Stuff Under the Header

8/18/2012

Crafty Creations

Edit: (August 22,2012) Today is the day of my birth! Well not today, but this day some x number of years ago!

Edit: (August 19,2012) This hasn't happened in awhile. I will be out of town from August 22-25.

Remember a few posts back when I mentioned that my brother's wife had a thing and it would be mentioned later? Today is that day!

Heather crafts fun and nifty original plush toys, cross-stitch patterns of recognizable faces, as well as original acrylic paintings. Upon viewing her work, I'm sure you'll quickly notice she's got quite the creative side and likes to stay busy. She does all the work you'll see on her page by hand. I really can't do her work justice by simply talking about it, so I'll let her work speak for itself.

Her blog for her creations is here. geekygamergirl
Which has links to everything else she has that is connected to this, including her etsy page and facebook page for her work.
Though I'll list those here as well.
Heather's Etsy Page
Facebook Page

The reason she wanted me to wait is she just launched her kickstarter, with the goal of helping her produce her work at a better rate as well as gather up more materials quicker. If you'd like, help her out, and if not, I definitely recommend at least checking out her etsy page, which showcases her fun plush toys. They're all at a reasonable price, and if you see something you like, claim it for yourself! Those cute monsters are limited. :3

The main point of this isn't to sell you guys anything, but to help spread the word about her creations. If you've got friends who like these kinds of things, let them know about it.

On a side note, I know some of you will be crafty enough to find me on facebook through her page. Please do not send me a friend request as I will not accept it. I don't mean anything negative by it, but my facebook is used for keeping tabs on friends, and primarily keeping up with the Austin IGDA and Indies groups. While the later is game related, I prefer to keep DT seperate (for the most part) from anything having to do with 'professional' work as well as my personal life. Its gone beyond being an experiment at this point, but I would still like to keep my hobby work seperate from everything else.

DT2 Feedback
You guys brought up some interesting points below. To address a few, bogs are totally deserts... right? One is dry and the other is... so moving on to the next subject. (Maybe I'll do some pixel work to change that as well as the bog line.)

ano0maly said it felt like 'VR Missions' which was really the idea. Just a collection of small challenges with a boss fight here and there, with some dialogue to build up to the 3rd game. Which I definitely understand why that's a concern after the first game. I really have no idea how to justify that other than they're different games.

Shade brought up saving the player's time and score (or at least time) when you reach a checkpoint, so that if you lose, you don't have to retry the entire level. That's the idea of those challenges, however, I like the idea of changing it in favor of his suggestion and I don't like it at the same time. Even with using his suggestion, the player would still have to pull off the feat itself. The latter half of the game would definitely lose a lot of its frustration value when trying to achieve these goals, which I'm in favor of. If this change is made, there will be some rules. If the player loses and chooses 'Retry' when on the second map, the Perfect bonus is completely negated. Killing Sprees would be changed to carry over to a level's second map, (I'm not sure if anyone noticed it reset on map entry.) so of course, upon losing, this would be reset. This makes the target times and scores easier to reach, but when trying to play for the highest score, it would still require the player to perfect the entire level.

Some connections to the game's content would also be made, and I know where and how it could be effective. (Plus some dialogue fixes.) As for adding in more levels. If that happened, it would be a world placed in between worlds 1 and 2, so difficulty would be set in there. As for a boss encounter, I have a fun idea for that. This world would have 2 levels and a boss. So worlds would have 3 -> 2 -> 3 -> 2 level counts.

Adding levels in the middle of the game would cause the scoring arrays to be all out of whack. If such a change happened, previous saves would not be compatible. In fact, to keep people from loading up completely broken save files, I'd have DT2 create and search for a new file. For now though, DT3 is still the focus.

7 comments:

ano0maly said...

Are you going to make any major updates by about next week? He may start his next LP (DT2) by then, but I can tell him to postpone it if you need more time.

ZephyrBurst said...

No, I'm going to leave DT2 alone. And adding in all that content mentioned below would take a few weeks.

Anonymous said...

Happy belated birthday! Just think, X years of making people punch their computers in blinding rage. :P

ano0maly said...

Well, I'm mentioning this because raocow prefers to play the finished version of a game. So if there's going to be new content, the LP could be postponed since he's not in a rush to play it.

Also, happy birthday!

ZephyrBurst said...

That's a good point, and while I was gone, I had thought about the new content.

In the next 2 months, I may add these new levels and such. So... I'll send him a message on his forum to postpone that LP. I noticed he hasn't started it yet due to his QA series.

ano0maly said...

Ok. I mean no pressure on you either way, just wondering if that's what you really prefer. Just don't feel like you need to rush the update.

Also I just finished whatever that was available on the DT3 demo. I'll post the feedback on it soon.

ZephyrBurst said...

There won't be any rush, but I'll probably start the DT2 update after the next part of DT3 is finished for the testers.

There really isn't that much content to add to DT2. I feel like most of the work will be fixing up the scoring for the new levels being inserted. The system wasn't set up for adding levels in the middle of the game. Since I had it all planned out before starting, I didn't set up the code to take in new stuff.

Other than that, it's just 2 levels, (4 maps) a boss fight, and a bit more story content. All of which I've drawn out. The issue I was having when I posted last week was the amount of content felt like a lot more than it really was.