KYLEBSTIFF'S PROFILE

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Kyle B. Stiff was influenced by the 80s. The bright glow of simple, iconic video games, the inorganic, DMT-flavored vibe of electronic music, a glowing futureworld always on the brink of violent collapse, and movies and cartoons that were over the top and unashamedly brutal.

He came of age during the demented "Satanic Panic," when being a creative nerd who liked Dungeons and Dragons and heavy metal music could get you thrown into a do-gooder's torture chamber. He came through that ridiculous era leery of "squares" - people unconsciously driven to turn the world into an efficient, gray, lifeless, joyless control-grid. To Kyle B. Stiff, the world is a wild, beautiful, terrifying place beyond anyone's control.

He is busy writing the epic Demonworld series, a post-apocalyptic hero's journey, and Heavy Metal Thunder, a gamebook series at the forefront of branching narrative stories.

He can be found here and here and here:

primeentertainer@gmail.com
www.kylebstiff.wordpress.com
@KyleBStiff

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Every project needs a WRITER. Am I the one for your project?

04/03/2016 01:37 PM

Every game developer knows you need a real artist for your visuals, a real musician for your music, and real coders for coding, but when it comes to writing, well... anyone can wing it, right? Isn't writing just taking elements from other stories, mashing them together, then looking for misspellings before you close up shop?

Of course it isn't!

The point is, I'm a writer, and I'd love to work on someone's project. I'll work for free as long as the project doesn't take over my life. Small projects, big projects - it doesn't matter to me, as long as the team is devoted to bringing the project to completion.

As for my resume, you can see some of my work (with descriptions and reviews) on my Amazon author page, and I've got a lot of strange stuff at my blog. I have two gamebooks available for download on iTunes and the Google app store. For a better idea about my involvement with RPG Maker, I have a short demo for a game called HELL available for download here. (It's not available for download at RPGMaker dot net because they said my maps were crap, which is probably true.)

Thanks for listening. Let's get to work!

[RMVX ACE] How to make NPCs (events) stand still during events?

08/02/2015 06:55 PM

I've got a good amount of experience with RM2K3, but my mind was blown recently to find a big difference between RM VX Ace and my old stand-by! So I have monsters wandering around, and when they touch the player, it initiates combat. I'm not a big fan of random encounters. But when the player initiates more complicated events, like large groups of people interacting or whatever, my monster-events are still wandering up to the player and desperately trying to touch him! Fortunately combat isn't initiated in the middle of whatever drama is going on, however, it's still really distracting to have monsters gyrating and panting all over the player. Just imagine Cloud confronting Sephiroth inside that lab or whatever it was, and the whole time there's a bunch of slimes and chocobos frantically dry-humping Cloud's leg. Total distraction!

So, how do I make everything outside of a particular event just freeze and chill out for a minute? It's weird because that was the default in 2K3.

[RMVX ACE] Slowing down battles!

07/31/2015 02:12 PM

Here's the short version: I want to slow down battles in my game.

Longer version: I don't want to make it feel like everyone is slogging through peanut butter - maybe just some pauses would be nice. I feel like the speed of combat in VX Ace goes way too fast, almost like the player is expected to be bored so they need to be quickly ushered through combat before they move on to another game. I like for things to have a slower, more "tactical" feel, so the player has more opportunities to pick up on the little nuances of combat. Especially early on when they don't know much about the different patterns and strengths of various enemies.

So, this is scripting stuff... way out of my league. I've got several of Yanfly's amazing scripts, including two of his combat scripts, but I looked through them and I didn't see anything that was about "speed" or pacing in general. Otherwise I would have just tweaked a few numbers to see what would happen.

Anybody out there deal with this issue? Better yet, anybody know of a script that handles the speed of combat?

[RMVX ACE] Characters/Events are still moving even when text displays!

07/21/2015 10:28 PM

Got a very strange one here! So usually when people want to have things occurring while text displays, they have to do a bunch of wild scripting and event shenanigans. As for me, my VX Ace seems to default to letting events/characters wander around while text is displayed! Have I done something weird? I thought that maybe I had some crazy scripts going on in the background, but I only have a couple of very tame Yanfly scripts (one for parallax maps and one that adds extra options the Ace Message System v1.05).

You all ever seen anything like this?

[RMVX ACE] How do I make random numbers truly random?

07/21/2015 10:43 AM

Hey all, I'm sure this is a basic question, but I couldn't find where it had already been answered in the forums. I need to be able to generate random numbers in RPG Maker VX Ace, and I need them to be different every time.

For example, you encounter an event and it gives you a random monster encounter, or item, or powerup, based on a random number between one and ten. But computers are notoriously bad at not generating the same "random" number every time. How can I make it so that on one playthrough the game generates a 3, then a 7, then a 4, rather than a 5 every single time?

Thanks for any help!

Would like some help calling up certain portraits in RMVX ACE!

07/14/2015 11:25 AM

Hey everyone, thanks in advance for any help given!

Here's my problem. I have conversations with standard character portraits, but I would like it if there was a way to tell the game something like, "At this point, please place HERO 5's portrait in the conversation... now place ENEMY 3... now place HERO 5 again..."

That way, if I change which portraits go with which character later on (which I most likely will), I won't have to go through every line of code in order to do so. I hope there's a way to do this without scripting, as I'm more of an artsy guy than a code monkey.

Play magazine interviews Luke Wacholtz of "The Way"

05/18/2009 12:21 PM

Hey everyone! I just interviewed the man behind "The Way"... Luke Wacholtz, aka Lun Calsari! I tried to shed some light on this badass habit of rpg making.

You can check out the interview at www.playmagazine.com

or jump straight to the interview at...

http://www.playmagazine.com/index.php?fuseaction=SiteMain.Content&contentid=1708&page=1

Hope you guys enjoy!

- Kyle B. Stiff