Category Archives: Gaming

FuzzyAdventures, Gaming

Let the Fuzzy Adventures Begin!

Leave a comment

With my summer now in full swing (even if the weather disagrees), I’ve started work on my new Fuzzy Adventure series. This was item 6 in my post about what I planned to do this summer and I’m super excited to get to work! I’ve done a test session already with a short run through Castlevania: Symphony of the Night to see how my setup works:

A screenshot of an initial Fuzzy Adventure test run.
A screenshot of an initial Fuzzy Adventure test run.

 

I’m using a StarTech USB3HDCAP to hook up my consoles to my PC and XSplit to handle both the Twitch streaming and video recording. The cool thing about the capture box is it can handle any console so I can play and record on anything from my old NES up to PS3. Since I just picked up Ni No Kuni I may end up doing a regular Let’s Play as I work my way through that.

As for the Fuzzy Adventures, I anticipate doing at least one episode per week. Each episode will probably include about an hour or more of game time (no doubt subject to the game being played) along with the written portion.  Since this is all new to me I’ll have to see how much writing is involved for each hour of game play.  I’ve also engaged the services of a professional graphic artist to handle the graphics for the videos. I really want something that looks well-made. All of this should be ready within the next week or two. Can’t wait to get started!

Writing, Imagination, Live Writing, Crowdfunding, Gaming

The Semester’s End & Things to Come

Leave a comment
This entry is part [part not set] of 73 in the series The Writing Life Blog

So yesterday I had my last final. I’m really glad it’s done but I’d also like to kick the person who decided to hold finals and graduation on the same day. Seriously stupid. Why not have graduation on Saturday instead? Makes way more sense. Whatever, it’s done and I’m pretty sure I did well on both of the finals I had to take. My hand is still mad at me though. Nothing like having to hand-write a five page essay in under an hour. Fun times. Now though it’s time to move on to super fun things!

Starting Monday, barring any life events, I will be starting my new Fuzzy Adventures series. All of the gear I needed to make it happen came in on Thursday. Took me a good day or so to get everything set up as well. Still have to do a few things on the software end but that shouldn’t be too much of an issue. Tested out the video capture card by hooking up my trusty old PS2 and booting up the first game I’m going to use for my Adventures series: Castlevania – Symphony of the Night. I wasn’t sure I was going to start with that one but the Kickstarter for Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night decided me. For those who haven’t heard it is a gothic-themed side scrolling action adventure RPG made by the same guy who co-directed Symphony of the Night (SOTN). In his opening video he says that he’s wanted to do another game like SOTN for a long time but the AAA publishers say there’s no demand for such a game. Considering the campaign is already at $2.1 million with 27 days left to go I’d say the AAA have their heads up their asses. That’s not news though. Personally I’m really glad crowdfunding has allowed game developers to give AAA pubs the finger and do what they and the gamers want: make awesome games without publisher oversight and interference. Just look at what happened to Maxis and Simcity. EA took a beloved franchise and forced Maxis to limit and monetize the game to the point that it was a huge failure. Then EA blames Maxis and closes them down. Fuckers. But I digress.

I’m excited that I’ll be using my Twitch channel quite a bit more. I still plan on doing Live Writing sessions since I have plenty of writing to get done this summer. Each Fuzzy Adventure will entail quite a bit of writing per episode. I haven’t decided how long each finished video will be since I don’t know how long it will take me to do the writing for every 15 minutes of game play. I suspect that will vary greatly from game to game. SOTN isn’t exactly plot or dialogue heavy so I’ll be making a lot of stuff up to tell an interesting story. If and when I get to games like Final Fantasy 6 or Crono Trigger though I’m sure the writing portions will be much, much longer with less deviation from the game plot & dialogue. Either way I’m super excited to get going on this!

