For some odd reason. But it's too massive and way too much time was put into it (2 months) for it to be in my Recycle Bin. If I get enough kind reviews and ratings, then obviously the people like that type of game, and I'll make a new completed version using AS3 and many new skills so that I can have zounds of enemies and way cooler abilities, faster gameplay and a better system of play overall.

School

At the moment I've not been able to complete things like games or more things on the site because of the HSC coming up, and my mountain of work that I have to complete before I am eligible for that certificate in the first place. So don't stress, I'll be back with a new game and some more updates to the site within the next month!

Users

Woah my mailbox is completely spammed with signups today.. And it's awesome [teeth]! But now that I have users.. I need to do the user page and view profile page. Current ideas are involving users being able to make their own blogs, adding friends, sending private messages, writing comments on people's profile, and showing trophies/achievements on your profile that you have at the time from highscores. Post your other ideas or suggestions about my current ideas hereee..!

Mine Mania

Over the last few months I've been training a legion of undead programmers to make games for me. Lies aside, I've been teaching one of my friends Shannon the art of Actionscript 3, drawing, and Flash in general. Anyways, he's released his first game! Mine Mania is a simple first release where you're the controller of a boat which has to avoid mines, as well as collect coins to get a highscore. Quite addictive, and harder than it sounds, go play it!

Interesting..

Well. It seems that a release of DAZ3 which had a weapon you can only use if you're signed up worked about as well as I expected. I got a good 30+ users out of it.. Now all I have to do is make the site worth actually visiting so people post and stuff. Well.. Suggest something! And thanks for joining [teeth]

Other than that.. My need of money to get a laptop has led me to the idea of Grey Life 2. This might make you a little queezy considering Grey Life is probably not one of your favorite games on here... But realize that my programming AND artistic skills have increased significantly, as well as my ideas on what should be in a game and what shouldn't. Admittedly, Grey Life turned out as more eye candy than a game. And even in that respect it's still a failure haha. Well.. I'll keep you posted about thattt.

Experiment: DAZ3.5 Exclusive

Today I'm gonna see what happens if I re-release Destroy All Zombies III with some facelifting, glitch correction and overall improvement. But most importantly, with exclusive content like weapons and armor that can only be used if you're either logged into Hysteria Studios or if you're playing from Hysteria Studios.. The aim of this is to see if anyone will start joining the site and actually using it, so that my efforts of making it a decent site to visit aren't wasted. Other than that, I might get a decent increase in revenue from Mochiads for a short period as well which should at least put me over the $100 mark for the next month.

After 18th

Last Sunday was my 18th birthday.. Nothing interesting happened really but I did get in a lot of sleep..! I had some nice dinners made by mum and stayed at the girlfriends house with two other friends drinking casually, and just hanging out really. Also I received bonus points for falling down the stairs see. It wasn't as fun or painful as it sounds. Social gifts aside, I also got some money from the parents which I used to get a new set of dumbbells, a barbell a new camera, and a small supply of alcoholic drinks just because I can and I felt like it at the time.. Anyways.. For the most part it was an alright last 2-3 days, some things went wrong but the things that didn't turned out really well and I ended it with a smile which is what's important!

On a side note, I'll be mainly working on the site over the next week, but look out for a magical remake of Destroy All Zombies III or something similar before Christmas.. Thanks!

Hysteria API

I think I'm going to start building an appropriate API for my future games. The API will start off basic with simple things like highscores and achievements, and evolve from there. With the release of Tile Break, I've learned enough AS3 to build this API and get some games out where people can actually compete against each other, etc[laugh]. Anywho, the introduction of competition through my future games should surely get more plays in attempts to be the victor. Ideas here please[dead].

Other than that, I'll be making a new Hysteria Studios game intro today or tomorrow! Exciting![worried]

Tile Break

Aside from the highscore table and some touchups, Tile Break is finished and here for your playing. Carlie gave me the idea [teeth]. Before I distribute, tell me if you think anything should be changed and I'll see what I can do[hmm]. Well enjoy.

