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TormTheMighty
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Torm's Mini-Blog

This is my way to make informal public updates about what were doing with this side project. I recently got a big load of art to program in, so yea' its exciting. I just need to get caught up in school. Diablo 2 binges are and always will be very dangerous (5 characters all the way through hell in 1 week...) It really only minorly affected one class, but I'm still behind.

Some quick things I haven't mentioned or haven't been redundant enough about myself. I am not a professional game designer or developer... I probably wont ever be, but I have been writing/designing video games since before I can remember. (Quick Time-line of examples: I was in first grade I used 5x3 note cards to draw out Metroid levels, In highschool I changed the fallout RPG system to work better for pnp and wrote my own 8 page addition to the game, 5 minutes ago on the crapper I thought of better ways to write AI making it less predictable yet more programming efficient emoticon

I'm always trying to find ways to make games better. Cept now that I can program its real, I really can take those ideas and thoughts for the last 18 (almost 19) years and make them into an awesome game for you.

So yea' this big load of art will almost allow me to finish programming the core of the game Smile!! Very excited just need to find the time. After which we'll step of the development path and go back to writing out sections we hadn't completely completed.

I frequently think about the next game in the serious of Reaper7 games. The next game, oh man, I can't even begin to tell you how excited I get thinking about it. When I sit down and think of ideas for this game I get the same energy rush that I get from chugging 2 espressos and jumping up and down to System of a Down. Unfortunately its very far off :/. I'm aiming to finish Sprite Battle Revolution by mid January. I promise that I'll have a working demo of Project2 to share with you all at some point.

One of the things I really like about creating these games in the Reaper7 universe is that it really gives Brian a chance to show off the universe he created. He gets to show off his universe and you get to see what our heads together can create game wise. I promise that for fan's of Reaper 7, SBR will have play value and lots of replay value.

-Vash out

3/15/2008, 1:31 pm

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TormTheMighty
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Re: Torm's Mini-Blog

Streetlight Manifesto is by far my favorite band ever. They haven't released any new material in well 4 yrs... so when I heard that some tracks were leaked form their new album coming out next month I totally didn't nab them. Because I feel piracy is totally wrong. (Coming from the guy who's shirt says "Every time you download music god kills a kitten") I'd like to think if I could write music it would sound this good.....anyhow.

I really wish online play would work on campus for Halo3...legendary has been the joke of the month...Although I'll be making a big shift from FPS to TBS soon, and I just can't wait. Front Mission: 1st for the DS Oct 23rd(ish?). Ever since H3 lacked a challenge I started playing Return to Castle Wolfenstien (PC not xbox) which provides some real entertainment. There's nothing like killing Nazi's than killing Zombified Nazi's.

I've had a really busy school week, everything from mid-terms, having my LARP organization make front page, to having to schedule a second interview for a potential summer co-op. Despite all of this I really think that the estimated release date of mid January for SBR is still quite accurate.

Today was definitely the first test run of an SBR battle. Its still early some elements of the battle haven't been coded in yet. But watching some characters fight it out was like watching a baby take its first steps (...and then getting to run up and push'em down) leaves me with such a good feeling.

3/15/2008, 1:31 pm

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TormTheMighty
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Re: Torm's Mini-Blog

$cd mailBox
$ls
AHHHH!
$cat AHHHH!
From: Jacobus
To: VasherTheBasher
Poseted: Thu Nov 15, 2007 2:31 am
DON'T BASH ME!
$cd
$bashNoob.out 9000 Jacobus
Jacobus has been bashed!
Your power level was over 9000!

Unix + Programming = <3
(Sorry Jacobus, you probably thought you were safe, but no one is Smile

Soooo... to sum up the last few holiday years in a single sentence, I've learned to not look forward to them. Last year was somewhat better and this year looks like it will be even better. As more and more members of the family get into gaming the holiday's appear to become more of a gaming night than a Christmas party. Last year we had a little DS lan going for awhile, but this year is going to be a battle of the bands. I'm extremely excited =)

On that note holy $#!& is guitar hero 3 addicting. I'm really glad I don't own it other wise I'd never leave the dorm. I love challenges, and that game is a big rewarding challenge. I really like how big the range of difficulty is so its really easy to track exactly how good one is at the game. Now personally I have a long list of games that I NEED to make before, and it wont be to much longer before R7 fans will get a chance to play the first game which is mostly again a learning experience for me! But in its development one of our primary goals is to make a fun game for Reaper 7 fans Very Happy

Honestly I didn't get any work done over break (Guitar Hero 3...) and well there's still work to be done. I think at the end of the next few weeks I'll know for sure the release date of SBR. It all depends on how unpredictably busy I become from School, Work, Holidays, and taking a moment to breath. I've got to say very recently I developed a new way to do animations. Its great and doesn't have the limitations that my previous system had. However inorder to use this system a lot of programming had to be redone and some images too, which were willing to do because we want SBR to be the best it can be before its release date. The next time I post I'll have some screenshots to show off what we've been working on, it'll go nice with the official release date of the game Smile

Happy Holidays
-Vash out

3/15/2008, 1:33 pm

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TormTheMighty
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Q: Vash you tit what the hell is going on? A) you said it was likely that SBR would be finished by January B) You said you'd have screen shots for a December post...

