I'm moving to Wales in a week. That's the news! Thanks for reading!
13 words is a bit sparse, so let's try and add some more C o n t e n t to this. This month I've been: making my videos, and making my video game.
VIDEOS
My Three Kingdoms narrative series Honour Among Kings has got started now. Personally, I don't like it all that much since it's not especially fun to write. I've been writing it roughly in the style of the original book, but that doesn't fit all that well with the gameplay footage. To explain, in the game key narrative events just instantly happen, while irrelevant things like walking around takes up most of the time. So something like a peace negotiation, which would get half a chapter in the book, gets 5 seconds in the game. That means I've had to pick and choose which of the events to actually include in the story, and then I feel bad for putting long conversation scenes over the top of footage of essentially nothing happening. Means the story is more disconnected from the video than in my previous narratives, and that's the part I don't really like.
Previously I had ranted about my desire to have a particular theme to the story, that being the idea that the characters ultimately don't know what the problems with the state are, and are trying to solve them blindly. Liu Bei is an idealogue, and isn't especially clever, just like in the book. The issue is that since he's an idealogue, all the story can do is show him rejecting alternative views, which then makes it hard for the story to be about those views as I had planned. The fact it's all written at breakneck pace and thrown out in first draft form probably doesn't help either, but this is fanfiction bois, and as any sophisicated big brain will tell you: fanfiction is the antithesis of art.
Speaking of which, I recently wrote an actual fanfiction for my own Kenshi series. It's a Nuk x Izumi side story that takes place during Chapter 11, which just came out yesterday. Should probably release this thing today then. Hmm? Does humanity deserve it?! Yes... humanity must be punished!
Writing Kenshi is more fun in general, although getting footage is a bit of chore due to constantly getting the whole squad wiped out and having to save scum. In the real chapter 11, everyone was killed by Beak Things just after leaving Heft. In the real Chapter 12, the crew is killed twice by Iron Spiders, twice by Crab Raiders, and once by Reavers. Yet none of this will be in the videos of course, for I scum my way forwards until I find a way for things to maintain anime-style plot armour (and even armour on the plot itself, since game events can ruin the plot). I need to find a way to cheat and make my characters much higher level, basically.
In Chapter 13 I'll be building a base to live in, which proves to be extremely difficult, so the amount of save scumming that goes into that sequence of the story is unbelievable. During the coming week I will be reviewing the footage and trying to write something vaguely coherent from what I ended up with. If in doubt: just have Nuk and Izumi bickering in a tsundere style for twenty minutes.
Also in video news, my new abridged commentary in Oriental Empires starts tomorrow. Going to be short, as I've made 2 eps and that already covered the first quarter of the game. Next seris will probably be decided by a vote, which I'm thinking of putting out there at the end of this week, along with the news that since I'm moving and will be without internet and free time for a while, video releases will be disrupted for early august. But as mentioned in the last blog, in the new house I'll have my own special room for video production, which will make pretty much no difference to anything, other than me feeling more special. Maybe I should put a sign on the door and everything?
VIDEO GAME
I'm closing on on some kind of final version of the future hit game, Godless Tactics. Each new iteration of the code has fewer and fewer revisions planned, and testing is more and more smooth. Recently I've mostly been doing balancing changes, but I did find a decent number of major niche bugs too. There are always more of course, but right now you can complete the game reliably, I THINK. Still more gamemodes and balancing things to test, so I'll carry on. Plus, lots more art is coming, including a UI update, so it can't really move from alpha state to beta state until then.
This week I found that two of the passive upgrades literally didn't do ANYTHING, and I just never noticed. Just never wrote the lines of code to make them do something, but fully implemented the ability to buy them. That's quality deving right there. How many of the other buttons in the game don't do anything upon further inspection?! Find out, probably some time in 2020!
It's gonna be good, I give you my word as someone who often rants about things in video games but finds this one to be okay.
Let's rant about games now, in...
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WHAT I PLAYED THIS MONTH
I played Bayonetta, and found out that I am not very good at Bayonetta, at least according to the rating system of Bayonetta. I managed to get the 'Stone Award' on pretty much every level, the lowest possible rating. Somehow I still completed the game despite being regularly told by the game that I suck at it, but that's only because of the discovery of a couple of the combos.
Normally you can learn the combos at the start of the game, however on my PC the loading screen, where the combos are listed, lasts about 0.1 seconds. So it was button mashing all the way, discovering a few combos by accident. At some point I realised that if you hold the attack buttons down mid-combo, the subsequent attacks become WAY more powerful. Ended up slicing enemies with the sword up close, then holding the feet button to power up the foot-shotguns in melee range, which just makes enemies disappear. So that's pretty much the secret of the game, making things much easier towards the end. You might expect me to rant about this information not being provided in the game, but I'll give it the benefit of the doubt: maybe it shows up for a 3 frame loading screen somewhere.
Still, it's flashy, stylish and fun, and probably has replayability, but when I tried the first level on Hard mode I got completely blown apart and gave up.
Instead, I switched to a far easier game: Valkyria Chronicles 4. A gang of flawed anime characters defeat the Nazis and win WW2 which the power of teamwork. It's basically that, which makes it very unoriginal in the face of Valkryria Chronicles 1. There is even a sequence where the team from 1 meets the team from 4 and the story seemingly notes how they all just the same characters with different models.
That said, it has a few more mechanics than 1, so despite being basically the same thing with a tonne of reused assets, storylines, characters, settings, music - OKAY ITS LITERALLY A PARRALEL UNIVERSE VERSION OF VC1 - it's still better than it! And the two plots don't rely on each other, as far as I can tell, so might as well just play 4.
I can't be mean to Vakyria Chronicles, because the bases mechanic in Godless Tactics is stolen from it. I legitimately consider it to be a far superior game to something that tries to achieve the same thing mechincally: XCOM. If XCOM was made using VCs battle system, it would be the end of video games. Interception fire, line of sight, tactical depth, vehicles, off-map support, plot, waifus - all the things that don't work in XCOM are done just fine in VC, which is so strange since it takes itself way less seriously.
There's only one thing that annoys me: the 'squads' are actually platoons deployed as if they were companies, TECHNICALLY GUYS, and there is a missed opportunity for whoever your superior officer is meant to be to be a character. In fact in both 1 and 4 you don't have any officers above you, orders just come from 'command'. Probably could have made the plot in 4 different to 1 by having some conspiracy among the allied leaders or something. Perhaps it turns out they are also weird anime villains with long silver hair / cute anime bdsm girls, like the Nazi leaders? Who wrote this trash?!
Once I'm done with Godless Tactics, codename: Ice Emblem, I'll make Einherjar Tales, codename: Valkryia Kronikles.
AND THAT'S WHAT I PLAYED THIS MONTH
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Time to film some video game footage for my video game footage based videos. Wish me luck moving to the valleys of Wales! I'll make a news video at the end of the week to cover any expected video delays etc.
Stay strong out there memers.