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My knowledge of Korean doesn't span much farther than saying "An nyoung", so my main method of communication in public will be limited to pointing at things and shouting "Hello". Cramming on Korean is something I'm going to have to do when I'm there, which should apparently be alright since the teaching is apparently not too intensive. And keeping a blog strikes me as an inordinately good idea, I wonder why I didn't think of that...oh yes, because I'm lazy.

I suppose while I'm there, I *do* have to go and see some Starcraft matches. Or play it, I've not been able to have a go since the nineties!

When trying to get some currency from the Post Office, the woman behind the counter kept insisting that the "Republic of Korea Won" was a forbidden currency. I had to persuade her that there was a difference between "Republic" and "Democratic Republic", and she only relented when I managed to get her colleague to agree with me. 

Well, as of this time next week, I'm off to Asia - I'm going to be teaching English to the natives in Korea for a whole year, and actually doing something fairly useful for the first time within this gap year (though at this rate, gap two-years). I'm no stranger to moving, my parents worked all over the world, but this is the first time I'm doing it by myself.

So, I thought it'd be an interesting thing to examine. How many people on here have moved out, not just from their home, but their home country? What did you find you missed once you got to wherever? And is anyone on here from Korea and/or able to warn me about things to look out for once I'm there?

An nyoung!

Made a brief trailer for it, just to entice anyone who's not decided to play yet, here on Youtube. Go on, give it a whirl. Or better yet, give the game a go! It's got explosions, and everything!

Drug tests on  competitors mandatory. Anyone found not intoxicated will be disqualified!

Hm...not sure why it'd be spawning outside the play area, it's only supposed to appear on top of a region within the level - I'll give that another looking at. Also, which labels are saying untitled?

And the fuel gauge is *supposed* to be there, since the empty box beneath tells you how many spawns you have left!

I would second 9.05, that game is absolutely awesome - and, it doesn't take up too much time, either!

[1st Drop]

Well, my second complete AGS project is finally finished, so I present:

1st Drop - a gravity-assisted landing game.

Taking inspiration from classics like "Dropzone" and "Lander", I decided to experiment and see if I could implement a similar system using AGS. Naturally, I succeeded, so the result is finally here! Because I'm now sick of making it (and I'd like to keep to a 'one game every two months' schedule), I've decided to release as-is. It's fully functional, and there are no game-breaking bugs that I've discovered, so here it is for y'all.

And because, of course, straightforward landing would just be dull, there are all kinds of other objectives, like:


Hunting through the rings of Saturn for distress beacons. or...


Rescuing colonists from the path of a hungry mining-robot.

!!WATCH THE TRAILER ON YOUTUBE!!

Plus, special unlocks to be found...

So, if you fancy a little bit of arcade-action, this might be what you're looking for. That, or you want to make sure your understanding of gravity isn't completely messed up. So, get yourselves over to GameJolt to acquire it, and save the solar system from the Corporate menace!

GameJolt Download

AGS Games Database entry

Technocrat, if you were a female wearing that outfit, I would take you out this weekend. Oh well.

I should have put up the picture of my *other* weekend outfit, then!

This is how I dress at weekends.  =^.^=

I was *just* thinking I had a strange urge to play Starcraft. I had the N64 version many eons ago, so I might just splash out on the real PC one for a slightly less pixelly experience.

Well, I'm certainly dead chuffed about how enthused people seem to be about this! I've just got a couple more levels to wind up before it's function, put the sound in, and deal with the final "menu" and score system, but it's nearly sorted.

Also, if anyone fancies giving this game a bit of a test-drive for me, I wouldn't be averse. At this stage, more in terms of balancing the difficulty - I think it's dead easy, my current testing minion (i.e. my younger brother) finds it inordinately difficult. If anyone's up for test-driving it, do drop me a PM!

Also, a boss battle:

[1st Drop]

Right, I'm thoroughly sick of working on this game, so I've decided to wind it up ASAP and release what I've done so far, before I have to flee to country. So, with limited ado, my sales pitch for:

1st Drop - a gravity-assisted landing game.

