Category: Updates

The Twelfth Hour

I’m almost done revising the last section of Chapter 11. O.O If this goes well, I’ll finish that and the chapter review by Wednesday at the latest. I plan to finish Chapter 12 by October 31. Then, I’ll have about a month and a half to review the whole book again, modify the little details that have changed, and write synopses and pitches for beta readers.

Burst!

I spent the past three weeks creating new stages for Burst!, creating a Stage Select menu, and continuing to work with Asset Bundles. Burst! has two new stages in addition to the test level that you’ve seen since this version of the game was created. Team KAIZEN will reveal them during the Fall Brawl in Bozeman, MT October 27-28 where we’ll demo PlayStation VR and the latest builds of Burst! and Shattered Soul.

Twitch

Last Saturday, The Cheeky Geeky Vaudeville hosted a twelve-hour gaming event on Twitch to help raise funds for our upcoming show at The Roxy in Missoula, MT on October 13. I spent most of the day streaming Oddworld: Abe’s Exoddus and have continued to stream it throughout this past week. I’ll likely continue experimenting with Twitch next week with more Abe’s Exoddus and Skyrim. You can watch on my channel or the AddATudez channel 3-4 PM Pacific Time every day… At least, I did that last week. You can find the schedule on my channel.

The Twelfth Hour

I finished Chapter 10 of 12! Then, I started reviewing Chapter 11. Finishing it will be crazy! All the plotlines and character arcs are smashing together into a glorious finale! …Or maybe into nonsense. Who knows? The due date for having the book beta reader ready is December 12, fitting considering the story ends on that day. If you’d like to get in on it, contact me!

Burst!

My brother got married last weekend, and we had family over. That consumed a lot of time, and what time I had left I decided to spend on The Twelfth Hour. I did, however, manage to finish fixing the screen resolution problems in Burst!, add Prima Nocta’s “Stones and Metal” to the playable songs, and fix some random problems with the gameplay before then. While I still have more to tweak, the CEO Josh showed the new build to kids at the company’s video game design camp last week. They were addicted to it! You can check out the latest build for yourself on the Add A Tudez Entertainment Twitch channel here. Next up, I’ll implement Asset Bundles, which, from what I’ve read, sound like my kind of tedious.

Website Stuff

I took some time this weekend to research and implement a new HTML retrieval solution to resurrect WikiNatural, and finally, a year later, the 3D web browser for Wikipedia has returned! You can play around with it here. I’ll likely write up an article on how I did it for this blog next week. Writing about these little web dev projects gives me an excuse to learn this stuff. 🙂 When I finish implementing Asset Bundles in Burst! and the Song Editor, they will likely become a topic as well. Also, the surprise article I sent to the Extra Life editor has gone through a couple revisions and will release soon.

Burst! – Burst got many new features these past couple weeks. We recently had the game reviewed (see 2 hr 32 minutes into the video) by a group of developers on Twitch, and I’m slowly working through the user interface and information problems they uncovered. I added some icons to the top of the screen to visually show where the beats are perfectly in sync with the song. Players can now play their own music and beat maps within Burst. I added an announcer to the game. And now I’m fixing some screen resolution problems. Coming sometime soon, I have to put everything into AssetBundles because I only found out about those recently, and it’s becoming a problem that I’m not using them. With the number of assets Burst has, that could be tedious.

Extra Life – Last weekend, I finished editing an article I started writing about… a year ago. Wow. Anyway, I sent that to the Extra Life Community editor, and it’s in the pipeline. You’ll just have to wait and see which article it is. 🙂 I’m hoping to write more for this blog and for Extra Life in the coming weeks. We’ll see how that goes.

The Twelfth Hour – I’m about halfway through editing Chapter 10. It’s been a slog, but I’m currently working on the largest continuous section in the book (~6,000 words), and it’s going much smoother than the sections that were a third that size. It’s one of my favorite scenes, so it makes sense it’s a little more polished. Oddly though, everytime I revise it, something about it changes drastically, and this pass is no exception. Maybe I’ll still make up the time I’ve lost though.

