So many times, it happens too fast...you trade your passion for glory. Don't lose your grip on the dreams of the past, you must fight just to keep them alive.
Yo dawgs, I just launched the penultimate update to Super Chibi Knight. It's version 0.9 which is REALLY close to 1.0! What could possibly be left? You ask...
I'm working on the final boss battle which employs a changeup to the gameplay style pretty significantly so it's taking some time. Also, I thought I'd found an animator for the final cutscene, but things didn't end up working out, so now I've got someone new... someone I've worked with in the past and that has one of the most unique styles on Newgrounds... someone who just recently started poking around Newgrounds again after a long hiatus... can you guess who it is? I'm really pumped to work with him and can't wait to see what he creates!
Additionally, @Jouste is doing up some trading card art which is SO SICK YOU WON'T BELIEVE IT! Here's a really sneaky preview:
Other than that, I just submitted SCK to PAX Prime's IndieMegaBooth thing... fingers crossed that it makes the cut!
Not much new to show ye this week, I'm trying to save SOME STUFF for the actual game :-P
Can you guess who will be doing the ending animation for Super Chibi Knight?
First off, I'm looking for a talented animator to do the ending cinematic for Super Chibi Knight. This will be paid! Just send me some samples of your work and some info about yourself via NG PM, or leave me a message in the comments here. I have the script and storyboard ready so a lot of the THINKING has been done.
REPEAT: This will be PAID!
I missed Pico Day... as much as I'd like to say it probably wasn't that good and make myself feel better, it looks like it was AWESOME and I really missed out by staying home to work on Super Chibi Knight. :-(
RAGRET! It was 20 years! I suck!
Seems like I say this every week, but Super Chibi Knight is GETTING CLOSE! Gotta keep on chuggin'!!!! I finish my university semester next Tuesday, so time will free up quite a bit after that.
I submitted it to IndieCade yesterday... I'm not sure it's really up their alley, but I thought it was worth a shot. Uploading screenshots to IndieCade reminded me just how BIG the game is and made me have some feelings of pride and think that MAYBE people will actually like this game. I'm WAY too close to it right now and way past the stage of appreciating it anywhere near what someone fresh to the game will feel. Videos like this one help renew some of the "wonder" I've lost:
I need to start running again...
More pics for your excitement:
Go ahead, leave me a comment, I QUINTUPLE-DOG DARE YOU!
[200th blog post!]
One of the big challenges I've been dreading for the launch of Super Chibi Knight is the communication between AS3 Adobe AIR and Steamworks.
Steamworks lets you do Steam Achievements, Trading Cards, Cloud Saving, chat from within your game etc. Unfortunately, there is no official "wrapper" made by Valve for interaction with Adobe AIR. That means I had to turn to a 3rd party solution which is always a bit scary. Fortunately, I found FRESteamworks, an open source library of classes that uses an "Adobe Native Extension" to communicate with the c++ code that runs Steamworks.
There were quite a few things undocumented (or at least hard to find), especially for people using FlashDevelop, in the FRESteamworks example code, but with a bit of help from @mike from Newgrounds, who went through a lot of the same hurdles making Swivel, I was able to sort everything out and get the Steamworks API working with native AS3 code! Part of the confusion is that all the Steamworks documentation is under NDA, so people who try to make these extensions can only tell part of the story publicly. Valve really needs to address this issue IMO.
Here's a pic of the very 1st Steam Achievement ever earned in Super Chibi Knight (it's just a test, but it still worked right!):
After the native extension was up and running, implementing cloud saves literally took about 10 minutes to implement, so now Super Chibi Knight save states will persist across multiple computers! Woo! Trading Card art is being made by @jouste and it looks as awesome as you'd expect :-D
In other news, progress continues on Super Chibi Knight, though some day I want to write an article about the weird kind of creative block I have about the game ending... I want it to live up to my expectations and be AWESOME, but now that it's here, I'm finding it hard to START the final art and code because then I'm COMMITTED and all the awesome possibilities collapse into the finite choices I'll make which might ruin it all. But it HAS to be done, this game has dragged on for too long... must finish...