This might remind a few people of a certain classic arcade game. Shameless plagiarism? Naaah, I take a good idea and add a few new things in. After all, why stick to just landing on the moon's surface, when there are so many other kinds of thankless tasks for astronauts to perform?



Search the rings of Saturn for the black boxes of less fortunate spacecraft



Rescue colonists before a robotic miner that thinks they look tasty gobbles them up


And...uhm...adventure!


Since I almost seem to now be able to finish a game in two months (improvement from finishing a game in never), this game will be out by the end of next week - whether it's tidy or not. It'll certainly be playable, but since I've cut down a lot of what it was originally going to be, it's more of another demonstration of what weird stuff I like to experiment with in AGS.

Spoiler

Does anyone know if you can drive the car in that first trial without crashing and landing upside down on the side of the road?

[close]

Spoiler

That always happens, but there's a difference between crashing successfully, and crashing failurely. Storywise, it gives an excuse for Madison to fix him up at the hotel!

[close]

*Leaps in on the pro-Heavy Rain side*

I've just spent the last 12 hours going through it. Granted, it only took 8 on the first playthrough, but the sheer permutations of endings, and experimenting with who survives is something that's going to keep me going through until tomorrow.

I'm surprised at AGS people being so vehemently opposed to it though! It seems like it'd be right up this place's street. It certainly doesn't feel like a choreto play, the way the "unconventional" controls are built into the flow of the game feels somewhat natural, helping to keep the story going in an unobtrusive way. It may look oddly arbitrary, and seem when you're watching it to look like "quicktime" events, but it feels more like an unconscious influence on the scene when you're in it.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to replay it with him as a terrible terrible father.

I remember when I used to play the first C&C, after borrowing it off a friend. It was special, and different to anything else I'd played at the time! I agree with the people on here who say they're all becoming far too homogenous. Things like stealth tanks aside, C&C and Red Alert were both semi-realistic warfare, then it degraded into lasers from there.

There *are* good sci-fi strategies, Starcraft and Supreme Commander being examples, but making every single example of strategy into some "dark and grimy" generic science fiction future really took away from it somehow.

Also, Red Alert 3 sucked. Except Tim Curry.

Sorry I'm not being particularly constructive, it just had such a lasting impact on my childhood, it's not something I like seeing being messed around with!

[Drones I Have Known]

War? Who doesn't love war? Well then, I've got one based on a true story, from a friend serving in Afghanistan at the moment.


Drones I Have Known

"Thompson!" The captain called out over the line of tents in front of him. It was far easier than actually searching each one individually, and sure enough,  a head poked out from the door of one.

"Sir?" asked the head. This was Ben, Lieutenant Thompson, the one being sought.

"We've got an oppo due, are you ready to go yet?" He wasn't angry, just loud. It would have been easy to mistake though, if you hadn't spent the last two months in a camp with him. He didn't have much of an excuse to be angry either, everything had been going right lately. They may have been in Helmand, but they hadn't lost a single man on patrol yet, and the locals were cooperative, if not friendly.

"One more minute sir, there's a loose connector we don't want breaking while she's up. Other than that, we're good to go," he assured his superior. The captain, visibly satisfied, turned and headed to the lorry being used as the command centre. Thompson, relieved, walked back over to the fold-out table in the middle of the tent. Hunched over it was his technical assistant, Sgt. Greene, who was performing surgery on a small white plane - a Desert Hawk UAV. It had been misbehaving slightly on its last couple of runs, so this health-check had been insisted on before its next sortie.

"Done yet, Daryn?"

"I think so, but I can't make any promises. Give me a day with her and I could tell you, but with only half an hour..."

"Cap wants it up in five. Chippie's on patrol, wants a recce of a village reckons the jundies are holed up there." Greene rolled his eyes, and reached for the panel to close the drone's body. He placed it on gently, and screwed it in place with an almost parental tenderness. Thompson had noticed that Greene had become somewhat attached to the UAV, though stopping short of naming it. He was concerned about its well-being, for reasons beyond its cost, but he didn't think the risk was beyond that. There were stories of a US operator who needed counselling after his bomb-disposal drone was taken out by an IED it was working on. He didn't think Greene was quite so sentimental though.

