SAM'S PROFILE

Back from this year's MCM Expo and just blogged up about my weekend. I can't be arsed to retype it in a way that works for those who don't know who certain people are etc so this is literally a copy paste. Sorry.

Oh man, right, I'm going to try and write this whilst it's still semi-fresh in my mind, but bear with me if there happen to be huge gaps in time or I forget to mention someone's awesome adventures.

Also, Tonyo, I'm stealing your format of going from Friday through to Monday, I apologise for that now. I'd also like to reitterate Tonyo's point that if you don't currently get to Expo on Friday and leave on the Monday - shame on you!

Friday
I'd booked me and the missus a nice and early train, so off me and Jo went with our bags to the station for 12:00 noon. I felt particularly guilty in the train station, as before we boarded our tickets were checked by Marc, who was supposed to be coming with us until his workplace changed his shifts. There is nothing more awkward than that I assure you, and I'm sorry Marc, we truly missed you over the weekend, Rachel too.

We got into London and navigated the tubes easily enough. On previous occassions, we had been in a much larger group with Jenny, Emma and Luna, but this time we'd arrived solo and I was in charge of getting us from A to B. After looking at the map (something men suppoedly can't do) I found a route that's much quicker and easier than the one we usually take when following Emma. No offence Emma.

First time staying in the Ibis too. I gotta say, check in was painless, the room was clean, the bed was comfy. I was quite happy with it. Of course, Friday night tradition is to head to Namco, so off we went.

Namco was fun. We got a lot of tickets, from which Jo now has a cat plushie (I wanted to get more tickets and try for the Sonic plushie, but noooooo), spent maybe a little too much, participated in Tonyo's air hockey tournament (and got obliterated), fun times.

Saturday
After very little sleep I got up with Jo, slipped into my Goku costume, and headed for the Sunrise meet. Someone must have neglected to tell me it was being held the other side of the ExCel, but I found it eventually. After a little bit of larking about and realising it was too cloudy to see the sun, I went back to bed, not regaining conciousness until 7 to queue.

I met up with Matt and Jenny in the queue, got a hallo from Dragon Ball Abridged's Masako, and started slowly shuffling forward when, out of nowhere, laura appeared in her Sora cosplay to say hi to Jo, who was in a Roxas cosplay. I had spoken to Laura on Facebook before and bought a Computones book from her but she didn't seem to recognise me, at any rate her and Jo started talking and formed a new friendship.

When we first entered I considered getting a ticket for the masquerade but I'd had issues with previous masquerades and felt that with the EuroCosplay qualifiers going on it would be packed and probably last longer than usual, besides which I was going to be participating in Sunday's masquerade so I passed.

I left Jo and Laura to it and disappeared to hunt down goodies before the halls got too cramped and flooded. I was victorious in claiming a Real Works Vegeta figure I'd been wanting for a while, as well as a HSCF Goku and Vegeta. I met up with the missus again and we decided to drop our goodie bags and purchases off at the hotel so we'd have our hands free.

I came back and realised that Expo had gotten more attendees than they had bargained for. The place was packed! It didn't help that the skys decided to open either, with the rain everyone ran inside. Sardines have more wiggle room, believe me!

I bumped into Sarah, a female Goku cosplayer, and her friend, a Vegeta cosplayer, and had a photo taken with them. They seemed quite nice and the entirety of Expo it felt to me that the usual hunderds of "Can I take your picture? Kthnxbai" had been replaced with "Can I take your photo please? How did you make that? Let's have a chat" which, whilst much less frequent, was really refreshing and I quite enjoyed actually talking to new people, so I'd just like to say thank you to everyone for the change of attitude.

Seeing as I'd already hunted down the souveneirs I'd wanted, and Jo was quite happy hanging out with Laura and the Kingdom Hearts group, I decided to go try some games out, hunt down Dragon Ball cosplayers and be merry.

I played the new Transformers game, which takes place on Cybertron, and I must say I was disappointed. Compared to the other Transformers games on 360, this one felt sluggish, and at times it seemed I was fighting the controller. The pacing was off, the combat was dull and I really didn't think much of it.

I got my photo taken at the usual Neo sponsored booth (still waiting for CPU to post those up, come to think of it), had a quick chat with Masako, played some Smah Bros and met a Fascha cosplayer. It was awesome to see someone doing a commonly overlooked character. She decided to join me on my hunt for Dragon Ball cosplayers, which turned up a pair of Androids, a Kuririn and Yamcha, a rather unresponsive Vegeta, and the best Freeza I have seen yet.

