Just after dark Maria kissed her husband and child goodbye, grabbed the lantern her husband handed her and left out to meet the girls. They had grown up together, gotten married about the same time, and with Maria’s addition a couple months ago, they all had children. Growing up they had always met in the woods behind the old church, lit a fire, and told stories to see if they could scare each other. It had been years since they had been out there, and they were all as excited as they were cautious. A year ago a homeless woman was seen eating a rat, and was later caught scaring kids with the eyes and tails. What started as a simple case of disturbance soon escalated into a plague of convenience convictions and vigilante justice. They all knew know one was safe, was the nostalgia of it all was far too enticing.

One by one they showed up around the campfire, each one more giddy than the next. After they all greeted each other and settled down Cynthia Hamlin started things off with a ghost story that had some promise but got way too sappy to hold it’s once haunting edge. Then March Engel stood everyone’s hair up with a story that was way to close home. After a long silence March broke through the eerie silence with her all too common laugh after scaring the fool out of everyone, which always led to a host of laughter. Everyone was slowly quieting down as Agaitha stood to tell her story. Agaitha’s stories always started off slow, with lots of dramatic pauses, probably the only reason escaped. At about the third mouth gaping stare we heard a rustling. We were scared for just a moment, when Cynthia pointed at that March wasn’t in the circle. March was infamous for sneaking out of sight and scaring everyone, with a smile on their face, story time continued as they eagerly awaited the obvious.

Agaitha was nearly finished when they heard a rustling, odd, they usually never heard her coming. March flew out of the woods in a blind run running falling over Cynthia. They all shrieked and fell apart in laughter, it took few seconds for March to catch her breath and finally speak above noise what she had been frantically mouthing since she arrived. “Run”, she shouted as her finger pointed back toward the church. A light fog was settling in and through it they could see the tint of torchlight. Someone had seen them, they were coming…

The idea is to write back story for games I am or will be working on, as a way to keep things moving forward when it seems like nothing is moving forward. It will also challenge my writing skills and hopefully improve them. And I don’t expect every week to be epic, but I hope it proves to be entertaining.

Games – Too Big, Too Hard?

For years I have been working full time, and going to college full time, while trying to spend time with my wife and four kids and working on games in my spare time, which left very little time for actually playing a game. During that period of time I almost completed Final Fantasy 3 on the DS making it to the final boss, and alas the world was left in peril due to my untimely death. So now that I am working one full time job putting my hard earned degree to work, I have had time to actually play games, like an hour every night!!!

The first game I pulled from the backlog of unfinished games was Chrono Trigger for the DS. I enjoyed almost every minute of this game, with exception to a lot of the add on quests that came with the DS version, but they were optional so I did what I wanted to do until I got bored with them. Then I got back onto the original side quests and beat all but a handful without having to reference a walkthrough. Each one was creative, and most came with good story bonuses. Then after many hours I took on the Black Omen and pretty much ran straight through from there to the final battle with Lavos.

It took me three nights to beat the final battle, putting the DS on suspend (love that feature) but slowly learned the what needed to be done and took it with patience. The battle felt epic, it was far from impossible, but seemed like it at times, and really challenged my nerves. After it was all over I was given an incredible game ending, and I might eventually play through this game again on the beaten mode.

After that I grabbed Suikoden for the DS, because I remembered the story line in that game to be quite good so far. I played on it for about a week or two, but the constant random battles just wore me out, Suikoden went back on the shelf, and now I am playing another game entirely.

For me Suikoden became more work than fun, and since it is wildly an amusing waste of time, I don’t find it necessary to explore the game further. But Chono Trigger had very little filler content, and I could explore without constantly being punished for doing so. And Chono Trigger is by far the harder of the two games, but it’s balance and intrigue kept me going, and I hardly noticed that it took me about four weeks of hour long play sessions to finish, I just couldn’t put it down.

So, that has been my recent experience, I like to jot this stuff down as I still do a bit of game development to break up the web development tedium.

Everyone believed him dead, but I now know he un-lives as a vampire, and I will forever be part of …

Oh yeah, I’m a fan!

My wife was at the release party last night, she won that bottle and a few other things. She hasn’t woken up yet to see that I’ve fixed this for her, but I’m sure I’ll be the first to know when she does. Anyway, it’s fun to do an off the wall post every now and then, but I must hurry and get back to my anticipation.

Disclaimer: I am in no way affiliated with Twilight or Earnest. I enjoy parodies of even my favorite movies and singers. This is in no way meant to be offensive, it is just for fun that I do this.

Goat Cheese concept art.

• Goat Cheese is a party based RPG focusing on the story of one town
• Up to 4 in your adventuring party
• Almost every NPC is a recruitable character on condition
• Lots of dialog based on your chosen party adding to replayablity
• Optional boss fights with the right party
• Every ending is a game ending, just go home and roll credits
• Humor based story line with multiple outcomes
• Start the game over with your saved character
• Desired Target Platforms: Mac, Windows, iPhone, iPad

The design has multiple authors and I am teaming up with a friend to make this game happen. The timeline is a year in our spare time, give or take a few months. Just to show you how serious this game is I included some early concept art. So in the mean time check back from time to time for updates and if you have an iPhone go check out my current game, Choppacide EU.

So now I have several partial RPG’s, including one half started 3d game (need more cash first) and no more college waiting on a degree so I can job hunt. So after running aground financially on 3D I decided to review my old design docs and decide on a way to mix them up and finish an RPG. I am still finalizing the design doc and prototyping a bit and getting pretty close to having something that looks fairly impressive. I am also toying with the idea of teaming up with an artist and a sound and music person. I was always hesitant to drag someone onboard before due to my inexperience, but I have learned a great deal over the last two years and feel much more confident in what I can do. And with college no longer a time factor I have been able to accomplish in a week what took me a month and a half in the first competition.

Choppacide on iTunes.

Choppacide EU

Choppacide EU was the side project I started to let off a little steam from two years of programming on an RPG. It is a quick fun game that is loosely based on my java4k entry in 2004. Choppacide EU was a fun project to work, and allowed me a chance to objective-c and cocoa, not to mention an incredible open source game engine called cocos2d-iphone. Chipmunk is used for the physics and is quite capable. It took me a couple of days to get a prototype working in TGB, then quite a few weekends learning iPhone development and tweaking physics.

I will have more on this game once it gets released.

Things are going quite quickly, it took me a while to get the hang of the syntax but it is pretty simple. It also took a bit to get used to the stricter C as opposed to the C used in C++. But I have been very impressed with the language and how quickly I can get something done in it. I most likely won’t bother trying to tie in a scripting language because Objective-C is as dynamic as I need it to be.

Finally, I have to take a moment to brag on the impressive framework that is Cocos2D. It is still being worked on and I have been able to submit some code to it, which might get rejected but I was happy with it. Cocos took a bit to get the hang of, but once I got into it I began using it as well as manipulating it to suit my needs. And with chipmunk physics easily integrated my game is almost fully playable. Now I just need to get it off the iPhone simulator and into my iPod.