New Computer

Yesterday, I got a new computer. I needed a new one because my previous one was getting very bad, by shutting itself down on me constantly. That kinda made it hard for me to actually get anything done, because if the computer doesn't shut down properly you can lose progress. Which is kind of irritating and made me just not bother to start with. Now though, I can get lots done[teeth].

The site's had a lot done to it.. But for what? Nobody even uses the stuff that I've added to it.. I need to get people signing up and posting/commenting/whatever.. Otherwise I'm going to slowly lose interest in making a cool site all together. Though, I have been learning a lot on this build of the site. And it's really good, because it's setup in a way that makes it easy to keep adding to it, and not have to rebuild the entire thing. Well, you've probably noticed that this is the longest lasting build so far anyways. Going well.

Other than the site.. I'll see if I can weed out the last few glitches on that brick breaking game through this week and just get that out there.. An idea that's been going through my head is to just sharpen up some older games like Destroy All Zombies III and Grey Life, just add some extras like a new enemy here and a gun there or whatever. Make some things exclusive to this site, so that I get more visitors? Should work well anyways[wink].

Sprite Sheets

Recently in a curious search as to how Boxhead: The Zombie Wars managed to populate their game with zounds of enemies without any lag, I had discovered sprite sheets. The craziness with these is the massive boost in performance when using them for your game graphics rather than normal movieclips drawn using the drawing API that comes with Flash. Another few interesting things that I have come across are Vectors and for each(var i:Object in something). Combining these with sprite sheets for graphics is giving me an insanely large increase in the amount of enemies or whatever that I can have on screen before I begin to experience any form of lag. Basically this means that, my next game is going to be the coolest sandbox game everr. Well not really, I'm aiming for extend-able RPG with many online elements. Once again more on that later.

Brick Breaking Game

On Facebook there's the Mindjolt Games app or whatever which is basically a massive list of games that you can play and the cool part about it is that it submits a high score and compares it to your friends scores. Anyway. This is quite addictive.. Even the lamest and more boring games that you find around the internet are suddenly so addictive so as to beat all your friends in the leader boards.

Of these games that you can chose from I played Brick Breaker a lot. This is a simple game that probably at least 70% of the world's current population has played, where you are given a grid of different colored tiles, and when you click a tile with at least one adjacent tile of the same color, then those tiles and all the connecting tiles of the same color are removed. If you manage to complete the level by removing all the tiles on the grid, then you are moved to the next level, which is just another grid. This continues on until you are in a situation where you cannot remove anymore tiles and there are still tiles on the screen. This is trickier than it sounds to accomplish, so it's quite a tough game to get a decent score in.

Anyhow, I set out to make my own version as well as an API for this site to have your score automatically submitted (assuming that you have an account on Hysteria Studios). Just something small to add to my currently tiny flash portfolio, as well as get some more Actionscript 3 practice in before I properly start working on Mist (more later on that later this month hopefully).

Have some photos of the brick breaker game to see if they refresh your memory..

Projects Page

Just added the projects page to the site. Meaning that you can now easily browse through my collection of flash works from over the years way back to when I started out[teeth]. Enjoy! Furthermore, post some suggestions on what can go in the right column.. Looking a tad bland with nothing in it haha. More updates coming through over the weekend!

Site Refreshments

We all know that though the site was functioning well.. It was quite bland/boring/whatever. Well today I've been working on getting that fixed as you can see. It's getting there slowly.. Should turn out well [teeth]. Going back to the good old orange theme with darker colors in use as well. Sticking with the lighter styles for the content areas and darker ones for the focus areas such as the newest release, and when it's completed, the footer which will have the old polls back as well. Overall site is starting to look good already. Nothing a couple of drop shadows and some color couldn't repair anyhow.

School Holidays

School holidays are here! That means ludicrous amounts of doing nothing, and more nothing. At least I have a lot of time to work on my site and Memories over the next two weeks starting today.. We'll see if that idea goes to plan. Sadly there's a few things been screwed up for me again so things might not go as smoothly as I had hoped they were going to. Other than that, I sent the demo of Memories off to Kongregate. Can't say they seemed very impressed at all.. [frown] But I'll continue on with it because even without a sponsorship if I happen to not get one, it's a very nice addition to my site's portfolio (which isn't even up yet haha) and will make some money from awards and advertising anyways.. So long as someone doesn't happen to release something amazing like Sonny 3 over the same month..