Website – Last weekend, I bought a web domain and hosting service through HostGator, and now this website exists. I spent a large chunk of the week copying stuff from my old website to this one, adding new content, and changing links. Perhaps the most noteworthy addition is that you can now play OokiiSoraCon Rules and Policies: The Game. I still need to change links on all my social media accounts, but I’ll get there eventually. Transferring everything from one website to the other was time-consuming enough. @.@ I also need to move the WikiNatural page here, but I figure now that I have a hosting service, I don’t really have an excuse for it not functioning. I’d like to fix it first. It feels like a whole world of new possibilities has opened just by buying space for a personal website. I have a place where I can organize all my stuff in a way that makes sense and experiment with php, sql, javascript, and other web stuff! It’s awesome! I should have done this years ago. The transition would have probably been a lot easier, and I’d probably have more web development skills than I do now.

The Twelfth Hour – I’m about a third of the way through editing Chapter 10, a couple days behind. As I suspected I’d do, I’m first completely or partially rewriting each section and then editing them, which lengthens the process. At least I’m not rewriting the entire story arc as I was last time I went through here. This rewriting is more about improving the pace and fitting events together in more natural ways.

Team KAIZEN – I finished work on the Burst! Song Editor and moved on to Burst! itself. I’m taking a break from allowing players to play their own songs in favor of improving the gameplay though. While I was programming the Song Editor, we identified some problems in the game that make testing it difficult. So far, I’ve added a countdown to the beginning of each song and icons in the sky to give players a visual cue for when button presses are perfectly on beat. Unfortunately, development has been slow. At the start of the week, I needed to onboard our latest programmer, which involved updating the Shattered Soul tech demo to a modern version of Unity, ensuring the Google Drive containing the project was functional and in-sync with my most recent changes, and writing instructions for what we’d like changed in it. Additionally, Team KAIZEN started a Twitch channel, and Josh would like me to record development vlogs and programming tutorials to supplement it. I spent a third of my programming time this week experimenting with how to do that efficiently. I’m hoping to have the first video edited by next week.

OokiiSoraCon Rules and Policies: The Game – I finished programming the OokiiSoraCon video game. We may make some cosmetic changes before the convention, but I don’t plan on adding anything else content-wise… this year at least. 🙂

Writing – I finished editing Chapter 8 of The Twelfth Hour, and I’m currently about 1/3 of the way through Chapter 9. Despite taking a break to write the plot synopsis and all the other things I’ve been doing the past few weeks, I’m still a few days ahead of schedule. Nothing exciting happened at MisCon aside from buying a couple new books, including a J.A. Pitts novel. I also finished editing the novel Winds of Eshra and rereading its prequel Messenger of Eshra. I’ll likely meet with the author after OokiiSoraCon to talk about the books and my notes.

Unity Development – A couple days before MisCon three weeks ago, I applied for a random Unity developer position at a video game studio that creates games mostly for phones and tablets in a remote work environment. The CEO invited me to go through their interview process, which was much more time consuming than I expected. It involved creating a Tic Tac Toe game in Unity in several steps and sending the code for review after each step. While I had fun doing it, created something that I could add to my portfolio, and learned some new things about Unity, the position I was applying for was filled before I finished the interview process and now I’m three weeks behind on Burst!. The good news is that with the OokiiSoraCon game finished, Winds of Eshra edited, and my latest attempt at job hunting ended, I’m back to working on nothing except Burst! and The Twelfth Hour. Well, there’s still OokiiSoraCon itself June 22-24, but I hope I can catch up on Burst! as the summer continues.

Team KAIZEN also got some exciting news last week. Burst! will be pitched at the Big Indie Pitch on Wednesday during E3! If we “win” the contest, we’ll get access to help with marketing the game to a larger audience. Even if we don’t win, my contact at Extra Life would like to write about the game for the Extra Life Community website.

And that’s what happened in the past three weeks…

Burst! – I’m still integrating the new database into the Burst! Song Editor, and I haven’t even allowed users to edit their own songs yet. At least the Song Editor is getting a much-needed facelift. Hopefully, I can work out most of the migration kinks so transitioning Burst! to the new database will be fairly straightforward.