Ready for some pretty good excuses, a day or two after my last post, we realized that we needed to redo all of our sprites before they'd be ready to be shown to the public. So that was the cause for delay for the screen shots, and the game in general. Plus as I've just learned today in a software developing class, often when you solve one problem in software and don't expect anymore to arise you're sadly mistaken. We've had a flood of problems the past months.

To list a few I dislocated my shoulder a few weeks back and its still not fully healed. Its possibly the most annoying injury I have ever had. School started up (...again...), and that takes quite a bit of time. A theatre really close to the one i work for is under reconstruction (I'm pretty sure there was a fire). So now all of their business is coming to our theatre for the next few months....As the head sound technician for my theatre it means lots more work for me. I was recently made President of my dagorhir chapter, and uhh that hasn't affected me yet, but I know by the end of the year I'll probably have put in twice the amount of time into dag' than what I did last year. Oh yea' we also had a hardware failure. Thats the most recent problem. The HDS forums where we kept all of our ideas and so much more is currently not functioning at all. We might have to scrap everything we had stored there (notes, stats, plot, systems, ect.) and start all over. Its been a frustrating time.

So back to where we are I suppose. The game is I would now estimate, with all of my vast knowledge, is probably half done. There's a lot we need to re-do fix correct and edit. I'm sorry that my previous estimate was just so damn wrong. I'll be fixing some code real soon to adjust it so that the screen shots that I'll be posting by February are actual in game screenshots to give you an idea of what it'll look like.

I don't know exactly when I can say this game will be finished cause I have a lot of things I'm doing that are time expensive and don't know how much time i have to spend on them.

-Vash

this is what dagorhir is.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4169475872072375074&q=eryndor&total=24&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=2

3/15/2008, 1:33 pm

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TormTheMighty
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Re: Torm's Mini-Blog

My goal for this month is to not waste any time, a reason being to see how much work I can get done. Oh man, I know I have many long nights ahead before SBR will be finished, but in this half month period alone I've accomplished a great deal. We have made some executive decisions to make the game a lot better, which as I remember when we were first starting to create this game we told ourselves we weren't going to do that, we're just going to make a crappy first game and move on. That got scrapped as we learned that if we put in extra work we'd have a very fun game. We couldn't resist, we're going for it.

Originally SBR was only a learning project, but we changed a lot of what we were doing and just started adding stuff to make the game .. well fun. We've decided to add non-playable characters to fight instead of only fighting the characters users can be. The list of enemies we're adding is relatively long; one can expect to see just about everything from Brian's works.

I personally originally planned to just ask for permission to use other people's music for SBR. I've thought about attempting to compose music for a little while, but have always decided not to until a few days ago. The big reasons for writing the music for SBR is that I'll be able to guarantee the re-use of common themes or songs throughout the Reaper 7 game series, and also because I've been out of touch with music for to long; I really have been wanting to get back into the swing of things. If you're wondering what experience with music I have the answer to that isn't very short. So to just summarize what I have done with music I'll just say a lot of critique and about 8 years of playing musical instruments. Also understand that I'll be doing my absolute best to create tunes that will be worth listening to over and over so that when you're grinding and kicking asses the music will be your least concern.

As I'm sure you've seen below I do in fact have screen-shots from Sprite Battle Revolution. I've debated about going through and discussing each image. I've decided not to, and I hope you enjoy knowing that things are coming together.

-Vash

I just can't help but wonder if Hiro still has some unspoken words for her.

Last edited by TormTheMighty, 3/15/2008, 1:36 pm

3/15/2008, 1:33 pm

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TormTheMighty
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Re: Torm's Mini-Blog

Happy Ides.

So we talked and talked about how much we hated the old forum. It was hurting progress in many ways. Our biggest concern was that if the fact that the old forum was so slow and it was deterring us from posting how much was it deterring you from posting? We assumed the worst and changed to this forum once we found out that nothing could be done to speed the old one up since the issue was with the provider... So here we are on the reliable runboards.

I've had some long weeks recently so unfortunately I haven't accomplished another big update like I wanted. I've only managed to code in all of the monsters we have made, and started on some other extras.

Musically however I have gotten a lot accomplished. I wrote up a short 1 minute song thats just a simple introduction to a 5 Part Piece that I'm working on. I struggle to enjoy it and I know I'm going to rewrite it making it longer so that the 4 main points I'm trying to make are better understood. Its hard to get feedback on my pieces since Brian lacks all that is musical. I think once I finish a piece to the best that I am willing to do I'll post it so that I can get some feedback from R7 fans.

Oh yea and today I wrote a 3 minute piece that I absolutely love right now. Its by far the best musically written thing I have ever done. Granted, thats not saying much, but moments like this are extremely exciting.

-Torm

3.17.08 Update!
Guess What!? I redislocated my shoulder! Yay!
...
emoticon

Last edited by TormTheMighty, 3/17/2008, 1:20 pm

3/15/2008, 3:42 pm

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theatregeek101
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Re: Torm's Mini-Blog

so...dislocated shoulder huh? oh no...REdislocated shoulder. i got to say, you did last nine-ish weeks before you redislocated it.
hopefully you aren't in too much pain, and are enjoying the inability to move you arm above your head!
good luck to you these next few weeks.
feel better soon! <3

3/17/2008, 4:08 pm

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