Adventure Begins!

So we had a ton of fun yesterday. At least I did. I hope everyone else did too. I forgot to snap pictures as it was going on though. Opps.

First fight my newbie friends got into was a bit rough. They didn't know how to work well as a team, or what their most effective moves were when. They ended up spread out all over the map, with no one in range of the heals that were available. Soeric the Avenger was knocked out, and a couple others were quite beat up at the end. I think it was a pretty good trial by fire start.

Second encounter was way too easy. They decimated the crew of 8 or 9 minions, and the 3 Kobold Slingers were getting horrible rolls to hit. It was a ton of fun for the encounter though, as the Sorcerer climbed a 8 foot wall, perched at the top of it, threw 2 aoe's to kill almost all the minions single-handedly, then promptly fell backwards off the wall. It was very entertaining.

Third encounter was about right for the difficulty. Maybe a touch too hard. They ended up pretty battered, but no one collapsed. A couple daily's were used, but not all, and very few action points. It is definitely seeming like the group needs more healing. I'm going to try to push some people to multiclass into something that gives a heal. There is only so much that Ghost Bear can do.

Timewise, things moved a bit slower than I expected. The first encounter was very long. I expected it to be long, but it was 3 hours or so, which was a bit longer than I planned for. The other 2 encounters were closer to the 1.5 hour mark. They had figured out how a lot of their moves worked, and some better planned strategies.

Overall, it was a good time. They didn't finish the little story I wanted to get done, they have 1 encounter left. But I might attach another encounter on, so that next session, we will get 2 encounters. Then head to town and do some shopping and such. Keeps the next session maybe a touch shorter. Hopefully they can level too, and we'll do the leveling process as well.

Beginning of an Adventure

So I'm pretty excited for Sunday. If you aren't geeky, you may want to stop reading now.

Sunday I'm starting as DM (Dungeon Master) for a D&D (Dungeons and Dragons) 4e (Fourth Edition) game. Man, geeks like Acronyms. I'm leading a group of D&D newbies. I think collectively as a group of players, they will have at most 20 hours of D&D play combined. I am a bit relieved because they are all video game RPG players, so some of the concepts they are familiar with. I should be pretty interesting.

It's also a wide mix of player styles. One guy has already submitted a character history, bio, and all sort of extra details that compete as one of the best back stories I've heard in D&D. One of the other players didn't even pick a close to appropriate name. Should make the group rather interesting as a group. I think a lot of crazy things will go down. It should be fun. I hope everyone has a good time.

I decided, since it's many of their first times playing, to not go too heavy into the story or role playing or anything. I'm intending the first session to be very combat heavy. I think they will connect to that quicker. After seeing how the first session goes, I'll decided if I want to hook them in to a bigger narrative, or just keep going with simple more one-shot style adventures.

I'll likely take pictures, and chronicle the adventure somewhat, as much for my own interest as any of my readers. So expect a summary next week sometime.

Progress!

So I deployed my first deployable build to the Xbox. I have the first 720p test map displayed, and the grid structure behind it loading correctly. I have the playable characters represented with some placeholders. Tonight I'll be attaching some basic controls to move the placeholders, and adding collisions, for locations you aren't allowed to move (and maybe some places that just slow you down, like hills?)

I got some pretty good progress yesterday, but need to make a lot of progress this week too. We have about 2 weeks until the deadline for submissions for the PAX 10. Hopefully by the end of next weekend, it's a a demo-able state. I might be hitting up a couple friends to start playtesting sometime this week, so be forewarned!

Hopefully I get the first 3d model sometime today, so I can retrofit my classes to support it. I'm a bit nervous about that. Hopefully it's as easy as I've tried to set it up to be. That is definitely my focus for this week though. Trying to free up some evenings to work on it, and I'll have to enforce a strict "Butt in Chair, Hands on Keyboard" policy. Hopefully I'll have a successful week!

Frustrated

So I write my final for my course in 2 days. I still do not know if they will be giving me my degree. I have been receiving invites to grad, and all that stuff, but no one has concretely told me if it's possible or not. So I'm studying, and hoping I'll be done school potentially forever come Friday.

And then, oh boy, do I get even more busy. I have a game project, Project Instant Ramen, that we are hoping to have in reasonable shape to submit to some competitions. The deadline for most of the competitions is the end of the month. We have quite a bit of work to do to make that deadline. The good thing is almost all our art assets, including 3d models and everything, sound like they are almost finished. Our script is past first draft, but by no means finished. A lot of the libraries I intend to use are somewhat built up. I have a lot of the pieces done / ready to go. It's just waiting on me to finish my course, so I can sink a lot of time into it, and get it going. My plan is to sink quite a few hours into it this weekend.

