I haven't updated the blog in a while, and I probably should have, but I've been busy with a heck of a ton of stuff in the 'real world' and sleep has been iffy. So here I am. I think I'll call this segment "Things I'd like to say that won't fit in a status update" (TILTSTWFIASU, if you will) due to just being all around ranty and "paragraphy" (is paragraphy even a word?) of things I'd like to say but it would end up being an ugly giant wall of text.
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TILTSTWFIASU, why?
My friend inspired me to start TILTSTWFIASU, my close group of friends and I used to have a gaming get-together every third Saturday of the month to meet and play video games, catch up, and have a traditional eat at Red Robin - Unfortunately real life took charge and we stopped doing that as often as friends got busy with jobs, me and one of my friends got busy with longer hours trying to finish our game, and the whole lot.
So last week (or was it two weeks ago? probably two weeks ago), I suggest to a close friend to start a blog after his family and some of us suggested that his public status updates on Facebook were getting a little too... I don't know, ranty, if you will. And I told him a blog would be a great way to express his creativity and what he really feels, without being judged too much by his peers (just only those who care to see it). He made his private and invited those who were interested to see his blog, where he posts things and questions that people would answer and so forth.
Everyone has a different definition of blogging, some is doing what said friend is doing, some's definition of blogging is using Tumblr to find and 'reblog' funny pictures and gifs they find funny (I don't really consider Tumblr blogging in a sense - it's more of a Facebook where sharing is more important than posting original material - but that's a different story), and mine is more of the traditional sense to really just write down what I'm working on and how I'm feeling to get my thoughts on paper somewhere. Alright, without further ado...
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MySpace and Online History:
MySpace recently revamped their whole website some time ago. I don't know when they did it, but recently I went to check some old entries in my old blog I had on there before I moved here to Blogger. I guess looking back, it was for the better because everything I had on MySpace was completely wiped except for A/ Who I was friends with (now it's called "connected to") at the time, and B/ your current profile picture (which was a drawing by someone of me and my FFXI character).
In a way it was kind of depressing because it feels like everything I did online in those years were now erased from memory, but in a different way it does feel nice for some other people who posted pictures of them doing inappropriate stuff and never really scrubbed it from their online histories. I have a friend who applied for a probation officer and their HR department made him look up all of his online profiles to make sure he was a good fit for their institution. If you don't have appealing stuff on those sites, it will come back to haunt you.
I recently found out that Xanga (the blogging site I used before MySpace and this) was also having some trouble and they needed funding to stay afloat. If that were to go, then all of the blogs I've ever had except for this one would be scrubbed from existence.
It really does say something. If Google ever gets replaced by something better in the future, will all of these posts be scrubbed from memory as well? Who knows, it would be kind of cool to have descendants be able to find my rantings hundreds of years from now to see what I did in my normal spare time, but YouTube videos and the like will be around in some archived format on future technology, so people will get laughs. Heck, people still watch TV and that's been around for over half a decade. I wonder how long the internet will be around before it gets replaced by future technology we can't even fathom.
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Final Fantasy XIV:
Words can't really describe how psyched I am for the game to come back. Our progress officially stopped counting on Halloween of last year with the epic finale of 1.0 on November 11, 2012. I was out in Vegas at the time without a stable internet connection and I worried that I wasn't going to be able to be there in the final moments, but in the end I was able to make it and zones were crashing due to the end-of-the-world events going on. We managed to make it to Ul'dah and were greeted with the End of an Era video as soon as the servers went down. I still remember it and we took a final shot of our 1.0 characters together right before impact.
As for my "A Realm Reborn" look, after much deliberation, I am going to stick with my Version 1.0 character with some modifications. I am too attached with my character itself to warrant a change in identity. Hell, we almost saved Old Eorzea from certain doom. I don't want to throw that away (and I feel like I would) for a drastically different look on my character.
I like the look, though I wish there were more hair options, but I'm pretty pleased with my appearance. Added some additional scars too to show the meteor/1.0 damage!
Grover Eyeveen's coming back in full force on Hyperion. I can't wait! I'd like to get some real life friends into the game, and that leads me into my next point.
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Free-to-Play/Micro-transaction Model VS Pay-To-Play Subscription:
Most of my real life friends like the free-to-play/microtransaction model. Most of them have PS3s and play free-online gaming and/or are fans of the online RTS "League of Legends". I played LoL for a short while, but the attitudes of the players are very off-setting and rude. I think that's why I really like pay-to-play models of games, it really weeds out (or at least sets a high-barrier of entry) against immature people who just log in to insult others.
FFXIV is going to be 12.99/14.99 ish subscription. (If you want 1 character or 8 respectively) - Some people think that price is too steep for a month. But think of it this way.
12.99 divided by 30 is 43 ish cents a day. That's less than the price of playing two arcade games a day. You can use Amazon Mechanical Turk in order to fulfill a couple of online jobs and easily make that money in 10 minutes tops. It's a very inexpensive form of entertainment as compared to, I don't know. Going out to a bar or watching a movie.
Not to mention it comes with updates for the game, new boss encounters, new classes, all the fun content.
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Studio Progress:
I think I've been becoming slowly more and more of a Producer/Director by keeping people on track. We are working on getting our games out to the public. I really know what type of people I'm looking for to get things done. People with a drive to actually work on a project, even if the rewards aren't immediate.
For Selatria we have a pretty close-knit team of people (one artist, three game designers, two musicians, and one sound editor/recording engineer) who are working on the game about 24 hours a week ish, almost as much as a part-time job. It's hard to stay motivated sometimes when the results of the work aren't immediately shown, but we still hack away at the game getting as much of it done a week as we can.
It's kind of funny that the highlight of our week was programming a "Game Saved!" window into our game once it writes data to a file. I will show more of Selatria in the next proper game development log along with some music and art. At least check out this song, I love the peacefulness to it. Chris did a really good job on composing this, and Jennifer did a great job with the art.
Selatria will likely be our only game traditional RPG format. (Maybe demand will change that in the future, but it's uncertain. We are here to make money after all.) As a studio, though, we do not want to be stuck in a niche and eventually try one of each genre. With Selatria we're out to prove quality games can be made with an RPG Maker engine and we're proving just that.
We're in the process of really learning the ins and outs of Unity to prepare development for our next game project. We're using about half of the development days each day to learn the engine. It's a lot of fun so far, and it's easier to learn when we develop in a very patient, take-your-time atmosphere as opposed to college where I felt like I was being rushed the entire time.
My personal philosophy is to get farther today than you were yesterday. Never be stagnant, because that's when you really lost. Heh, that kind of brought me to my next point.
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Trying new things and experiences:
Not sure if I posted it before or not, but I'm known as someone who has a very wide comfort zone, and doesn't really like to escape it as often. I've also notoriously been known for swearing things off after one bad experience. Bad time at a restaurant? I never go to it again. Friend tries to play a joke, never trust them again. I also had a great fear of talking to people on the phone and intercom, and that includes talking to people in drive-thrus, not to mention being too passive and not taking charge when needed. It's kind of bad for someone in several leadership position like I am, so I've been making steps to change it.
I'm really trying to break that habit by trying new things and giving people second chances. I tried some new items at existing restaurants I already go to, and I've been using notecards and small scripts in order to go through things like a drive-thru or talking on a phone so I don't stutter as much. It's a good step forward!
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That's about it for my first TILTSTWFIASU. Maybe I'll post more, but this was a really good place to get things off my chest. Until next post!
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