Category: Updates

It’s been almost a month since my last update. O.O But that’s not because I haven’t been doing anything!

Burst! – I replaced Burst!’s old fireworks with prettier third-party fireworks. I added a smoke effect when the player misses a beat. I added a helicopter that flies around the world and crashes! I added windows that flash! And I did a bunch of other random things. Now I’m working on the Song Editor again, adding the ability to multi-select, copy, and paste beats. The great reveal of this next version of Burst! will be March 24th at the STEAM Expo in Great Falls, MT.

The Twelfth Hour – I made it most of the way through speed-writing Chapter 10 and Chapter 11 when suddenly I had an epiphany and realized how all the pieces from Chapter 8 to the end fit together. So, I started speed-writing again back at Chapter 8. It’s going faster this time because now I actually know where I’m going, and it’s more about tightening up the pieces and removing those that aren’t needed or don’t fit. I’m now most of the way through Chapter 9 and hoping to get through that and most of Chapter 10 next week.

Other – What else did I do? I watched a crap ton of the Olympics coverage. I started editing another novel. The Winds of Eshra is the sequel to The Messenger of Eshra, another novel that I helped edit (though I don’t think many of my suggestions made it into the final novel O.o). I turned in five job applications, had one job interview with a random recruiter, and completed a coding challenge as part of a technical interview. I also helped my brother write two cover letters for job applications… Then, I made a video tribute to a friend of mine who passed away last weekend. Among other things, I’ll be traveling to Montana for his funeral next week. It’ll be fun to reunite with some of my friends, but I wish it were under better circumstances.

Burst! – I finished Burst!’s Song Editor for Team KAIZEN last week. Well, for now anyway. The audio engineer, my brother, informed me that most of the game’s music wasn’t included in the project I inherited. I’ll have to add those once he’s finished editing them and making final decisions with the game designer. If it needs more tools, I’ll, of course, implement those as well, but in the meantime, I’m on to polishing Burst! itself. Good Lord! I don’t know if it’s me or the people I work with, but I keep inheriting undocumented spaghetti code!

The Twelfth Hour – Chapter 9 is taking longer than expected, but I’m about three-fourths of the way through it. I might go on to Chapter 10 since I never finished writing it in the first place, and many of the changes I made in the previous two chapters have also affected this one. Who knows? Perhaps I will continue rewriting until I reach the end of the book. Chapter 11 is also massive and in need of changes and pruning. It’s okay though. In the last draft I wrote of this book, I completely rewrote more than half of it. Before that, I rewrote the entire book at least three times. Now I’m down to less than half, and I haven’t even started changing major events yet, though I think I’m about to start. So I am getting closer to a final draft! I swear.

Sakuracon – I made the decision recently to go to Sakuracon with some friends this year. For fun, I also decided to submit The Lightbringer to the AMV contest. I just sent it in last night and haven’t heard back yet, but if all goes well, it’ll at least play at some point during the weekend in the AMV room.

Burst! – I’m almost done adding new features to Burst!’s song editor to improve its usability. Once that’s done, I’ll polish it and bug test. Then, game designers can use it to map button presses to the beat of songs for the actual game. I’m hoping to finish this up by the end of the month. Next, I’ll work on Burst! itself.

The Twelfth Hour – I wrote like mad and finished a rough rewrite of Chapter 8 this week. I’m a bit surprised it came together so quickly. I started with no idea how I was going to fit all these scenes together or if they would even work, but miraculously, all the pieces fell into place. O.o Next week, I’m hoping to finish a rough rewrite of Chapter 9. It depends if I can continue this speedy pace. After all, I’m also starting this chapter with no idea what I’m doing. 😛 It’s also massive and bloated… Then, I go back to Chapter 8, make a plan, and start revising because rough rewrites for me either produce an excess of description or dialog with nothing else.

Critters – I finished editing the latest novel I took on from Critters. I think this is the first amateur novel I’ve read that had a satisfying ending. O.O It was great!

I thought it might be fun to look back at what I did this year. I didn’t even realize I released 17 YouTube videos. That’s probably more than double what my average has been throughout college. O.o In fact, “I did more than I thought I did” is a consistent theme throughout this list.

