One of my favorite episodes! Hilarious first question and Jack Attack.

When I first started this development blog, I wanted to document every single step of the process of programming and developing MageQuest. Well, unfortunately, since I’m the only author of this intense and extensive project, that makes staying on schedule rather difficult. Every time I animate something, I have to set up the recording software, then edit it together in Windows Movie Maker, post it on YouTube, then post it on here, then submit the story to all the social networking and news sites, etc etc. That takes quite a bit of time that I really won’t have when school starts again this week. I’m going to be developing MageQuest alongside 16 units of upperdivision courses at college. Haha, I plan on bringing my Wacom Tablet onto campus with me so I can still work on art production and animation.

Therefore, I’ve decided to tone down the strict documentation of this project. You’ll still get to see lots of videos of me animating sprites, and write-ups on what algorithms are running each of the various particles, just not as often as before. I really want to keep the momentum of this project up, but I must admit that in the past I’ve been hesitant to start a few aspects of this project because of all the preproduction involved. For instance, getting the settings right to record the YouTube videos was a giant pain in the ass.

I can already feel the weight lifted off of my shoulders. In fact, just today I belted out a few hundred lines of code that implements the various states that control the hero’s animation, attacks, blocking, and movement. Exciting stuff! Now I just need to do the same for all the other enemies in the game.

My God there is so much work left to do…

For those of you who have a Steam account (which should be… anyone, since it’s free to download and join), the amazing First-Person-Shooter “Prey” is on sale for $5 for this weekend only! Prey was one of the first games I’d seen to use portal effects similar to Valve’s highly popular game Portal. I’ve played a demo, and the story is quite interesting (well, the kind of story you could wrap around an FPS title). It portrays a rather realistic and haunting interpretation of aliens mass-abducting humans from planet Earth. Also featured is some incredibly interesting gravitational effects. You simply have to try it and see for yourself. $5, people! That’s less than a movie ticket!

For one week only, AdultSwim.com will feature the Aqua Teen Hunger Force: The Movie for FREE on their streaming video section. Now, I never saw it in the theaters and I doubt I would ever rent it. Many of you out there have probably done the same. What better time to watch it than now?

I think I finally understand most of Wordpress’s codex and CSS stylesheet code. I adjusted the layout of the blog, so that any game development related posts can be viewed in the left column, and quirky stuff I find online will be viewed in the right. It was kind of annoying that my posts regarding MageQuest would get buried under all the funny Youtube videos I keep posting. Let me know what you think. It’s still a work in progress.