After me and Fascha parted ways I bumped into Sarah and her friend again, who seemed to be having trouble with a Tony Stark cosplayer. He wanted to take five photos of him getting nearer and nearer to Sarah's chest with the last two frames being Sarah punching him, from which to make an animation. I gotta say she didn't seem too comfortable with this, but went ahead anyway, warning she'd punch him for real if he actually grabbed her! Me and her friend were kinda waiting by the sideline to see if we'd hafta jump in but thankfully he turned out to be relatively harmless.

I also watched the Naruto voice actors give a hilarious panel, but I forget if that was Saturday or Sunday. Either way it was awesome to hear "If I met Sasuke in real life? I guess I'd pet him softly on the head and tell him it's all OK."

Honestly, I don't remember much else of Saturday. Me and Jo went for drinks at Novotel. We could hear the party next to us but it didn't seem like much of going on. Laura confirmed this when she turned up, went into the party and came out five minutes later with her boyfriend Terri saying it was crap. Also had a chat and a few jokes with a couple of northerners.

Emma, Jenny, Craig and Matt didn't wanna come out so we wound up at PTI with Tony (not Tonyo - Tony) fro a few drinks. Left my passport on the bar, but thankfully someone returned it to me. Thanks again for that =)

Sunday
Me and Jo thought we'd get bad places in the queue Sunday on account of not getting up very early, but we ended up right near the front. The place seemed dead (possibly because everyone was hung over from Saturday night?). Usual queue goings on, games of bogies people yelling "card games on motorcycles" "Buttscratcher" and playing bogies. There were also some people putting nanny McPhee stickers all over the floor, and whilst I hate Nanny McPhee, I don't hate the ExCel cleaning staff who hafta peel those off.

I went in, Jo got a ticket to watch me in the masquerade later and I went and signed in for said masquerade. Then went over to Cosplay Fever and got a photo in with them, hopefully I'll get into the next book in October, and spoke to some of the indie comic guys in the artist alley.

Having just finished art school, and being very interested in starting my own comic, talking to these guys was invaluable and true to form, these guys knew how to talk for England. Jo can talk to her horsey friends for hours, I can talk to comic and games lovers for hours.

Jo went off to see the Kingdom Hearts group again while I went and got judged for the masquerade - and the guys waiting in front of me to be judged, a Chris and Jill combo, were the ones who'd found my passport the previous night! Small world.

A big hand to the guys on the cosplay desk. They were running around getting us sweets and water and chairs, they were brilliant! Thank you and well done to you guys, you rock!

After judging I had about an hour to spare before the actual masquerade, so I went and saw Jo for a little bit before going to enter my first masquerade.

The queue was actually quite fun, as was backstage. Again, the cosplay desk were attending to everyone's needs and giving the best hospitality I have seen in a long time, and cosplayers always being friendly, were up for a chat and a laugh. Particularly Ronald McDonald and the Colonel of KFC fame, those guys were epic!

I was impressed with the masquerade this year. It ran a lot more smoothly than before. Cosplayers were allowed to come on one after the after, there was less 'banter' inbetween costumes, the seating had been rearranged to resemble a catwalk, so everyone wasn't looking at your costume straight on. Oh, there were also no badly fan dubbed skits, no yaoi kisses and only one dance, plus all the costumes were awesome! Huge improvement there.

Sunday night was a bit slower for me. Jo ran on outside with Laura to play with glowsticks, while I had a quick drink with Matt, Jenny, and Terri. I didn't have the energy to join in with the glowstick fun, so I had a quick chat with Dan in the lobby and called it a night.

Monday
There's not much to say about Monday, we were sad to leave and knew parts of the tubes and DLR would be shut, but bar a replacement bus and having to switch trains half way home, it really felt the same as Mondays always. Shame on those who stayed the extra night to avoid the supposed hassle of the bank Holiday Monday, there was none! =P

Jo's made a new friend in Laura and they've now set up a Facebook group for all UK Kingdom Hearts cosplayers, I had a fun time and met some new people. All in all a good weekend and I'd like to say thanks to everyone who made it brilliant!

So, it's been a while since I did anything with RPG Maker *cough* go download Fenrir *cough*, and now that my degree's pretty much finished I wouldn't mind making another game in RM2k3. Why 2k3? Because I know 2k3, I'm familiar with 2k3 and I can make 2k3 dance however I want it to, well, almost. Plus, using 2k3 keeps things niiice and casual for me.

I've got a couple of ideas floating around, a few ideas for simple systems. I'd love for you guys to pick them apart for me.