Here are some sneak peeks:
[INSERT CATCHY QUESTION TO STIMULATE CONVERSATION]
I just spent a good amount of time reviewing my old blog posts. It was a pretty intense trip.
I'm really grateful to my past self (he's a guy I usually hate for making bad decisions, but in this case he turned out to be a decent fellow). I'm grateful to him for being consistent with posting and for being pretty honest.
It's helped me realize that, while I've still got a lot of growing to do and goals to achieve, I've made pretty decent progress in my happiness levels. This year was my best of recent years in dealing with the winter season slump. I barely noticed the short days and we're already starting the downhill slope to having longer days again.
Losing my job in early 2013 and becoming a freelancer has been stressful, and going back to school has also been a stress, having morekids has been a stress, but somehow I'm dealing with all of it better. I've even had less sicknesses this year.
What this tells me is that my happiness is, at the core, uncoupled from my circumstances/situation. If that weren't the case, I'd be ultra-unhappy right now. :-P
I'm not sure WHY I've been doing better this year. My hunch is that I've been humbled quite a bit... to the point where I've had to re-evaluate where I am and what direction I really want to be heading, and what's really important TO ME in my life. Making steps to work toward "my element," even though still early and only small steps, is more fulfilling.
Being forced to rein in my finances and operate "lean" has actually given me a greater sense of "control" over my future. I have much more detailed/specific plans for future "fat" days. I have a lot of hope and confidence that those better days are on their way.
One major shift in THEME of my posts from back then and now, is I was more focused on my FEELINGS when I was depressed in the past, the last year I've been super focused on what I'm DOING. My posts are perhaps less poignant, but I'm feeling better personally.
Life is cyclical/sinusoidal (cycles through time). A series of expanding and contracting. We usually hate the contracting periods, but they do serve a purpose.
These times are the Rocky training montages in our lives... where Rocky builds his strength for his future successes. The irony of those movies is that, in real life, there is no soundtrack and the moments are not cross-faded into a neat 5-minute segment building anticipation and hope. They're actually pretty scary, uncertain, and overwhelming.
There was a good TED talk about "grit" (the "key" to success) that I watched recently, and it mentions that one of the best ways to increase your "grit" is to believe that failure is recoverable and non-permanent.
My favorite part of all the Rocky training montages is in Rocky 1 when the loneliness and difficulty of what he's doing is emphasized instead of all the "getting stronger" ridiculous rippling abs and biceps (and dancing in the ocean in short shorts):
His alarm goes off at an ungodly hour (4 am) and he drags himself out of bed ALONE. The DJ on the alarm radio says it's 28 degrees F outside (-2 Centigrade). He has a moment when he sits there on the edge of his bed and shivers... no doubt considering just covering up and going back to sleep. He musters some will power and gets up to go to the fridge (the light from the fridge is painful and he tiredly winces). He disgustingly slurps down 5 raw eggs, he does it fast to get it over with and the juice dribbles from the sides of his mouth onto his sweatshirt. The radio DJ playing in the background plays a prank on some poor lady who chews him out for calling at such an early hour.
He stumbles out the door and it is BITTERLY cold in Philadelphia. Sad, subtle music plays (NOT "Gonna Fly Now"). NO ONE is on the streets cheering him on as shown in an ultra long shot of Rocky's alleyway/street that is completely dark and lifeless with one solitary figure (Rocky) slowly chugging off into the distance.
Downtown, the only person outside is the early-morning newspaper delivery truck driver. Rocky arrives at the famous Philadelphia Museum of Art steps (no one trailing behind him), but every step is a STRUGGLE. You hear only the sad background music and Rocky's extremely labored breathing as he just can't keep running anymore and slows to a cramping limp. He's doubled over at the top of the steps, clutching his cramped side. He snatches a glance out over the city as he turns and hobbles back down the steps. The sun is rising.