While Greene finished up the bodywork, Thompson booted up the console for the drone's control. It ran through it in a couple of minutes, then he switched on the Xbox controller used to pilot the aircraft. Greene gingerly lifted the plane by the fuselage, and carried it to the door.

"I'll get her up," he said to Ben as he walked out, "don't be too rough with her." Thompson grinned as mental images formed in his mind. Greene trotted a hundred or so metres to the open patch of ground they'd nicknamed the 'runway'. Some of the squaddies nearby stopped their digging and turned to watch the takeoff - sometimes they'd ask Thompson if they could have a go flying her, and Greene was extremely grateful that he had the sense to refuse them every time. He lifted the plane over his head in his right hand, as if about to throw a javelin. He switched on the motor - Ben would have already activated the cameras and electronics, but they saved the engine until the last moment to spare the battery. "Good luck," he whispered. Preparing himself, he put one foot in front of the other, took a couple of quick steps, and lunged forward, catapaulting the drone into the air. With a loud buzz, it took to the sky, and shrank into the distance.

***

The captain looked over Ben's shoulder. Drones weren't his field of expertise, he was an artillery man, but he could appreciate the technicality of it. The large screen in front of both of them showed the bird's-eye view of the road beneath it, along with twelve men on patrol below. The plane quickly overtook them, and headed on to the village ahead of the squad. Thompson pushed the right-stick on the controller, and the camera tilted upwards, the image now covering most of the village. As the village grew in size, it became obvious that the intelligence about the insurgent positions had been correct - technicals, pickup trucks with machine-guns mounted in the back, were parked around the prominent mosque. Tiny figures with RPGs slung over their shoulders wandered here and there - the people with smaller weapons were almost indistinguishable from the civilians. They weren't dug in to the village, but it was clear that caution would be needed.

"Uh-oh." Daryn looked up in response to Ben's foreboding comment.

"'Uh-oh' what?" he asked suspiciously.

"Control feed's gone." It wasn't the fault he'd been working on earlier, but certainly something that should have been avoidable. The sergeant, now visibly panicked, stood and navigated his way through the piles of tools towards the console. He pushed Thompson and the captain aside, grabbed the controller from him, and furiously pulled on the sticks. There was no response in the drone's movement, but the picture remained from the camera, and he watched in horror as the plane began to nosedive, careening towards the ground. After what seemed like an eternity of falling to him, the picture went black, and a message on the screen popped up.

> No feed on input 1

"Damn," the captain said curtly. He hadn't failed to notice that Greene was visibly shaken, but was doing his best to avoid the subject. "I'll get on to Chippie. Now we have to enter the village, even if just to recover the UAV." The comment seemed to pass straight through Daryn, who obviously hadn't been listening. He walked out, and Thompson crossed over to where Greene was now slumped.

"Don't worry mate, you heard the captain. It's a rescue mission now!"

***

"Understood, D-Team out." Cornet William Fish, or just 'Chippie' to anyone behind his back, had received the orders from HQ. The drone had confirmed that the village up ahead, Kher Dey Wey, was being used by insurgents, but he could tell they'd been spooked. From his position on a nearby ridge, his squad's spotter could see technicals and trucks making a getaway. Apparently, the drone that went down earlier had alerted them that they were on their way. He had reported this to HQ, but his orders still stood - secure the village, and ensure that the insurgent presence was gone. "Well," he said to the beefy-looking squaddie next to him, whose name he could never remember, "looks like our mission just got easier." The fleeing warriors were no longer his concern - 16 Air Assault Brigade would be delivering them the good news on the road, with an Apache ambush set up a few miles away.

They would still have to be cautious - they may have set IEDs up along the roadside, or even mined the village - it was not unheard of. As Fish's patrol neared the village though, they could see the civilians going about their business - a good sign, since it meant both that the insurgents were not likely to have fortified with explosives, nor had they spent long enough there to terrify the occupants. In loose formation, they cautiously moved along the village's roads towards the mosque, and the centre. Though being careful, they didn't exhibit the outright paranoia that their US army colleagues tended to when entering a village, and the locals' reactions reflected this. Only a month ago, Fish had watched a football match that some of the Royal Artillery men had had with the boys of this settlement.

