In my last entry, I said that I'd
probably write about what I was up to since the entry before that. To
sum it up, I did my masters dissertation project and played some
excellent games – the best of which, Dark Souls aside, were
probably Deus Ex and Deus
Ex: Human Revolution.
There,
I've written about it. I'm not
going to go into detail about the
university side of things
(though I might post some screenshots of
my project later) as it'd be
rather boring. I'm actually
considering making a separate
blog to talk about programming
projects. It's not as if
Bradcom has a huge audience, but I don't want anyone
who finds their way here to
be more bored leaving the
blog than they were coming
in. As Jen from The IT Crowd
said, “Keep the conversation about things that would interest
everybody. You know, nothing about 'memory' or 'RAM'.”
I mentioned in my very first entry –
not counting the two entries from years ago which I deleted when I
refurb'd this here blog – that I like to write. However, aside from
a few pieces of fanfiction which I won't link to here (not because
they're slashly or anything; they're just not too great) and a spot
of poetry, I haven't finished any piece of creative writing since
2002 or 2003 when I wrote a fairly long piece for a GCSE English
assignment – something like 3,000 words though we were only
expected to write about 1,500 – which, again, I won't be publishing
here.
I have two main excuses for this
creative inactivity. Firstly, I had to spend five or six years being
a moronic teenager and then another four years being a pretentious
university student; and secondly, that writing is much harder than
just thinking about writing.
I've
known
about NaNoWriMo for some
time, but I've never given it a go due to either forgetting or
knowing I'd never manage the
50,000 words due to other
commitments. This was especially true during my university years when
I preferred to
use my free time to play video games and watch TV than
force my exhausted brain to juggle words and avoid clichés; though
I did try my hand at writing a play in 2009, but then I scrapped it
because it was shit.
Having
no such excuses this year, I have decided to give NaNoWriMo a go.
Other than writing, it will
give me an excuse to meet
people, many of whom are NaNo veterans.
The other day I attended a get-together for London dwellers (and
visitors) who were also taking the challenge. Here's
a picture.
I'm
the red haired chap in the checkered shirt near
the centre of
the picture. I don't recall
if I was pulling that pose for the camera or if the lady next to me was telling me something horrific.
I met
many friendly
and funny people and learned that I wasn't the only one who gets
demoralised by the crappiness
of first drafts. I also heard many intriguing plot ideas, which made
me a bit sad, as I believe
participants don't always
choose to share the ensuing stories. Knowing
how terrible my first drafts are, I'm not sure I'll be sharing mine,
either. All the talk about
plots
and characters and badly-written sex scenes inspired my inner author
(if I may be so ostentatious as to
say I have one) to write
something, but as I'm saving my creative energy for November and I
don't want to be a rebel I'm writing this blog entry
instead.
My
story is going to be about a young
man who one day realises that he's been replaced by an android clone.
As in, he is the
clone. I haven't thought of a
decent title yet.
My second excuse for this entry: VVVVVV
I played an indie game the other day,
which, as per Bradcom tradition, I am going to write about.
The game I played was the excellent
faux-retro 2D puzzle-platformer VVVVVV. You are Captain
Viridian, a person-shaped block of colour, and your ship has crashed
in a strange dimension which loops in on itself. You and your crew are
somehow teleported on impact to separate parts of this bizarre new
land, and you have no choice but to slap gravity in the face
repeatedly as you hop between floors and ceilings to make your way to
each of your friends.
If you've never played VVVVVV before,
my vague description might have conjured up a horribly inaccurate
image of what the game is actually like. Allow me to direct you to
this video, which demonstrates the game nicely (but makes it look much
easier than it actually is).
I like a lot of things about the game.
The music is catchy and suitably retroish, if ill-fitting for the setting. The visuals are a bit more subdued
– while bright and colourful, the game never looks garish. The
gameplay is the game's strongest point. As you may have gathered from
the video, Captain Viridian cannot, in the traditional sense, jump;
he can only reverse the effect gravity has on him, and cannot do so
in mid-air. If the player is confronted by a pit of spikes, the best
they can do to cross it is fling themselves upwards and hope that
there's a ceiling which they can walk across, and that said ceiling
has no spikes. Many areas are a mess of spiked surfaces and shifting
mid-air platforms, requiring you to first figure out how to use the
gravity-flipping mechanic to make a workable route before attempting
to reach the other side.
source: VVVVVV Steam store page
My main (and perhaps only) issue is
that Captain Viridian is too, well, slidey.
If I let go of a movement key or analogue stick, I don't expect my
character to skid to a halt one foot onwards, I expect them to stop
moving. A
good number of the deaths I
accumulated in VVVVVV
were due to sliding into spikes. It might seem a bit captious to take
issue with this (thanks, thesaurus.com), and perhaps it's
true, perhaps I am
being a bit unfair. It could
have been my keyboard, which
I used because the game
didn't detect my Xbox 360 pad and I found no settings to enable it.
Had the game been longer, I'm sure I would have gotten used to the
sliding and learned to work
with it. As it stands, though, in a game with such
unforgiving collision
detection and where even the
smallest mistake in movement will often get you perforated
(accidentally brush your arse
against the flat side of a spike, and you die), it
quickly becomes irritating. Luckily,
you have infinite lives, there's
no reloading after a death, and
checkpoints are very, very frequent.
At
least the game had no ice
levels.
The
game is about three hours long (my Steam dashboard says “2 hours
played”, but I'm betting it's more like 2:59) and probably
longer if you go for all of the secrets
(I didn't). Some might
consider this brevity a flaw,
but a few weeks ago, I gave myself a target of completing one game a
week, the short length allowed me to finish it in two sittings,
putting me ahead of schedule.
There
are also custom levels as well as a level editor, neither of which
I've tried, and tributes such as Notch's demake, VVVV
That's
about it, really. I also read
American Psycho. I
hope it won't influence
my NaNoWriMo story.
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