Back in Business

I've retrieved the source and components to Memories, which means it's full speed ahead so I can finally get this one out[teeth]. Suggestions welcome as always.

Quick But Cool Game

Memories is currently resting on a hard drive. Sounds good? Nope, cause the cord we need to connect that hard drive to a PC so that I can retrieve it is broken. But don't stress, it's still there and safe, I'll be able to claim it soon.. Meanwhile though, I have thought up a small game idea that could make some decent cash. It's largely inspired and taken from The Endless Zombie Rampage 2 by Diseased Productions. The idea behind being inside a kind of refuge which you leave to go out and rescue people, find supplies, or just kill things, seems a little bland but comes together quite well along with the upgrade and buying system run off EXP that you earn.

So basically, I wanna remodel this, but with a Gothic-medieval theme where you're in your castle in the middle of the map, which you must protect, as well going out into the forest around the castle to complete objectives that will construct a small storyline for the game. The castle will be a little more complex as the refuge in The Endless Zombie Rampage, meaning that you can actually walk around in it and talk to specific people who have taken refuge inside to gather information, get quests or buy things from. I might even work on party play and you can hire someone to go out with you.

I'll keep the way The Endless Zombie Rampage works in regards to days, resting, etc. Other than that the idea currently is that you play the game as the prince of the castle, which is the last place on earth not overrun. And you're trying to gather information and resources to "cleanse" the world of the "monsters" and start life anew using survivors, etc. I'll have the story told by the main character, in a past tense manner. So it's like he's telling you about what's happening from his memory of the events (which you're playing).

Anyways, gimme some pointers while it's fresh in my Projects folder aye?

Computer Problems

Recently I broke my computer, which is why I haven't been doing anything the last few days. Anyway. I got parts of my old computer and built up a new one.. Problem is most of the parts are damaged and the computer doesn't even stay on for longer than 2 hours at a time. In fact, if I get it going without it turning off on me more than 5-8 times an hour, I'm going well.. [frown]

RSS

I've added RSS to the site.. Not sure if I've set it up correctly and so far the only way I know of adding to the feed is manually which is kind of annoying. But from what I've heard it's kinda mandatory on blogs these days, so there it is. If anyone knows of a way to like.. Have the xml file updated automatically, that would be very awesome. Just let me know in this thread. Kthx.

Crazy Glitches

While re-designing my blog, I came across some crazy things that your browser can horrifically mangle and leave behind in a sorry pile of mess. IE particularly must interpret 90% of CSS as screwThingsUpHere() as most of the issues I get are in IE. Some of these include the columns not matching up somehow and so they would decide to push themselves down underneath the footer, or as shown by the provided screenshot, it will just dump all of the content ontop of itself in a small space on the screen. Anyways, that's all figured out now. I really wanted to use drop shadows off this middle part (white strip) but couldn't get height: 100%; to work properly. So you have to just make do with stupid borders.

Small Redesign

I have tonight to myself so I'm gonna be nice and bored, which means I'm gonna do what I've been thinking about for the last few days and bump up the look of this website[teeth]. I'll just another column for flash on this front page, because the flash page looks way too empty there on it's own with only flash stuff to display on it. So yeah just gonna integrate that to here. So for the duration of that the site is gonna move around a lot and look awkward, but it shouldn't last for long!

Learning AS3

In the last two days I have been at home from school because of some injuries I had received from a fight a few days ago to the face. Anyways. I whipped up a small game this afternoon that I made using AS3. It's essentially the classic Asteroids game made back in the stone ages, with one or two additions like a score multiplier and some shiny art. There should be a highscore table or something of the likes setup for it soon to test the API that I am making in AS3 for my future games, which will link to your profile on this site as well as an interactive kind of avatar I will be making.. More on that later.

Cameraless

My digital camera that I was using to take the photos that are on my site had a slight accident. Meaning it doesn't work anymore. So I'm gonna have to work on getting a new one.. Woops.

