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I'm Back, Kinda!

I'm Back, Kinda!
Hey!

It seems that I vanished for a good while here. Sorry about that. To make a long story short, I had a bunch of stuff happen in my life that just took priority over my typical update schedule. I had to cut certain aspects of my life to give myself enough time to breathe, and my blog was one of them.

I will probably end up elaborating on a bunch of what happened, but for now just know that I’m doing fine, and things are currently pretty swell. Can’t ask for much more. I moved to Seattle not too long ago and have been settling in pretty well.

As far as work related things go I’m currently working on Super Meat Boy Forever! I think I mentioned this before, but I can’t exactly remember what I was talking about on my blog a year ago. As far as Super Sky Sisters goes, unfortunately right now I have to put that project on the back burner in order for me to fully focus on my role on Meat Boy. I was brought on to Team Meat for Level Design and some Game Design stuff, and it’s been an absolute blast so far. With working on a big project with a team though, I can’t share as much stuff as I usually do with my personal projects. Just know that the project is going really well and it’s a game that I really like to play and work on, which is always the game development dream.

Thanks to everyone that has been so supportive to me since I began my game development career, and to those that helped me even beyond that. The support of family and friends that I have is second to none and I live every day with a deep gratitude that I get to live the life that I live.

As far as future blog posts go probably don’t expect anything as rapid paced as I was posting before. I was thinking of maybe doing some sort of weekly or bi-weekly post schedule in the future with just whatever thoughts were on my mind, game development or otherwise. As far as doodle posts go I still plan on getting back into those, and those should be relatively easy to fall back into.

That’s all for now. Thanks for listening!

Fresh New Look!

Fresh New Look!
It is done!

The fresh coat of paint is still drying so some things might be still broken, but overall I think this is looking pretty good.

I really wanted to get a redesign of my site going because I honestly hated the artwork on the old one. If you draw you know what I mean. Your art doesn't age well usually. When you're constantly improving at your craft over time, you notice how horrible your older work is compared to your newer. I mean it may have not looked objectively horrible, but man it was so gosh dang old I couldn't stand it anymore.

I've been drawing a whole lot more lately so I thought my new website should reflect that and look all totally hand drawn. I tried to simplify a lot of things like the shapes and colors and textures of the site. My old site was flashy and a little complicated. I liked it, but I'm feeling like much more of a simpler look now without paint brush splatters and gradients everywhere.

Still to come is some more visual polish. You might notice that the site is now left aligned instead of centered (when it at maximum browser window size.) The right side that looks totally empty right now will eventually have some cool art in it. I just have to figure out what that art is going to be.

You might also notice that the website changes based on how large your browser window is! I hope to improve my site's performance on mobile, and also hope to keep the site pretty viewable on smaller screens while also taking full advantage of how high res everyone's desktops are now. The site's width has increased from 960 pixels to 1100 pixels or so, but that changes based on your browser's width.

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I also went through and took a lot of my "doodle posts" and rolled them into my newly named "draws" page. Everything that was on there before is now filed under "ancient" and you definitely shouldn't look at it because old artwork is terrible and embarrassing.

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That's all for now! More updates to come.

Genesis 4 TowerFall

Genesis 4 TowerFall
A few weeks back I played TowerFall at Genesis 4. I flew out to Oakland and drove down to San Jose with the California TowerFall crew and spent the whole day playing some pretty intense matches. I won't spoil the results here, but be sure to check out the full playlist provided by 2GGaming. Oh and I guess my name is "kpluv" for this tournament.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a48IBm3BXEc[/youtube]

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmZV3MvwfkU[/youtube]

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3V-BUIWZx0[/youtube]

Pathfinder Web Dev

Pathfinder Web Dev
Progress continues on my Pathfinder character sheet built with HTML, Javascript, php, mySQL, and css! Oh boy I love when I have to combine five totally different languages into a monstrosity. It's working out quite well though!

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I've built some cool systems to save and load the data on the sheet with some jQuery magic. I feel way more comfortable using jQuery than I usually do for some reason. I think something about it really clicked for me working on this for whatever reason. Maybe all my time in C# land has improved my programmer skill levels.

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The thing I'm most proud of right now is a generalized system for adding and removing things from a list. One of the limitations of our character sheet in PDF form is that we can't have dynamic sized lists of things. Things like our characters feats, abilities, gear, skills, and especially spells all suffer from hard limits in the PDF, but over here in the magical world of javascript I can make a list be any size by adding and removing rows on the fly!

I even worked out a system to save lists into the database and load them back out no matter what size they are. The best part is that I made it totally general case so whenever I come to a new part of the sheet that needs a dynamic list that can be saved and loaded I just have to add a submit button that's tied to the right javascript functions, and away it goes!

I think this break from game programming has been good for my brain so far.

PAX Recovery

PAX Recovery
I decided to purposely take a lot of time off after PAX, and this included posting on my blogosphere. I think I can still hit my goal of 12 posts of something or other this month, but four straight days of PAX ended up being more draining than I thought. I think I'm back and ready to rock for real though, so I'll start with a quick recap of PAX.

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So I was able to set up a small demo station of Super Sky Sisters at PAX at a friend's booth. There was no big banner or fireworks display or anything, just me and a TV and two controllers. Sometimes I had a chair to sit down in!

I was fairly nervous about people playing the game but more confident than I ever have been. At this point the game is pretty far along and my real test was to see if people would understand what was going on without me interfering. My main goal for PAX was to see if I could in four days of constant play testing with new people playing the game all the time, and by that measurement it was a pretty big success.

Holiday Break Game Time

Holiday Break Game Time
Things got a little chaotic for me over the last two weeks and I've felt a little bit distracted and was kinda forced into taking a small break on game dev. There's also the fact that Summer Games Done Quick is going on and that is just a constant distraction for the entire week.

So I took a look at my Steam library and there were a couple of things there that I needed to still get through. One of them being Environmental Station Alpha! I've been meaning to play this game forever but I never got around to it until pretty recently. I was a few hours into it and so I started playing it again and took it all the way to ... almost completion? (Spoilers: It turns out this game has a billion hours of post game content, and I think I've done all the major things I can do, and found all the cool things I can find.) So I figure instead of talking about my own games for once I can throw down some thoughts about someone else's game.