I've been debating an open world, versus say, a three act linear story. The linear story would not be void of side quests and exploration, but you would get subtle hints before completing the last main bit of story for Act 1 that you won't be able to go back and finish any of Act 1's side quests or even access some of Act 1's areas after Act 1's completion, if this makes sense.

I recently completed, and thoroughly enjoyed, Mass Effect 1 and 2, and while I think it would be too big a task to make large changes in the story based upon your decisions as can happen in Mass Effect, I do think it would be neat to play on the whole Paragon/ Renegade system. For the uninformed, it's an old and basic system where you choose how to reply to people and a statistic changes depending on your answers making you more of a dick or more of an angel. Mass Effect took it further but I like the basic concept and I think I could use it to change people's reactions to you and maybe force a dickhead player to approach a mission in a different way to an angel player. I think it would also be fun to put the lives of minor characters in your hands and have small reprucussions later based on your choices, but nothing huge or complicated.

May I apologise now if this sounds a little jumbled, I'm literally typing while I think.

Time period struck me. Classical RPGs set in the past are done and dusted, but it is incredibly easy to find resources for such titles, and I already did a game set in the future *couch* go download Fenrir *cough* so it would be nice to do a more traditonally styled RPG, and this includes random encounters.

For me, I like random encounters, so long as there isn't one every two steps. I believe that there are still people who love to hunt these creatures down and grind against them, or try and force that one rare drop item from a group. I did consider, for the less hardcore, an arena, where you can fight stronger monsters and earn EXP more quickly. Maybe you would have to pay or complete a side quest to open this arena.

For the dungeons, I would be looking towards Zelda for inspiration. Zelda has you dodging arrows, spinning flame wheels, using switches to change layouts of rooms, using certain items in certain areas... Smart but familiar puzzles that grow in difficulty. These are the kind of dungeons where, despite what I said earlier, I would turn random encounters off. It would just be you, and the puzzles and cavernous maze of the dungeon. If grinding were neccessary I would place a 'spawning pit' near the boss room that was known for giving birth to local monsters so players could grind without having to leave the dungeon and come back.

I think I need to really narrow my ideas down and write a design document. I have a plot. It is not finalised yet. I have the rough ideas, characters, locations and how they get from one place to another, but some of the details are missing, there are gaps in the storyline, a few characters need personalities tweaking and ultimately I need to decide whether to be open world or more linear Act based before I can start writing scripts or anything.

What do you guys think?

Hey guys, for fun I recently ran Platinum on a DS emulator with my monitor and tablet set up, had the top screen displaying on my PC monitor and the touch screen running through my tablet as a fun little experiment. Here's the results:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnOxcytCZyo

Well, seeing as the pen for my tablet has mysteriously vanished and shows no signs of turning up (I wouldn't be suprised if someone tried to use it as a normal pen and chucked it out thinking it didn't work), I'm looking to buy a new tablet.

I would love to get a Cintiq or something similar that has a display you can draw directly on to, or one of those laptops where the monitor acts as a giant tablet, but they're a little out of my price range.

My budget is between £50 and £250, my old tablet was quite small so I wouldn't mind upgrading to one that's about A4 size. I'm avoiding Trust and Genius tablets like the plague due to having issues with hardware from both companies before and the number of horror stories that circulate their products in general (I once had a Trust USB keyboard that seemingly thought it was a printer). I would like a Wacom again, but honestly, Wacoms are damned expensive and there are cheaper alternatives that are just as good.

Right now I'm looking at these two:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Aiptek-SlimTablet-600U-Premium-II/dp/B001IX3YUQ/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1268584190&sr=8-7
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Aiptek-14000U-Media-Tablet/dp/B000TGMI5A/ref=sr_1_16?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1268584289&sr=8-16

I was wondering if the latter has a display due to it's price and the fact it says it supports 4:3 and 16:9 aspect ratios. If anyone has more info on either of these tablets or has some good suggestions for other tablets I should look at, I'd really appreciate it.

So yeah, after reading some topics here and on other forums on how Sonic would work as an RPG I tried to see if I could make a more 'old school' Sonic system in 2k3. Everything worked fine until I added the spin dashing. Now the spin dashing works perfectly but none of the other keys respond so I can't sprint or jump anymore.

I've tried having the input keys in seperate variables - that didn't work, I tried doing the spin dash differently and, while everything worked, Sonic could only spin dash for one tile at a time.

Here's the common events, maybe some of you guys have some tips? I'm trying to prove this can be done.