Need Users

The point of this site is to have zounds of people posting and expressing their opinions.. Right now there's about three people actually doing this. We need to develop ways for people to want to sign up. And here's where you're going to post your suggestions for this.

Room Cleaning

One thing about me is that I absolutely hate working around or in a messy environment. This house is generally not the cleanest, but thankfully I own this computer and therefore it resides in my room. This is a strategic advantage, because my room is my own and thus it generally stays reasonably clean almost all the time.

Anyways, today I gave my room a little bit extra in the way of cleanliness and added some posters from Littles, and mixed things up on my desk such as moving the keyboard down onto the slide-out tray that comes with my shabby desk. It's a little hard to get used to, and I've already gone to hit a key on the keyboard that isn't there anymore. But I'm getting used to it alright..

Anyways, heaps tired now so probably not much more from me tonight. Niight.

Waking Up Early

School sucks. Not cause of homework, not even because all the teachers almost literally take your bag and fill it to the brim with works, but because of the fact that you have to get up early. My school is especially good for this. I don't know what made them think this would be a good idea, but they've even set school back an hour so I have to get up even earlier! Living 15km away doesn't help too much either, cause obviously there has to be time given to travel there and back. I think on a spectrum of things I hate doing the most, getting up early and sticking flaming needles in my eyeballs are pretty close by..

Luckily for me though, that's why coffee was invented. So it's alright once you have a shower and down a cup of smokin hot coffee[teeth]

Flash Complete

The flash page on here is now completed enough that you can play the games in my portfolio and view a few statistics on the game itself from the main list such as title, filesize and description. More soon![happy]

Tattoo

In August this year, I'll be turning 18! This means that yeah, I can drink and stuff. But the thing I am most looking forward to is getting a half-sleeve tattoo on my left arm. I've wanted this particular type of tattoo for ages now and I'm pretty determined to get it. Cost of these ones is upward of $950 AUD, so they certainly aren't a cheap thing to have..

First I need to get a design that I like.. Not too sure how to go about this, as far as I can figure out so far you need to go to a tattoo designer and pay them to make up a design with you. Sounds like a bit of a pain though, the arm and left side of my chest can't really be classed together as a flat surface.. So I'm curious as to how this design is going to be lay out.. Either way, I'm not entirely sure what I want on it just yet. All I know is that somewhere needs to be a rose with thorns coming from it going all over the place, and some patterns underneath that. Looking mostly toward red/black coloring for this.. Anyways, in case you have no idea what this tattoo style is, I've found a photo of one.

High-Definition

Previously, when clicking an image thumbnail you would have been taken to a very poor quality, enlarged version of what was shown on the thumbnail. Well, originally I wanted the thumbnails to link you to a high definition version of the image. This didn't work out though, because when the thumbnails were loaded, the image filesize was the same as the filesize of the high definition image, which meant that it took ages to load the little things. Thumbnails at 1.2-2MB a piece weren't all that friendly toward your page download time at all[frown]

Well anyways, now the thumbnails have been fixed up to link you to the same low quality image as before, except with the rest of the page being a little nicer as well. As well as this, if I upload a high definition version of an image, you'll be given the option from this page to view that photo in HD. Pretty nifty[teeth]

Spiders Around the House

Here in Australia, we are ~~cursed~~ blessed with an awesome variety of spiders. This means that there aren't a lot of places other than indoors that you can go without running into plenty of them. Annoyingly though, the "other than indoors" factor doesn't apply to our house. If anything, there are twice as many spiders around this house than what there are out in the backyard. I don't know why this is. Maybe they are scared of getting rained on, or something. It's quite annoying, particularly when you have one the size of your hand sitting on your keyboard and then because you're so intelligent, you brush it off into your bed and forget about it till later on when you have it running over your legs. Yes I've done that so what[oops].

Old Object Avoiders

The first two games I ever made (on my own) were object-avoiders where you controlled some misc shape through a level without colliding with certain threats such as mines, rockets, lasers and more. Later in the games, doors were introduced which made the game a little more difficult again and made them take longer to complete as well. Each of these games which are Project Green and Grey Life were alright.. But they could be improved massively. After Memories I obviously need to start on a new game. And a new object avoider is being thrown together in the back of my head, as well as a sequel to Memories and an RTS game looking much like one of my narrowly known releases Orbit, which can be found on Kongregate if you're curious.