Here are some pics from the latest progress in the game.
HTML5 MESSINGS AROUND:
A friend had a Q about "html5 canvas" the other day and through helping him solve it, I felt the itch to explore more. It's VERY cool, I could see making some pretty decent games that don't require any kind of plugin! Here's what I made:
I sit next to this weird (I use this term lovingly) kid in the back of one of my university classes. Yesterday he brought his laptop and a video game controller to class and started playing video games discreetly under the table.
He started watching the preview video (which shows Abobo's Big Adventure and Castle Crashing the Beard) and got a really weird and surprised look on his face. Then he went total fangirl and kept asking incredulously if I had REALLY made those games.
Turns out, he follows me here on NG and has been playing my games forever. He also idolizes @TomFulp and Dan Paladin and was awestruck that I'd met them in person (he also loves Fancy Pants and was equally as impressed that I'd met Brad too). He's earned all 100 achievements in Abobo's Big Adventure. His parents wouldn't let him play "T" rated games when Castle Crashers came out, so he lived on Castle Crashing the Beard for quite a while... ha ha!
He's been playing my stuff for the past 10 years and said that Newgrounds' games inspired him to major in Computer Science in college. He couldn't stop talking to me during class which was distracting everyone else and frustrating the teacher. He told me all about some ideas for games that he wants to make and actually followed me out of class and walked me to my car gushing about my games the whole time. He thought my location tag on Newgrounds "Somewhere in Nevada" was just a reference to Madness and not actually true. :-)
Anyway, it was a nice reminder that REAL people play my games and my current projects will potentially provide entertainment for a lot more REAL people. He refused to tell me his NG username cuz he was embarrassed, but he gave me his email and I sent him a Steam Key for Super Chibi Knight.
Every once in a while it's neat to feel like a rock star. :-D
Super Chibi Knight Update:
I finished the jungle level in Super Chibi Knight, and it turned out pretty nice. It's available on Steam Early Access if anyone wants to play it early.
I made a "FINAL PUNCHLIST" of to-dos to finish the game. It has 42 items and each is probably a day's worth of work. It's probably not comprehensive, but I tried to make it as close to comprehensive as possible. That's kind of exciting to see that glimpse of light at the end of the tunnel.
Here are some other pics and videos to show off the latest progress in the game:
Since it's taking a long time to finish the game, I'm trying to make a bigger deal out of incremental updates as I go and posting them on Steam Early Access.
This one was fun cuz I fashioned a "poor-man's shader" for Flash to have a cool ice-reflection effect on icy surfaces. The level also has nifty dynamic snow (each individual flake is under my control). All of this made possible in large part by Tony (The-Exp)'s expert optimization help. I use the snow control for some cool surprises in the final boss battle.
I struggled with the question of whether I should bother including water pools and water physics in the jungle level because it would be a one-off gameplay thing and require research and core-engine tweaking (read as TIME) and I didn't want to delay the game even more. Eventually I just said "screw it" and decided to put in the water. It'll make the game more fun and I think it's worth a slight delay to include it.
It was pretty fun researching 2-D water physics and getting them working in AS3, here are some progress vids:
AS3 WATER PHYSICS:
Final result is that I'm MORE EXCITED to work on this jungle level. Getting re-invigorated is a nice side-effect to doing research into new stuff.
3. Livestreaming
I did a couple livestreams of Super Chibi Knight development last week, and they were quite fun. Biggest benefit is that I work a lot harder/faster/more efficiently when someone is watching. I think I'll keep doing them just because of that!
Here are the links to the archives on YouTube (I apologize in advance for the bg music on some of these):
3rd is a still pic of some new armor variations for the mobile freelance project I'm doing.
Aaaaaaand finally, there's a video I really enjoyed because you get to see the process behind the artwork of some extremely talented, yet stylistically unique, painters (old Disney behind-the-scenes documentary).