The Twelfth Hour – I’m about three-fourths of the way through editing Chapter 8, and so far, my estimate of how long it’ll take me to finish revising the book has been scarily accurate, which is both encouraging and discouraging. On one hand, the book won’t be edited to the best of my ability any sooner than November/December. On the other hand, holy crap! I’ll be done editing the book in November/December! I hope my accuracy continues anyway. Next week, I’m taking a short break to write a plot synopsis. Since my last horribly failed attempt, I’ve thought of a different approach that I want to try for fun. Also, MisCon is coming up next weekend. What!? It’s been a year since I started editing this!? I’d kind of like to bring a couple copies of the synopsis to the convention, just in case. I even have elevator pitches prepared that I had some fun crafting for a future #PitMad event. Also, in the event John Pitt’s remembers me from last year and gives a crap, I can prove I’m making progress… or that I’m as incoherent as ever. 😛

OokiiSoraCon – The script I wrote for the secret OokiiSoraCon project has been approved. I can also reveal that it’s a short game built with RPG Maker MV that teaches convention etiquette. Attendees will be able to play it at the convention for a fast and fun way to learn about OokiiSoraCon and its rules and policies. Now I’m programming it… in five weeks while staying on schedule with Burst! and The Twelfth Hour. We’ll see how this goes, but I’m super excited about it. It’s been fun to write and build, and I hope our attendees find it entertaining to play as well. 😀

Burst! – The PC version of Burst! now accepts mouse input in the menus, and I added a Quit option to the Main Menu. Hurray for being able to exit the game without force quitting! Also, I updated the game’s project to the latest version of Unity (2018) from version 5.6, which I’ve been meaning to do for a while. Now I’m overhauling the song database and database interface code in preparation to allow users to create beat maps for and play their own songs.

The Twelfth Hour – In the past couple weeks, I reacquainted myself with the first half of The Twelfth Hour. I’ve been iterating on the second half for quite a while and needed a refresher. I edited a few sections, including the opening, and made notes on potential things to add and improve later. Then, I made a formal estimate of when I’ll finish revising and start looking for beta readers. At the moment, it looks like somewhere between November and December, around the same time as the late-end of the release window for Burst!. I also made the plan for revising Chapter 8. As soon as I’m done editing Chapter 7 (changing a few details I determined I wanted to modify while speed-writing the second half of the book), I can jump right into that.

OokiiSoraCon – I also added a bunch of stuff to the OokiiSoraCon website. Among other things, you can now see our current panels, events, vendors, and artists! Additionally, I got to play around with Google’s Map API in order to add a map to the Hotel|Travel page. Finally, I wrote a script for a top-secret project. 🙂 We’ll see how much of it I can share in the coming weeks.

Burst! – Since my last update, I made a plan with the founder of Team KAIZEN to release Burst! on Steam at the end of August this year. It might take a little more time to finish than I think, but even if we miss August, I think sometime this year is doable. On the programming side of things, I finished the framework for switching between PlayStation and keyboard icons and created interfaces where the player can view their locked and unlocked items. Next, I’ll work on getting the menus to accept mouse input. Additionally, I’m acting as somewhat of a project manager, coordinating the artists, the lead designer, a voice actor, and the audio engineer/level designer to make sure we get the project and all its parts done on schedule. We’ll see how that goes. 🙂

The Twelfth Hour – Chapter 12 is roughly edited, which kind of means that another draft of the book is done! I’m attempting to make an estimate of how long it will take me to finish revising the book just to see how accurate I can get. I’ve been working on my writing habits and gathering a lot of data about it. Judging by that, I currently edit/write about 500 words a day. If I know that and the current number of words in Chapters 8-12, then I should be able to calculate roughly how long it will take to edit those chapters. It’s not a short amount of time, and it won’t include the minor editing I need to do in the first half of the book, but it’ll be nice to have something to look forward to and a more concrete way to see my progress.

Other – Also since my last update, I became OokiiSoraCon’s Web Content Manager. I’m currently working on editing the website and making it look nicer and more consistent. You can watch my progress live and shame me when I fail to get stuff done fast enough or nice enough. 😛 I also made a plan to finish editing The Winds of Eshra, the sequel to The Messenger of Eshra, by the end of June (regardless of whether the author will use my suggestions or not). I can print it off and edit it on paper, so it’ll be a nice excuse to get away from the computer and sit outside in the sun!