My other goal for the weekend is to get my sleep schedule adjusted for the summer. I get "trapped" in various requirements during the school year to allow me to attend class and work, and my body doesn't like all of them. It works still, but I know I could do better. I'll have to work it all out, and likely re-adapt somewhat. Done it before, and it'll be good to get back to a better schedule. My plan is as follows:
Up at 4am. Yoga, Breakfast, Shower, and so forth. Drive to work around 6:30-6:45. Nap at work, before starting anything, around 7am. Work, breaking for a nap around 2pm. More work, Drive home. Eat supper. Nap around 8pm. Up till 1am. I'm hoping I can lock in the 9pm to 1am range as time to work on Project Instant Ramen. My biggest concern with it, is for the next 2 or 3 weeks, I'll be logging roughly 13 hours of programming a day. I need to, as I have a lot I need to get finished, but that might be a bit stressful. That does leave my weekends code free. I may say like Tuesday Thursday, evening work on PIR, and Saturday Sunday, and take the other evenings as entertainment time to keep my sanity.

I'll keep you updated with how well it pans out.

Happy Broken Internet Day

April Fool's Day is one of my least favourite days in the world. You get exposed to pranks, that typically aren't funny, and are just annoying. Main annoying factor, the broken internet. Normally you should be thinking when you read anything on the internet, as nothing is guaranteed to be true, but on April Fool's Day that problem is magnified tenfold. You have to filter through so much crap to get to any nuggets of truth today, that it's easier to just give up and disconnect for the day. Now for a tech junkie like myself, fully disconnecting for a day is pretty hard.

But too much work to do, so this post is very short. I will update more after finals!

These are the days of my life

Oh boy. I was SICK.
So I missed 3 days of work, lost some weight, and had a very crummy start to the week. Feeling much better now, actually ate a normally sized meal last night. Things seem to be on the up and up. However, now I am behind on everything important. I have a big assignment due on Tuesday I've barely started. I have to make a Demolition Derby game. Currently it loads and displays the background... Obviously I have a little ways to go. So that will likely take most (if not all) of my time this weekend. Also, I need to get more work done on Project Instant Ramen (one of which tasks should be actually finding a name...). We are setting some targets for full demo versions. To enter for the PAX 10, we need to have a full working demo submittable by May 9th, which gives us just under 2 months to essentially finish. That means a lot more work. We have another one we're shooting for too, IndieCade, with a deadline of April 30th. Once we're closer to that date, we'll see if there is a Beta or something we can make publicly available. Don't hold your breath.

I'm still very very excited for this project. I would love nothing more than to have it play like we want it to. Getting it on XBox Live Arcade, or Greenhouse, or something would be nice, making money with it would be even nicer, but just for the experience and practice it is definitely worth the effort. I'm hoping that I can sink some time into it this weekend, but assignment has to take priority.

But I should get to work here, I'll be keeping you updated.

Summer Plans

So I have been trying to decide what to do with my holidays this year. I've put some aside for the Penny Arcade Expo, as I always go, and it's a great time. This year I may be taking resumes too. But last year I took two full weeks off, and spent 1/2 a month on that coast (and loved it). This year, I don't think I'll be spending near that much time, which gives me a few holiday days to use up elsewhere.

As that was sitting in my mind for a couple weeks, I was contacted by a friend in FFXI, the MMO I play. There is a crew of folks, all of whom I know in game, who all live (somewhat) on the East Coast. They get together every summer for a BBQ to hang out and have fun. I was invited this year. They haven't locked a date in yet, but with some rough estimates I determined that it would be a decently cheap flight ($400 round trip? nice) and I would have no hotel or anything to worry about, as I can crash at friend's places. I think it would be a lot of fun, and a good chance to meet these people for real. So I'm pretty excited for it.

That sort of event always brings up debates. Some people, like my sisters, and parents, think it's crazy that I would have friends that I consider really good friends, that I have never met face to face. They thought it was very weird last time I had some online friends share a hotel room with me for PAX (which was 3 years ago now? And Ruben still owes me money for!). I think many people in our society think along the same lines. Sure, I have never met these people face to face, or even seen pictures of some of them, and constantly forget their real names (I don't even know how many of them know I'm a Cody), but friendship isn't based off that. I DEFINITELY talk to these online friends more than my Parents, and my sisters (likely combined). I know what they do for a living, I know of some of their interests. I know about the good and the bad things that happen in their life. I trust them with things like my account numbers for my game characters, which gives them access to years of effort on my part, and virtual goods worth thousands of dollars. That's more than I trust some of my local friends with.

I just find it an interesting generational divide. Making solid connections over the internet is just a foreign concept to many people. To those of us who have done it though, it just seems natural.