John Baez from The Behemoth stopped by my Video Game Developers Club at UCI for a speaker event! We had a great time with him, and in return for setting up the event I was awarded a red knight from Castle Crashers! How awesome is that!?

Conjurer is picking up pace, despite interference from a secret side project that was only supposed to take a short time. >_< Expect a demo reel soon of the new level 3. The redesign has been very good to it!

Captain Forever is a fantastically designed flash game from farbs.org. After about 2 hours I constructed this unbeatable monstrosity. Give the game a try, it’s unusually addictive! Click on the movie to reroute to a higher quality video on the YouTube site.

You’re probably wondering why there hasn’t been a lot of posts lately. Well, sorry about that. Conjurer is a bit on hold for a while. Here’s why:

I’ve picked up a gig with a well known publisher.
I can’t really say any more (Pesky NDA’s), but you’ll definitely enjoy it when it’s wraps up in about 3 weeks.

School is back on in full force.
I have three classes. Two of them are hellish; A project course in database management/web app development (a time sink), and an upper division linear algebra course (a test of my sanity).

I’m running the Video Game Developers Club at my college.
The VGDC is running hot this year. I’m planning a lot of speakers, organizing events and workshops, and working with UCI’s Research into Gaming and Virtual Worlds.

It sucks for Conjurer, but it’s good for me.

Level 2’s redesign is almost complete. Thought you might like to have a look at it. Check it out full-screened in high quality!

The new level code allows me to create MUCH longer levels. They’re friggin’ huge now! You can see for yourself in the following image.

The top level is the new level 3 stage 1, the bottom is the old. As you can see, the new design is 4 times longer, with no serious hit to the CPU. I’m really excited to see how the new level redesigns go. Level 2 still needs some soft shadowing, as well as animated props and checkpoint events, but it’s coming along.

So you can see why it’s been a while since y’all saw an update. There are other reasons, some of which I’m not too fond of. On the lighter side, Southern California has been suffering through a bit of a heat wave lately, and my non-air-conditioned office must have cardboard for insulation because it gets downright miserable from 2 PM – 10 PM. I also helped a friend with another game project which I hope you’ll get to see soon. But, on a more serious note, I’m turning 30 in a couple of weeks, and for some reason I’m not taking it very well. It’s been hard to keep focus and stay motivated, but I do what I can. I should be back on track now. Progress like this is always inspirational.

P.S. I HATE Flash CS4. If I didn’t need native support for Flash 10, I would have never upgraded. The bones tool is a useless joke, my sessions crash repeatedly, despite the fact that I fixed a common corrupted font problem. Some filter effects turn off completely when you zoom in to certain levels. The deco tool is another useless toy. And the UI has so many glitches and bugs it’s nothing short of aggravating. And to top it all off, there is STILL a laundry list of bugs carried over from previous versions of Flash that they STILL HAVEN’T FIXED! Worst… upgrade… EVAR!

Here’s a fantastic article that voices out against all the bullshit that flash portals like Kongregate, ArmorGames, and Mofunzone force upon developers who submit to their sites.

I cannot tell you how much this echoes my grievances within the flash gaming industry.