Balance, Live Writing, Method, Gaming, General, Life, Publishing, Stuck in my Head, Writing

Brainstorming for Summer

1 Comment
This entry is part [part not set] of 73 in the series The Writing Life Blog

With just two finals left this semester will be done before I know it. This has been making me anxious. Mostly because it means that my schedule next week and going forward will be up to me and it would be nice if I could manage to not waste this free time. After all how many 30 something’s get a real summer break? I know I never thought it would be possible once I was neck deep in the soul sucking 9 to 5 grind. To that end I’ve been thinking that it’s time to brainstorm and come up with a list of goals for this summer. So without further ado (and in no particular order), here is the list:

  1. Write book 3 of Stephen’s trilogy
  2. Do my own Let’s Play series with the Terraria 1.3 patch
  3. Do video readings for some of my short fiction
  4. Finish re-edits for Transformation & Induction
  5. Edit and publish Avatars & Identity
  6. Complete at least one Let’s Play + VG Writing Series (Fuzzy Adventures)
  7. Compile, edit, and publish the class fiction and poetry book
  8. Find and check out local writing meetup and social groups
  9. Design BFG Publishing website
  10. Shampoo the carpet
  11. Move my desk
  12. Re-organize this blog
  13. Write more short fiction & poetry (At least 1 poem & 1 short story/flash fiction per week)
  14. Send stuff to magazines/publishers every week
  15. Continue the Live Writing series or combine with some of the above

 

Whew. Looking at this list I realize that I have my work cut out for me this summer. This to-do list is in addition to the usual goofing around and just having fun that will be required to stay sane. I’m also going to have to prioritize if I want to get even half of this done. The Fuzzy Adventures series is something I’ve been thinking about most of this semester. I love video games and I love writing & reading. I wanted to combine those somehow. That’s when I struck on the idea for re-visiting some of the games that I loved so much as a kid and doing a combination let’s play with an episodic writing series. The basic idea is that I’ll play a game in sections and write a story to go along with it, also in sections. Basically I’d have a separate area of this blog devoted to these series with each game getting it’s own sub-section. Each blog entry would be an episode of the story and video both. I’ve got a short list of games I’m considering, but I’ll probably start with something short like Castlevania: Symphony of the Night instead of an epic length game like Final Fantasy 6.

I’m thinking the other thing I’ll need to help keep me on track is some kind of daily schedule. I’m not very good at sticking to schedules that I come up with on my own but I might need to give it a shot. Anyway, glad I finally got all of these thoughts down. The list reminded me that I’m missing a couple of key pieces of hardware that I’ll need for a number of these ideas. Amazon ho!

Life, Unemployment, Writing, Balance, Changes, Imagination, Inspiration, Method, Career, Gaming, General

Done and Done

Leave a comment
This entry is part [part not set] of 73 in the series The Writing Life Blog

It’s been a couple of quiet weeks as far as posts here go. That was mostly due to being ill. Picked up a nasty little bacteria that took up residence in my sinuses and chest. It was a lot like a mild flu mixed with a head cold. Got the fever, cough, congestion, and sore throat combo going so that was a lot of fun. Probably could have cut my sick time in half with a little antibiotic love but that requires expensive doctor visits and medicine so no joy there. Future illnesses like this shouldn’t be a problem if the VA comes through though so here’s hoping on that front.

As far as writing goes I didn’t let a little thing like being sick stop me from writing. I certainly slowed down but I’m very happy to report that book 2 was finished early today. I was working on Chapter 21 when I realized I was just dragging out the story and could easily cut it at the end of Chapter 20 plus a short epilogue. So that’s what I did. My second novel ever clocks in at just over 92k words and took an unfortunate 5 months to write. Book 1 was 4k words longer and took 3 months all while I was working 40 hours a week. Funny how it’s been harder to write when I have so much more free time. Of course moving threw a big monkey wrench into my writing time/energy so there’s a good month lost to that. The real problem was making the time and space for it. For the first book I was in a lull as far as my gaming went so it was no big deal to devote an hour a night to getting some writing done. Still, done is done.

This second book was much harder to write for me. I think part of it was just the amount of world-building that went into this one. For the first book I could get away with vague references and hints until the big reveal at the end. Book two though is all about getting down and dirty with this new world. It’s a first for the protagonist, the reader, and me. 🙂  Fun fact: I used a short story that I wrote to build a lot of the details in book two. The short story takes place in the same world and focuses on a day in the life of a secret agency office worker. I ended up going through the short story again to jot down all of the details and filled an entire legal pad with notes. I will definitely be writing more of these kinds of stories to help flesh out my world. I think it takes the huge task of world-building and breaks it down into smaller, more manageable chunks. I’m actually itching to get going on another short story. It’s nice to know that I can start a project and get it done in a week or less. Finishing a novel feels great but the slog getting there can be rough.