Anyways, obviously if I'm going to work on yet a third object avoiding game, it has to be perfect to rack up a 4+/5 score on sites such as Newgrounds and Kongregate. Suggestions can be posted in this thread and if there's enough good ones then I'll likely disregard the other ideas and work on this one. After Memories, of course. Which is going splendidly by the way. Look out for it over the next month or two at the most!

Flash Page

Just gotta work on the flash page now.. But I have no idea about how to put stuff on thereeee[frown]. Should like.. Post your ideas here and I'll get on it.

Memories Builder

So, back to Memories for a sec.. The builder for this game was originally designed to be used by only me, so it was quite shabby at first. However I am mixing up the idea of letting users make some of the levels as well as myself, as many creative minds are surely better than just the one.

The editor isn't going to be included in the game itself, so it's certainly not made to be completely stupid-user proof. It takes some slight getting used to with the controls used to add tabs and link levels. Level data is put out in a big list when you click to view it, so that can all be sent to me quite easily. As for the site, smileys are working[happy] and users can post stuffff which is what you should be doing otherwise I wasted all this time.. Ha.

Accounts!

You can now create an account on Hysteria Studios. When you create you account, please be sure to provide the correct e-mail address, as this will be where your verification link will be sent. You must verify your account before it can be of any use. Once your account is verified and the lot, you can post comments on anything you see in the blog. Further uses for accounts will come around over time, but for now this is about all having an account has to offer.

An account page where you can customize your details such as your full name and change of password will be available soon as well. There will also be boxes that you can check to have notifications e-mailed to you as well. For the moment however, these are all disabled by default. Notifications can be sent for events such as me posting something new on the blog, or someone posting a comment after a comment that you have posted in a thread.

Well, enjoy for now!

V-Walk

Another thing I like to do when I get bored is learn random useless things off youtube. Youtube is wonderful for it's massive amounts of how-to junk. Generally I focus on things that relate to some type of dancing move or trick like a handstand etc.. For the last half an hour or so I have been learning the v-walk. It's quite simple and looks very cool lol. You just have to get the hang of doing a kind of rolling motion with your feet simultaneously and once you have that down the only thing I need to perfect is keeping my feet the same distance apart. Very nifty and from what I can see, it's one of many related things you can do. So.. Now I am a pro v-walker thanks to youtube!

Commenting

The perhaps long awaited ability to post comments on my random rubbish is now here! At the moment the site is ultra-prone to spamming but I'll work on that over the weekend for sure cause I really can't be bothered to do the cleaning up every day. Especially when the site has lots of posts and there's so much to moderate. But yes, right now you can click the add your comment link which is surrounded in a very conspicuous yellow box for your convenience, and then fill out your name and the comment you want to write. Have fun with the very basic current form before I change it to something a little more secure.

New Clothes

Cause I was starting to feel a little bogan in my old wardrobe, I decided it was time for a personal facelift. So today, I went around with roughly $200 and got myself a couple of new jackets, shirts and a new pair of shoes.

With the shoes.. Well they're hard to get used to at the moment. Cause generally for probably around the last 2 years I have worn only volleys. Now, going from "skate shoes" which I wore before that, to volleys, was interesting enough. Doing this in reverse is proving difficult and when I look down I see massive clomper feet that just don't look right anymore. But I know I'll get used to them quickly, so that's okay. A good thing about them is doing any crip walking in them looks way cooler. Especially when there's a black light around, as there's a white ring around the base of them. Snazzy.

Guitar Hero

When I get really really bored, I play Guitar Hero III.. It's interesting because when you play heaps in a row you slowly get better, but when you take a long break like a week or two, you come back twice as good.. How on earth does that work? Anyways, I haven't played any of the newer ones but they all look alright as well..

