Esk: March 2008 Archives

Anyone not looking to waste a whole lot of time should probably avoid visiting The Video Game Name Generator.  I had to pry myself away to write this week's Gruedorf entry, but not before coming up with a few dozen genuinely good ideas for short video games (thus the title of this post).  But before I start making "Morbidly Obese Dessert Assassins", there's work to be done on Starlight.

I'm sure you noticed that the title of this post is a line from a Fleetwood Mac song ("Temporary One").  Okay, probably not.  As anyone who knows me well (and probably anyone who's ever met me) could tell you, I love me some Fleetwood Mac.  Anyway, on to this week's Gruedorf entry.

I'd like to start off by apologizing for last week's terrible post.  No, please don't go back and read it to see just how terrible it is.  My only excuse is that I had a migraine and only 30 minutes remaining before the Gruedorf scoreboard deemed me a capital-L Loser.  The pressure got to me!  As of this post, I maintain my 0% Loss, 0% Lame standing--I think that means I win, or something!  Wait, no, I probably have to finish a game first.

Well, McGrue gave me a pass, this week, to fulfill our ancient pact instead of showing progress on my own game, Starlight.  You heard me, an ancient pact.  Is your interest piqued?  Read on to discover how I can stretch out an entire blog entry about a pixel-bridge!

We appear to be living in a world where the average consumer of popular media has developed a finely tuned sense of the hackneyed, clichéd, and otherwise overdone.  I've listened to friends and acquaintances complain (at great length) about how much they hate rip-offs, remakes, and the derivative genre "crap" that the mainstream media has been churning out as of late.  Some people seem to believe that mankind's last original idea was finally thought-up sometime in the 1980's, or whatever decade they spent the majority of their formative years in.  The truth is that there are no new characters, only new characterizations; no new stories, only new storytellers.

My first exposure to the adventure game genre was at Camp Island Lake, in a darkened cabin full of sweaty kids, all grouped around Macintosh Classics.  I can't remember what we were playing.  Honestly, what I remember most was how unbearably hot a closed room full of computers and kids could get in the middle of the Summer in Starrucca, PA.  But despite the heat, we were entranced by the game we were playing.

So apparently it's not enough to simply declare that you are entering Gruedorf, as I so foolishly did yesterday.  No, you have to prove that you're making progress on your project.  Well, I was making progress up until last night, when I realized that I was going about it all wrong.  I was trying to make a Puzzle/Adventure game in RPGMaker VX, which is somewhat like trying to make a sandwich in a blender.  Sure, it'll probably taste fine, but the texture will be all wrong, and in the end people will just point at you and tell their children not to do what that man over there is doing. Okay, lets retire the sandwich-blender simile.

More after the jump.  Oh, god.. I can't believe I just said that.

0x22.com was one of my more ambitious coding projects / timesinks.  It has since fallen by the wayside, and even spent the better part of last year offline.  So imagine my surprise when I stumbled across this site.  Look similar?  It should!  It's identical, but for its (eye-melting) color scheme.