• Released 4 Software Products
  • Schedule Splitter
  • Cue Masher
  • WikiNatural
  • WebGL and three.js Demos
• Released 17 YouTube Videos
  • 6 Speech Therapy Videos
  • 8 Improvised Incoherence Videos
  • 3 Other
• Wrote 4 Extra Life Articles
  • Fulfilling Kaena’s Prophecy
  • Advent Children: What’s Beneath the Fan Service (Part 1)
  • Advent Children: What’s Beneath the Fan Service (Part 2)
  • Advent Children: What’s Beneath the Fan Service (Part 3)
• Critiqued 17 Pieces of Writing
  • 3 Novels
  • 12 Short Stories and Novel Openings
  • 2 Other
• Submitted 2 Stories to Critters.org and/or MisCon’s Writer’s Workshop
  • My Eliza – Good but the ending is silly
  • The Twelfth Hour Chapter 1 – Good but holy crap it moves fast
• Completed 4 Video Games
  • Star Stealing Prince (2/23/17)
  • Final Fantasy XIII (2/28/17)
  • Final Fantasy X (6/23/17)
  • Final Fantasy XV (10/21/17)
• Read 16 Books
• Other (yes, I consider these accomplishments!)
  • Logged 1921 hours on writing, software development, theater teching, video editing, and job hunting since April
  • Moved to Spokane
  • Opened a Twitter account
  • Made a random Twitter friend
  • Argued with strangers about Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children
  • Talked to three publishers at Fan Nexus
  • I still can’t believe I submitted The Twelfth Hour to MisCon’s Writer’s Workshop O.O
  • Job hunted for software development jobs in new and scary places 😛

Writing – I finished revising Chapter 7 of the The Twelfth Hour and began making a plan for what to do with Chapter 8 and Chapter 9. Shit hits the fan in these chapters, and well, it hits a bit harder than I like. I also realized that midway through my previous draft, I’d begun rewriting part of Chapter 9 and never finished… so Chapter 9 kind of doesn’t even have a sensible series of events. Plus, a lot of things have changed over the course of this latest draft. Rather than coming up with a complete plan as I’ve done before I started revising previous chapters, I came up with a rough timeline of new and modified scenes that I wanted to happen instead and started a very rough rewrite. I’ll go back and figure out what scenes are necessary/working/problematic once I get a better feel for what exactly is happening and in what order. Also, I’m almost done editing the latest novel I took on from Critters, I’m helping my brother with a cover letter and resume, and I’m writing a cover letter and resume myself.

Programming – I’ve been putting some time into Burst!’s song editor for Team KAIZEN lately. The more tools I add to it, the more I feel like I’m building a video editor. O.o I also gave this website a facelift to make it easier to find things from the main menu. I removed some pages, added some pages, modified some pages, and reorganized some things.

Other – Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! I celebrated Christmas by helping my mom cook, writing, or doing nothing, which I will probably also do for New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. I uploaded the complete English dub of Elysium to YouTube as well, which took a surprisingly large amount of time and effort. I did it for you, Elysium!

The Twelfth Hour – I made it three-fourths of the way through revising Chapter 7 in the past two weeks. Also, I discovered a Twitter event called PitMad where authors post an elevator pitch of their ready-to-publish novel with #PitMad. Agents and publishers can browse these pitches and those that they Like are considered an invitation to send a formal query to them. This event is held about once every three months, and the next two occur in March and June next year. I’d like to participate in at least one of them and see what happens…

Shattered Soul – Besides that, I continued programming on Shattered Soul. I’m now in the middle of refactoring part of a system I wrote about five years ago. The new system is pretty awesome… but then again, I thought the old system was pretty awesome. Indeed, it did serve its purpose pretty well for getting the tech demo off the ground, but I didn’t think it was flexible enough. It needed a component design, not a hierarchy! 😀

Other – Christmas is coming. Can you tear yourself away from your work long enough to plan what presents you’re going to get anyone? I know I have a hell of time doing that. Also, everyone in my family hates stuff right now (because our house is full of fifteen years worth of crap we haven’t unpacked/burned). So I’ll be figuring that out next week. In other news, I’m editing another novel for someone. Thankfully, this novel isn’t as enraging as the last one I critiqued. It’s not free of problems, but it is, by far, the most entertaining and cohesive novel I’ve edited.

Shattered Soul – For the past couple weeks, I’ve mostly been working on Team KAIZEN’s 3D fighter, Shattered Soul. The president of Team KAIZEN, Josh Hughes, recently released a teaser of what I’m building, the game’s pitch demo. You can watch it here. The executable this gameplay footage came from is about two weeks old but way out of date at this point. I’ve since fixed and added many things, but it gets the idea across. Tomorrow I’ll be making a new executable for Josh to test before PSX.

The Twelfth Hour – I’m officially done revising Chapter 6 (for now). It was a bitch until the end. 😛 Since then, I’ve made a revision plan for Chapter 7 and finished editing on one of its major sections. This chapter isn’t such a mess, so I hope it doesn’t take as long.

Final Fantasy XV Article(s) – Writing on my Final Fantasy XV article slowed down because of my work on Shattered Soul, but it’s close to finished-rough-draft status. I hope to send it to the Extra Life editor soon… because there are so many things to say about this game. It’s like Kingsglaive. The more you dig into it, the worse it gets. For example, I started writing a blog about the West’s influence on Final Fantasy XV as part of my Unsolicited Comment series, but it ballooned into a full-fledged article. O.o That’s part of the reason why I haven’t posted anything except updates for the past few weeks. Anyway, it’s a little too political to be Extra Life material, but I’ll polish it at some point and post it here.