I don't quite understand how to get good enough to the point that you can smash songs like Raining Blood and One.. I can beat Through the Fire and Flames on Hard, but that's nothing compared to those songs. It's insane.. It could be easier if they just made a generateRandomNote(); function or something. Shrug. You go onto youtube and watch people do it without trying.. Makes me want to stab them..

Stupid School

Here I am trying to make my site and Memories, meanwhile school is cramming assignments down my throat faster than I can keep track of them.. Year 12 is a bit of a pain. But after that, it's free time for my business. Woo. So yeah.. If you're coming here (not likely) and wondering what the delay with any progress on either my project or my site is about.. Blame stupid school!

Bowling

So this weekend just passed I went down to see my dad, and generally when this happens he drops my brother, step sister and I off at the Manhattan Superbowl.

Bowling is upstairs which also includes a fair sized arcade and bar for whatever food and drinks you want while you're there. But more importantly, there's a jukebox that let's you select a certain amount of songs for a certain price. The songs you select will be added to the playlist that the complex has going on their massive sound sound system, as well as the film clip for that song being played on the projector thingos that come down from the roof where everyone is bowling. This might not sound cool right this moment, but I swear they have pretty much every song ever made starting from the existence of man right up to yesterday. I spent at least $20 on this jukebox ($2 for 3 songs) during the three games we had.

Another really cool thing is that there is minimal lighting in the place, it's all dark and everything is neon lighted. And all up near the bowling there's black lights (those lights that make white and fluorescent colors glow) which in combination with wearing white shirt and the provided bowling shoes, looks really cool.

Anyways, so that's why I haven't been working on the site or Memories over the weekend.. But I'm gonna work on the site for the rest of today.

Project Progress

Been working on Memories very hard over the last three days.. To the point where I stayed awake from 2PM Wednesday when I woke up until 5PM the next day! That might sound bad, but I don't think so. Because Memories is now evolving into definitely the best game I have made to date, and possibly one of the best games that will appear on Kongregate, Newgrounds and the rest of them.

So, what has been done on the game so far? Well here's as detailed as a description as I feel like giving at the moment.

The World: The game world is made up of many smaller levels that are linked through various objects found throughout the game such as trapdoors, doors, holes, and various other entrancey-looking object. Each time you leave a section of the game to enter a new one, that level you were just visiting will be updated and stored as a visited level. This means that when you return to this section, it will be as it was left. I'm considering enemy spawners, but as of yet, the enemies are all pre-set and the experience you gain from them will get you through the game fairly. I'll be working on making the world as detailed as possible, as you can see by the screenshots provided, the terrain and structures aren't of high quality. But don't stress - as they are temporary for the mostpart.

Combat: Combat in the game is simple. You into range of an enemy, clicking to attack. Various spells are also provided which can be cast from the quick select bar along the bottom center of the screen. The corresponding number key on the keyboard will also cast the spell. Loot is dropped at random from enemies that you defeat, and added to your inventory by clicking the item.

Leveling Up: Leveling up in this game is much the same as almost any other RPG, which is that when your experience reaches a certain point you will "level up". However, this game has a slight twist to character advancement, which is that you don't gain in any stats or skills when you level up, but rather, you gain an amount of points (currently 3) that you can spend on increasing stats such as health, mana, strength and magic, increasing natural resistances or learning new spells and passive abilities.

Items: The game features a developed engine that handles items. This means that items can be created from scratch and have any number of special properties, resistances or features added to them. Items can be tinted any color which correspond with the properties of the item eg. an item with the mana increase property will tint blue. The inventory contains 42 slots that items can be carried in and all items use one slot. The types of equipment possible are helmet, armor, accessory, weapon and shield.

So from those small explanations I hope you can put a game to the screenshots I've provided. More updates as I go so keep checking up!

Memories Update

So, it's 4:16AM and I've decided to get some sleep now. Basically.. I've been working harder and harder on Memories, and it's getting very very good. The gameplay is smooth, the graphics though not final are still graphics which I can cope with for now, and the engine for spellcasting has just been finished.

Anyways, bed time for me. But, have a screenshot before I go.

IE Bugs Resolved!

