Tag: ookiisoracon

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Update

Twelve’s Design

So… almost two months have passed since my last update. I overbooked myself last month, but I’m back. I’ve almost finished Chapter 4 of Twelve’s Design and am transitioning into Chapter 5. Well, I’ve made the decision to break the book into more chapters, so Chapter 4 will become Chapters 5 and 6 and Chapter 5 will be Chapters 7 and 8. I’ll probably think of the book in terms of the old numbering scheme for a while longer though since my notes are organized that way. I hope more chapters will smooth out Chapter 5, which has a ton of stuff in it, and other messy chapters in the second half of the book. It does make me sad that Twelve’s Design will no longer have twelve chapters. I can live with either two groups of twelve chapters or three groups of six chapters though. >:D

OokiiSoraCon Web App

I hosted the OokiiSoraCon website for pre-convention testing purposes… somewhere on this domain. I’ll keep it secret for now because, while I did follow a security-minded tutorial to implement it, I don’t know how secure it really is. Now I’m squashing bugs and implementing requests as revealed by the members of the OokiiSoraCon staff that tested it. I question if an OokiiSoraCon video game will happen this year, but we’ll at least have THIS. You’ll have to come to the convention to find out what. 😛

The Writer’s Net

I’ve mostly finished implementing the React half of The Writer’s Net. All I have left to do is finish implementing the map. For some dumb reason, I decided to update my old code to the newest version of D3 while also refactoring it for use as a JavaScript module. So, adding it to the application hasn’t been as simple as importing it into the project and attaching the right connections. When I first started this React implementation of The Writer’s Net though, I had no idea how those connections would even work. Refactoring the code has helped solidify that. Now I just have to get it work!

The time I’ve spent learning the other technologies the NuCamp class has moved onto, however, has also slowed development. While I don’t exactly feel comfortable building mobile applications yet, I at least got familiar with React Native last month. Now we’re learning NodeJS, Express, and MongoDB for the backend logic and database portion of the JavaScript MERP stack. I have no idea what the best practices are for designing a database that stores redundant data intentionally, and it doesn’t look like the class will delve into it, so I guess I have more outside research to do to finish The Writer’s Net. I graduate mid-July, so we’ll see if I can at least have the application basically working by then.

Elysium

Something amazing and completely unexpected happened last month. I received an email from Matt and Adam Rovner, the co-writers of Elysium (2003)’s original script. They discovered the articles I wrote on the film and wanted to tell me what they know about its history. O.O Since then, we’ve run into multiple scheduling conflicts, but you can bet that when we get a meeting together, I’m writing another Elysium article. In the meantime, if you have any Elysium-related questions you must have answered, send me a Tweet @SilentFuzzle. 🙂

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Update

Twelve’s Design

Hey, it’s been… a month! Beta reading for Twelve’s Design has begun, and I already have ideas for how to fix some things. I’m refraining from rewriting or editing until I gather more feedback (and problems to fix) though. I worry about the last three chapters the most, and no one except me knows what’s in them yet. In the meantime, I’m beta reading other people’s novels and stories. I’m also rereading parts of another manuscript I wrote a long time ago and started rewriting five years ago. I got distracted by Twelve’s Design before I finished it, and I’ve wanted to continue ever since.

Programming

Now that I’m done writing Twelve’s Design (for now), I’m easing back into programming. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how you look at it), my schedule exploded as soon as the new year began. I now walk dogs and care for animals 15+ hours a week. I guess that’s one way to make some money!

At the beginning of February, I’m planning to take NuCamp’s Full Stack Web Development course. What I want to do is use the course’s portfolio projects to develop the next OokiiSoraCon project. In the next couple weeks, I’ll put some time into developing specifications for it with the Chair and staff. What is this project, you ask? You’ll just have to wait for next OokiiSoraCon. 😉

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Weekly Update

OokiiSoraCon – The pop culture convention in Helena happened last weekend! About 400 people attended it over three days, and everyone seemed to enjoy themselves. While we did have a few hiccups behind the scenes, overall, we had a good first year! During opening ceremonies, the convention chair played OokiiSoraCon Rules and Policies: The Game for an audience of about 100 people and voice-acted the dialog with the members of Zapp’s Spaceship of Love, the convention’s guests of honor. Everyone found it hilarious, and we received compliments on the game throughout the weekend. Once the board and the convention’s volunteers recover and we start holding meetings again, I’ll bring up the possibility of sharing it online for all to see.

