Entry #6

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.

source

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'.”

My first excuse for this entry: NaNoWriMo

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.

I like Dark Souls. Here are pictures.

I was going to write about what I've been up to recently, and I probably will eventually do so, but it's going to be difficult to compose something about it that's interesting or at least readable, so I've decided instead to talk about Dark Souls, which recently came out on PC, and post screenshots.

Warning: spoilers and spiders ahead.

This is my main character, the ultra-stylish Varine, looking all shiny in her silver knight armour. She started off as a backstab-happy thief, but on acquiring a pair of rings that lessen the weight of her armour and thus allow her to sprint and roll as if she was in civvies, she began to grow into a medium-armour curved-sword fighter - dagger and curved swords both scale in damage with the dexterity stat. It is important to note for those who haven't played the game that you play as an undead character. Beneath all her armour, Varine is essentially a zombie.

Here we see a rare glimpse of her “human” form. In this form, other players can invade your world, where they'll try to hunt you down. After a few incidents in which invaders did toilet in her hair while she was fighting other, larger enemies, I've made a point of keeping Varine corpsified for most of the time.

Here she is offering humanity to the Fair Lady. In Dark Souls, one may make covenants with gods or other powerful entities, and offer them items in exchange for unique rewards. Varine's covenant is with the pale, blind half-spider known as the Fair Lady, who has been left crippled after having saved her servants from disease by drinking the “blightpus” that caused the affliction. You can give her humanity, a sort of secondary currency and also a temporary character stat, and her health will gradually improve. She'll also teach you some extremely destructive fire spells.

Here's Varine posing next to some bump mapping...

...and here we see her about to find out what a “lawsuit” is.

Firing an inexplicably luminous (or brightly-painted) arrow. lol if only I could be so grossly incandescent etc

This is one of the few remaining screenshots where Varine is well lit and not covered in motion blur effects. The pose makes her look like a Games Workshop figurine. In this one, you can see that she is barefoot. In Dark Souls, boots and greaves and the like are included in the leg armour, but this skirt doesn't come with any. It looks a bit inconsistent, but that's what I get for combining plate armour with mage attire.

So, as you might have noticed, I like Dark Souls a lot. I do think, though, that the music could have been better, especially as it was composed by Motoi Sakuraba, who did music for the Golden Sun games as well as many other JRPGs. I associate him with tracks that have actual melodies, rather than the film score-like music of Dark Souls, which sounds impressive but ultimately forgettable (with a few exceptions). I'd have been happy if the tracks were like this, which sounds all grand and royal and suitably hectic, but has a memorable tune.

That's all for now.