Packing Up
Last entry before I go to Florida. Just finishing moving over the work I need to my notebook, and then I will pack up everything.
I'm sitting here rather amused as I do it. Because of current regulations, I can't carry my spare battery open in my notebook bag. So I have it wrapped in a bread bag that will sit in my notebook bag, so it fulfills spare battery regulations.
I don't just lounge around when I vacation, or I get stir crazy. I have to be doing something at all times. On vacations I will be staying somewhere with electricity, I bring my notebook to work on things, at times such as when I'm camping I bring a bunch of paper and writing utensils to work. Here for this trip I'll have my notebook, with my documents and my Spiral Island map editor to work on. I have over a four hour flight each way so it will for sure be torture without something to do. I'll be working on Skewed, the script for Spiral Island, and whatever else I feel like when I am bored.
Tags: personal programming travel
Version Three - Spiral Island Trilogy
Looking over aged discs of end-of-year projects burned off from my multimedia classes, the transitions to the Spiral Island Trilogy was decided by the time my Sophomore year ended, although the proper fonts and logo designs for the title screens for the other two titles didn't come until later. Unfortunately I cannot find an exact date for this, as my Junior year's data disc is degraded and unreadable. However based on modified dates on other copies of the files, apparently the correct logo titles for the first two were created in summer of 2002, and the third game's title was made in early 2003 from the look of it.
As I began rewriting the storyline to remove the old fanfic aspects of it, I ended up eliminating a lot of characters. From the protagonist main characters I ended up down to Amy Carter, Marcus Tilden, and the leadership of The Anaconda's PMC. On the antagonists side, I had a number of divisions under Orion in the enemy company, the Omegan Army, with several division leaders. Looking over the archive page for the first two titles, as I was writing the storyline further I found absolutely no use for the other characters, so I stripped the important main characters on that side down to Orion and his assistant, Xedre Kopta. To keep with the heritage of the first game, I continued with 12 PC's for Spiral Island 1, creating new characters with stories and purposes for the new progression.
I worked on the game, coding everything from scratch. I had intended on releasing it right after graduating, but for reasons I no longer remember something prevented me from doing much to it. And then as I started employment, I re-evaluated the gaming market, and it was no longer feasible at the time, in late 2003, to work on the game in 2D any further, and I shelved the project, intending to learn more about 3D programming to restart the project in 3D. I spent the time since then fine tuning the story, as well as writing new stories for more games.
Now we catch up to 2008, where we are now. The console now is the ruling force, the game market has been turned on it's side with the sudden creation of the casual game market, and the industry's on the verge of shifting yet again with the hobby and indie developers being opened to a new mass distribution method, with Microsoft's XNA platform. Which brings us to the point I am at now, reviving the original Spiral Island in 2D on XNA.
Tags: programming spiral_island writing
Reunion
5 year High School reunion in an hour or so. I had meant to get a couple other entries in between the Spiral Island introduction posts, but my tasks this week at work prevented me from having the time to sit down and write some other ones, and I've spent my time at home either trying to get the map editor I am working on for the game to function properly or playing Metal Gear Solid 3 (though at the moment I made the mistake of fighting during the fight with The End, so I have to wait until he dies to continue playing). I have started a couple of articles and have them on hold, I'll complete them as I can.
There's one more article from the first set, scheduled to be released late this evening. I actually wrote these first three articles on Spiral Island all at the same time, with timed releases for the future. As I start getting more work done on the actual copy of the game for the XBOX and show progress work on the forums and the devblog, I will talk some more about the game here.
Tags: personal spiral_island video_games
Version Two - Spiral Island
Spiral Island started out using the the three characters I had in Leviathan: Amy Carter, Marcus Tilden, and Queen Sarissa Croshid. RPG Maker 95 let me have up to 12 characters, so I created some more. I added in my own character, The Anaconda, as one of the playable characters, and began creating the enemy group, a team led by my own character's rival. I borrowed from an earlier event in the Pokemon fanfic I had started this character in, and resurrected my elementary school writer alias, Orion. The rest of the characters were really throwaway characters, with alliterate names from a random name generator, and really were only there for filler.