The Twelfth Hour – Despite how busy I’ve been (including volunteering over 50 hours in four days during the course of the convention O.o), I managed to finish editing Chapter 9 and make a plan for editing Chapter 10. I’m still on schedule! While Chapter 8 and Chapter 9 were fairly easy to edit in this draft, however, I have a feeling Chapter 10 and Chapter 11 are going to be a pain. They are longer than I would like, and a crap-ton of stuff happens in them. I do know how to fix a couple problems though. Two scenes don’t feel quite right emotionally, and past experience has shown that whenever that happens, the problem is always that the protagonist isn’t angry enough. And indeed, that is the problem. In another two scenes, I realized I needed the sidekick in the scene, but I had the love interest instead. That’s a new and bizarre mistake.

Tic Tac Toe – The job I applied for a few weeks ago came back to life the moment I got home from Montana. The CEO invited me to finish my Tic Tac Toe game and apply for two new openings for temporary positions in the company. In the space of two days, I finished the project and then had a two-hour-long interview. @.@ I’ll find out next week if I got the job or not, but regardless, I’ll have an even better project to add to my portfolio. It was also nice to hear from someone with much more experience than me that I actually have decent UI/UX design skills and coding style. After spending my entire career working mostly alone, making up coding standards, figuring out how to use design code and interface as I go, and hardly ever having getting any feedback on that stuff, that’s pretty validating. O.O

Team KAIZEN – After OokiiSoraCon, I made a trip to Great Falls to visit the owners of Team KAIZEN. We met a new member of our team and discussed what his role would be, we talked about some exciting opportunities that have come up in the wake of E3, and we talked about Burst! and Shattered Soul. Hint: If the job I applied for doesn’t come to fruition you just might see more articles and videos from me. 🙂 I also gave the author of Winds of Eshra the notes I had on her book. In other Burst!-related news, while this job opportunity and OokiiSoraCon continue to slow progress on it, I did implement Undo and Redo functions in the Burst! Song Editor as well as the ability for users to swap between PlayStation and keyboard control schemes and icons.

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Weekly Update

SakuraCon – Last weekend, I went to SakuraCon in Seattle. I’m still recovering and getting my work schedule back to full speed, but I’m writing an update anyway! I was somewhat disappointed that there wasn’t a panel dedicated to terrible full-CGI anime this year, but I did see the world premiere of Fist of the Blue Sky, a full-CGI anime that prequels Fist of the North Star. The animation is only slightly more passable than Berserk, but go watch it anyway! I believe episodes are now being released weekly on Crunchyroll. Additionally, after reading mention of a mysterious full-CGI movie he’s working on, I went to a Q&A panel for voice actor John Swasey. Lucky me! In the only panel of his I managed to go to, I got to see a trailer for The Perfect Khan, a CGI-movie animated in… Africa or India I want to say… by a company that’s now bankrupt. A company Swasey works with bought the rights, rewrote the script to be dirty and ridiculous, and recorded a new dub to accompany the terrible animation. They plan to distribute it on a service like Amazon Prime or Netflix. This is definitely one I’ll watch for. 😀 In other CGI movie-related news that is completely unrelated to SakuraCon, I saw The Emoji Movie. It was horrible, so horrible in fact that Starship Troopers: Traitor of Mars was far more entertaining.

OokiiSoraCon – It’s convention season, and since I have several friends dedicating a good chunk of their time and effort to organizing it, I decided to volunteer for a new convention in Helena, MT called OokiiSoraCon. At the moment, I’m doing some advertising and editing for them and helping with a top-secret project. >:D If I’m feeling ambitious, I might create a CGI-movie presentation for a panel as well. The convention happens June 22nd-24th. If you’re interested, check out our website, like us on Facebook, and pre-register now for $35!

Burst! and The Twelfth Hour – High scores and unlockable items are officially visible in Burst!’s interface. Now I’m working a little on the PC version of the game, which replaces the PlayStation icons with letters corresponding to keyboard keys. Next, I’ll be modifying the editor and the game so that players of the PC version can create and play levels from their own music. As predicted, Burst! went back to taking up the majority of my programming time, but it was also a strange week. Perhaps I will go back to dedicating a little time to my .NET project next week. Finally, I’m a quarter of the way into Chapter 12 of The Twelfth Hour! So close to the end, and then, it’s all about refinement!