Changes, Career, Gaming, General, Writing

Side effects

Leave a comment
This entry is part [part not set] of 73 in the series The Writing Life Blog

So I’ve been noticing some side effects from the whole writing project thing. The first and most noticeable was that having something meaningful to do, something I’m doing for myself and not just to pay bills or just as a distraction, pulled me out of my funk. Between re-locating for a job, getting divorced, and a general lack of direction with my life I was definitely pretty down in the dumps. What has fascinated me about starting, and keeping with, my writing project is how this one positive has lead to others. I suppose it shouldn’t be too surprising that positive habits can reinforce more positive habits, but it has definitely been a fun experience for me so far.

Anyway, on to more nerdy topics! Sometimes when you’re sitting around on your computer with nothing in particular to do, you suddenly find yourself heading out on an Internet Adventure! It was on one such Adventure that I discovered an amazing web series called ‘There She Is!!’  Now, I actually discovered this quite some time ago while I was stuck on a deployment and incredibly bored. The Internet connection was slow and very unreliable so Flash videos were much easier to watch within a reasonable amount of time. The series is made up of five short music videos with no dialogue and a different song for each video. It follows the story of Nabi and Doki, a cat and rabbit person respectively. In their world, it is completely taboo, even forbidden, for cats and rabbits to be cross-species couples. Over the course of just these five amazing videos there is an amazing amount of story, character development, humor, and more genuine feeling than you can shake a stick at. The series was completed in 2008, but has never (to my knowledge) garnered much attention outside of its native Korea. This is unfortunate because I really can’t say enough about these videos. They are both incredibly moving and inspirational with a very definitive message.

Link to all five videos (the site is in Korean, but the Play movie links are in English and will launch each video in a pop-up window. You’ll need Adobe’s Flash Player to watch them. Or you could watch them on Youtube.)

http://sambakza.net/works_tsi/tsi_main.html

 

PS: If these videos do not tug on your heartstrings, you are a soulless automaton and should go back to watching “reality” TV.

 

PPS: So I just discovered that the whole series was posted to www.newgrounds.com as well as their Korean site. It looks like all five videos won trophies for top video when they were posted, and the last video has an amazing 1,662 pages of comments from users!

Gaming, General, MMO, Writing, Balance

No Country for Old MMO’s

Leave a comment
This entry is part [part not set] of 73 in the series The Writing Life Blog

One of the things that has been helping me stick to my writing project is the complete lack of interesting MMO’s on the market currently. I’m a long time player of World of Warcraft, but I’ve pretty much come to the end of my rope on that one. The ridiculous daily grind introduced with the most recent expansion pretty much killed any desire to continue playing. That and I’ve leveled almost every class to max. Not much left to do except grind for raiding or Arena gear. No thanks.

Still, just because there’s nothing I want to play that’s out right now doesn’t mean I don’t want to play at all. I’ve definitely been missing the ever-present entertainment of an MMO. The knowledge that there’s a game I enjoy that always has something new I can try. For a long time that was WoW for me. I’ve tried other games from time to time. Conan. Rift, Star Trek, Star Wars, Age of Camelot, LOTRO, and so on and so forth. Honestly I’m pretty tired of the WoW copies. It’s just frustrating  knowing that most of what’s out there are all variations on the same basic theme. Of course, there are some sandbox type games coming. Everquest Next is supposed to be such. Free to play as well. As a player of the original when it first came out back in 1998 (dating myself here), I do hope they’ve come up with something different. I am very interested in CCP’s take on the World of Darkness. The concepts they’ve talked about would definitely lead to a different type of MMO.

Sandbox games have certain grown on me as well. While I don’t care for Minecraft, Terraria is a game I just keep coming back to. Super excited about the hopefully near-future release of version 1.2 that’s going to add a massive amount of content. Starbound is a similar game that’s in the works and supposed to be released this year. Not sure if they’ll hit that time frame. Either way we’ll just have to be patient.

Overall this lack of games that I want to play has coincided happily with my finally getting off of my butt to start writing. When any of these games do arrive, it’s going to be tricky to balance the unfortunate necessities of work and sleep with my writing and games. There are much worse problems to have though, so I’d best keep my perspective. In the meantime, Writing Week 3 ho!