After discovering that the RPG Maker games were illegal translations, but failing to find anything else good enough to replace it, I decided to learn some updated programming languages from the Commodore BASIC and Pascal that I knew. I began learning C++ and the DirectX API, programming on the Pentium computer that I owned, a gift from a person in my church who had built it for a particular college class and didn't need it anymore. This wasn't an easy task, as the original machine was actually damaged from a part installation and needed a replacement motherboard so it had a working floppy drive controller, and the replacement motherboard had a bad memory controller or integrated video controller (I never actually figured this out) and was constantly crashing or locking up as long as I owned that machine. I could only do coding as long as that machine cooperated, which wasn't often. Eventually after a year or so I got a Pentium 2 that was being sold off by my father's work as they updated their machines, and my problems finally ended in that regard.
As I began developing the story to Spiral Island, I began to take it more seriously. I wanted to go further then just a single game, and do more with it then just an extension of a Pokemon fanfic. I had wanted to actually start a game development company after I graduated, and I decided this game was where I intended to begin. So I trashed almost all of the storyline I had written for it, and began a new storyline, with a new backstory. The original Spiral Island was dead, and the company AnacondaSoftware was started anew, with a new title. The first game in the Spiral Island Trilogy .
Tags: anacondasoftware computer programming software spiral_island writing
Version One - Project Leviathan
As I mentioned in the last entry, I wanted to give an introduction to the Spiral Island storyline. I figure I'll start this off here by telling how I have gotten to this point.
Each of my game projects has a project name. The project usually is a codeword to represent it, and is usually the working title. The usual naming convention I go with for standalone titles unrelated to anything else are a string of letters to make up initials, and for the series titles they usually refer to their place in the game. For example, Phobia project I am working on in XNA, Genome Prototype, goes by the name Project Zeropoint, because it actually comes before the game I had designated as the beginning of the storyline, which I call Project Fear for that reason in particular. Spiral Island's project name is Project Leviathan, due to it's unusual origin.
Spiral Island began as an extra credit project for my World History class in 10th grade, which I was failing due to botching up some other assignments and tests in the class. The game wasn't anything at all like the final version at that point, but was instead a project on Greek Mythology, a game I simply titled Leviathan. Not having any real programming experience on any modern platform yet at that point, I was making it instead with a game maker known as RPG Maker 2000, which at the time I didn't know was an illegal translation of a product sold only in Japan. My whole intent of this project was to find a suitable game maker to restart another game I had started, a project called Team Rocket which I had taking place in the Pokemon universe.
Leviathan originally involved a fictional character, a teenager named Amy Carter, who was traveling in a fictional world learning about Greek Mythology. She had gone to a monarchy-ruled country known as Croshid to visit their antique library, which was more a museum and had a lot of things from the Greek rule. This was an island nation, and the characters were traveling their by sea, when they were attacked by the sea monster Leviathan, and fell through a magic portal and were transported into ancient Greece.
The problem with this project was the dependancy files of RPG Maker 2000, it required a massive amount of other resources be installed in order to actually run anything made with it. I was looking at other game makers at the time to try and avoid this, and I had downloaded a number of other free and possibly open source utilities that existed back then. The only one I remember at this point is the next one I experimented with, an older - and also illegally translated - version of the first, known as RPG Maker 95. This one didn't rely on the resource packages that 2000 used, however it's translation was much worse, and I found myself unable to create any new maps to work with for cities and the like. Stuck with only one map, I cranked it up to the maximum size of 200 x 200 tiles, and thought of a way to be able to most effectively use the space in just one single map for the longest play possible. The result I eventually came up to was a landform shaped loosely like an Archimedean spiral, leading to the creation of a spiral island. Walking around my creation in RPG Maker 95 took a long time, and my annoyance with the land, with nothing to do there, proved to me that I had an interesting concept here, and I decided to continue it. I had first mentioned it on November 13 of 2000, simply describing it in a news bulletin in this way: "Fifth, I have yet to find a RPG maker good enough to handle the remake of Team Rocket. However, I am making an annoyingly hard little game that will tide us over until I do."
I turned out able to pass with the other extra credit I was doing, ending up with a final grade of C+ for that quarter. Leviathan was no longer necessary, and the ideas coming to me for the "Spiral Island" project were intriguing, so I went on with it, shelving the Team Rocket project permanently and focusing on this new project. The game Leviathan was gone, and in its place had begun Spiral Island, the rebirth of Project Leviathan.
Tags: anacondasoftware names programming software spiral_island writing