The massively annoying problem of the content on my site being "invisible" in certain places on IE has been looked up and resolved!! Through Google I found out that the reason for this happening was something called the Holy Bug, which was a bug where if if the container of certain content didn't have a "layout", which is like a set width, height or one of a few other things, floating elements went really weird.

This was easily fixed by adding height: 100% to a few elements in CSS.

Protein Shakes..

So you might have all been thinking of me as some heaps skinny nerdy kid who doesn't do anything other than be on the computer.. Well, in some ways you were correct. However I do also maintain my figure and work out a fair bit as well as my web and flash hobbies..

Recently I have been experimenting with Protein Milkshakes to see if they get results any faster or even differently.. I have to say they are working better than I originally expected them to. Though I already had much definition, that was the easy part. Since consuming these "milkshakes", I have started to put on more size rather than definition. Either way, I like the results and as well as giving me these results, the shake also contains loads of vitamins and random resources like iron, magnesium, phosphorous, niacin and more. Each summing up to 25% of your RDI per serving, which is 60g.

Working Working

Guess who's been working hard the last two days on an old promised project. That's right I have..

I've started putting gallons of time into Memories again, and it's looking awesome. I've finished the engine for adding enemies to the map, attacking them, and letting them attack you. I've scrapped the old inventory system which slid out of the side because it was too large and ugly for this beauty of a game. I have to say it's looking to be my definite best release yet! Loads of levels, sidequests, optional bosses and hopefully a storyline will all be included in this one here.

As for this site, I obviously need to get some kind of system for posting up ASAP. As well as that, the whole point of remodeling my site was that the content was "invisible" on IE. But guess what.. I'm having the same problem on this one too! Damnit.. Well I'll work on finding out the reason for it as well as building the commenting part of this site sometime soon.

Memories?

Just before going to bed tonight I took a quick little browse of my "incomplete" folder for Flash projects.. And uncovered the hopefully at least slightly anticipated Memories. Opening this game I found a lot of very.. Organized code! I don't know what happened to this.. It was all coming together so perfectly without any glitches and then I suddenly stopped working on it. Anyways, because of how nicely I coded everything it is very easy to continue on with. No promises there though, just so you know. But do be sure to consider this a possible release for this year.

iPhone's Don't Like Cement

About two months ago I set out to get an iPhone on the $79 cap plan, which is unlimited free text messaging, $550 worth of calls and 700MB of data usage. With this plan I was offered the iPhone for free, so, obviously I took it. Two months down the track and just like all my previous phones, it's hit the pavement in a rage due to some phonecall.

Turns out iPhone's don't take this punishment too well.. As you can see by the photo. Luckily the part of the plan that's costing money (the Sim Card) is perfectly fine and is now resting in a Motorolla invented by dinosaurs. Seriously though.. It's got a blue backlight with black pixelated text and images.

Starcraft Maps

Everyone loves Starcraft.. And one of my favorite past times is playing this game, but as well as that, building fully triggered maps for it.

Starcraft is an RTS (for those of you crazy people who haven't heard of it before) and is probably one of the best balanced and highest selling RTS games ever made. Blizzard has managed to perfect this RTS so much that it has even become a national kind of olympic game for South Korea. They are insane for Starcraft over there, you can even go onto YouTube and watch a few tournaments if you get really bored and want to laugh at the hilariousness of hundreds of Korean people cheering at two people playing a video game on big screen.

Anyways, I've been making this map for me and one of my friends to play as well as making this website at the same time. The point of this is that I have been working on my site for some hours today and now I am changing my activity to the relaxation of building and completing this map titled "Showdown". More on this site possibly tonight or definitely tomorrow!

New Bloggy Site

Well.. School holidays I must say are boring as anything. So, I've taken it upon myself to clean my beloved desk as well as the rest of this tiny room I have. As well as that I have, as you can see, designed myself a nice photo blog in an attempt to make the site more interesting and flexible. Meaning that it won't stick to simply flash news, but generally everything that happens around me interesting or not.

The site is nice and simple, loads quickly because of this and is easy to get a feel for. As I work on it, more tabs will be added to it and along with them will be my flash and web portfolios. At this moment discussing blog posts isn't available, but it's on it's way!

Have a screenshot of my old site while we're here.