KILLER WOLF'S PROFILE

I always use milk to make my hot chocolate, and I always add a dash of vanilla extract and cinnamon. I'm not entirely sure why I stared doing it, but it must have been a while ago since it is automatic now.

Listen to this, then go listen to a version of Mars Volta's Goliath, more the leads/solo work than anything else. You can actually mute one video and play the other and the music still seems to synch up pretty well, in both directions (except that Goliath has more vocals).

Also:



And:


Eclecticism abounds in my playlists.

Up to a point, most of my "programming" background came out of working with Qbasic when I was younger, so eventing in 2k and 2k3 felt like a natural progression of that. I could do line numbers (labels), subroutines (common events), inkey processing, and loops as needed.

I'm also not a big fan of game making via the à la carte method. Collect other people's scripts and repackage them into "your own" game. As I mentioned earlier today, I realize this is how things go in the big bad world of commercial game design,(Havok Physics, anyone?) but at the Indie level it still feels strange.

For me, I guess it comes down to expediency. I don't usually open a Maker up and try to figure out how to do things with it just for kicks. I open a maker up because I have some game idea I've been working on that I feel it is suited for. While I'm trying to express that idea, I don't want to have to keep stopping every couple of minutes to either go download a script, or spend the time to learn how to write it on my own.

I've reached the point where I automatically take 2k3's functions and limitations into consideration at the dev document phase and try to plan skills and scenarios according to the hard limits, as well as the soft limits I'm able to reliably circumvent.

Again, to paraphrase what I said in the Watchu workin' on topic: If I spent as much time working on my projects as I do trying to figure out how to work less on them, I'd be a lot further along. This almost certainly applies to improving my scripting capabilities and moving to VX at some point. For me, the main problem is that it is something I never think about when I'm not trying to work on a project, and something that I have no inclination to do while I AM working on a project.

I'm working on devising a way to automatically scale enemy encounters so that I don't have to make a billion redundant copies to allow for different player levels and enemy concentrations.

The game is going to use an on-the-fly grouping event for enemies. In 2k3, I can have a bunch of enemies hidden that have no effect on the battle until they are called in, so my grouping woes are pretty much a thing of the past.

At first, I thought I could just set all of the enemy stat values to 9999 and then reduce them to 1, and raise them to the proper values, based on the party's level and the challenge level I assign for any encounter. The problem is that it works just fine with hp and mp (if I put in events to make sure healing skills don't blow through the evented hp ceiling, of course), but I don't seem to have direct control over the rest of the stats in the same way.

Skills, I can work around with switches. Just load every possible tier of skills for the enemy type, and let the check level event turn on and off the ones I want it to use.

The stats are the sticking point. I could pretend they are all throw away data. I could control damage resistance through damage types, which would still let the player's debuff skills function properly, but this would mean I'd have to scale the enemy abilities themselves to reflect different power levels. Also, no enemy could attack physically, because their atk stat could be very low compared to the player's level, so that trashes any notions of having skills or items negate critical hits, since they would be useless. I'd also have to put a hard limit on everyone's speed, to make sure the enemy characters still got a chance against higher leveled parties.

Oh well, I'll figure something out. (And yeah, I know the easy answer... use a "real" maker as opposed to 2k3... but part of the fun for me is circumventing the rules/limitations)

EDIT - If I spent as much time actually working on games as I do on trying to work LESS on games, I'd probably be much further ahead.

author=Gourd_Clae
Edit: Gah! It IS impossible! Try to move your foot clockwise while simultaneously drawing a 6 in the air! You can't do it without making your foot go counter-clockwise or simply messing up...

Maybe it is due to a bunch of similar exercises I used to do as part of NLP pre-training, but it is actually pretty easy.

I guess if you wanted to cheat though, and not spend time divorcing different motor and cognitive functions, you could just draw the six backwards, starting with the hoop and ending with the leg? Or just try not looking at the hand. OR try doing it very slowly at first and picking the speed up. As soon as you can do it once, you can do it.

EDIT - Also, Happy New Year!