"Pa khair ragla!" an old man shouted to them. He recognised this as one of the village's leaders, and turned to another young man in his squad for a translation.

"He says hello, Chief," answered the young man detachedly.

"Ask him about the jundies," Fish requested. After a bit of babbling back and forth, the corporal was able to give an answer.

"They were fleeing the Marine raid up north, asked around for provisions in this village. Hadn't realised it was so close to us, and left when they knew we were watching." Fish's expression showed he was obviously pleased by the news so far. "They didn't realise we were coming until the drone crashed, though."

"Is it still here?" Their orders were also to recover the drone. Granted, it was unlikely the Taliban had the technology to make a great deal of use of what was on board, but protocol was protocol, and those desert hawks were expensive. More jabbering between the corporal - Fish guessed he was of Pakistani extraction - and the old man, and eventually the elder started walking off towards a small grove behind the mosque.

"Better follow him, sir."

***

Greene was still inconsolable. Evidently, he had put not only a great deal of effort into his work, but also love! Thompson wasn't sure what he could do - if a relative had died, he could think up some generic platitude for the situation. He didn't want to seem to be going overboard now though, but he also wanted to help his friend. He considered trying to distract Daryn with more work, just as Fish's strolled into the tent, confident as ever.

"Chippie! You bastard, how was it?" Thompson asked, trying to lighten the mood by sharing in Fish's positive demeanour.

"Not bad, piece o' piss frankly." He looked over at Greene, then back to Ben. "Damn, I heard he'd taken it badly, but you'd think his mam had died. Come on, I've got something for yous." He spun on his heel, and left the tent. Greene looked up at Ben, who shrugged, and followed the Cornet outside.

On the top of a Warrior IFV parked outside, like some casualty of war, was his UAV, his drone, his baby. His expression changed instantly, as he viewed its triumphant return. "How...?" he started, too distracted by the emotional turmoil. Fish began to recount how the operation had wound up.

The elder had taken them into the grove, where they found the UAV tied to a tree. They were told that, when it had struck the ground, the insurgents debated what to do with it. They had believed that the tiny plane that had been spying on them was piloted by trained mice, and that their priority was therefore to stop the mice flying away, escaping to alert their imperialist masters. So, to prevent the plane taking off again, the insurgent group's leader had told his men to lash it to a tree in the grove, where it was later discovered by Fish's squad.

"Makes you wonder how we're going to win against anyone that daft," finished Fish. "I'm off for a bevvy now though. Let you get back to the missus," he gestured at the plane while addressing the comment to Daryn. Once again, he was too busy to be paying attention particularly, unhitching the plane from the IFV, and cradling it in his arms as he inspected it for damage, and saying soothing things to it on the way back to the tent. "Though, saying they're daft, he's not too far off." Fish sighed and headed for the impromtu bar set up in a prefab building nearby.

"Nah, he's not daft," mused Thompson. "He was just worried about a comrade-in-arms."

I quite liked 2, actually! Had a playthrough of it last week, so I'll have to complete it again again again when this is done!

What sort of terrain will your soldier be operating on? The suit should reflect the type of soldier, and take into account practicality. A bright blue suit of armour wouldn't be the best option in normal environments, unless it's ceremonial. So I think you should consider how the suit will be used tactically, and how it suits where the soldier is based.

The back view niggles me, but other than those two things, it's quite good.

I see what you mean about camouflage - I was thinking of other variants for other environments, but in this case, it's kind of an "urban military police", urban being in space colonies of course.

In a nutshell, it's a space-suit that's more geared towards soldiering than NASA's usual line of work. While the person inside is supposed to be a woman (I suck at drawing, yeah), she *is* supposed to be fairly masculine - long hair doesn't work well with helmets after all, and armed forces aren't going to go to much effort "feminising" suits beyond functional necessity. Still, I want to improve on it, and any advice is much appreciated! I think I could do better on the face, in particular...

It adjusts the points based on the difficulty you start on - so, the easier you start, the less points you finish up with!