Steven D Podcast Episode 1: Oh… Shiiiiit!

This is the first episode of the Steven D Podcast!

It features myself, and guest host Baylee Alger, taking the game I created known as Oh Shit, and putting it through the grinder! I start out playing a regular round of the game, but end up messing up the mechanics so badly, that it turns into something that not even the best regular Oh Shit players would be able to play!

You won’t want to miss this episode. It’s filled with fun, jokes, and best of all, interaction with listeners just like you! If you missed out on this live stream, don’t worry! You can still write in through the form on the podcast page, mention me on twitter, or of course catch the next stream! Also don’t forget to subscribe!

Rewrites and an Audio Demo

Hey guys,
Steve here.

There I go again, with the whole not blogging for over a month thing. The problem is, I have been wanting to blog for at least the last week and a half… but then again it might be better that I waited this long to because some important things have happened recently that I would prefer to have gone in this post.

As I’m sure you could tell by the steady decline of enthusiasm I displayed towards S Quad Racing, and the increasing lack of work being done on it, I was definitely becoming unhappy with it. Since I’d started working on it so early, I didn’t know much about the language I started coding it in, causing me to do numerous things the wrong way, something I wouldn’t find out until the game really started taking off. By November, when I was trying to really ramp up the features, I realized that my code was pretty much just patched together, close-ended, buggy, and virtually unusable.

So, the last week of Christmas break, I finally decided to rewrite the entire game. There were still parts I copied from the old version, such as ambiance, playlist, checkpoint, and obstacle support, but everything else was completely scrapped.

After just a week of coding, I had a fully functional game. And when I gave it to my testing team, the bugs they found were only minor, easy to fix ones that usually resulted from forgotten or wrongly written lines of code. I’ve spent the last week fixing those, leaving only some minor bugs I just found out today. But thankfully, those that are occurring now are not the irreparable ones found in the old version, as I am more able to fix them now that I have a workable code base.

In other news, S Quad Racing is not the only project receiving a rewrite. Matt the Terrorist’s engine is receiving a rewrite as well, going from a 2d side scrolling game to 3d. The code base for this was not mangled like the old S Quad Racing, however it didn’t really have much in the way of flexibility, I.E. Implementing 3d support into it would have been next to impossible due to the y coordinate being used for up and down movement among other things.

Plus, since this game is not completely user friendly due to the keyboard layout, –we have keys for movement for forward, backward, left, right, up, and down, there are two keys (one for the left arm and one for the right), plus whatever keys will need to be added in future, I thought to add a keyboard configuration option. The way the keys will work in this new version are w a s and d for directional movement, r and f for up and down, (climbing ladders and controlling your jet pack), left and right shift being held down for the respective arms, enter to throw items, i to deposit them into inventory, and space to place. However, due to the complaints that will likely come about due to this rather odd key configuration, I’m working on a way for all aforementioned keys to be customized.

Aside from that, I’m really interested to see how three dimensional building will turn out in an audio only game. I don’t suspect it will be different from other audio games in terms of navigation, but we’ll just have to see, since the player will actually be constructing 3d structures without being able to feel or have them described to them.

That concludes tonight’s post, mostly anyway. Since I promised audio demos, I’ll provide this one for S Quad Racing since the Matt the Terrorist engine test is not in much of a playable state at the moment. Enjoy.

Play

Thanks for reading,
type you later,
Steve.

a pleasant week

Hey guys,
Steve here.
I know I know. I’m definitely not the creative sort when it comes to blog post titles… but to my defense, that’s really what most of them have been about–weeks of my life, right? Anyhow, it is true, I’ve had quite a pleasant week. First of all, I got away with yet another semi-stress free week of school, with one big exception–I found out that I made a 35 on my most recent math checkpoint, so as you can probably infer I wasn’t really happy about that. Thankfully, however, I went to tutoring and got the problem solved, and as progress reports are coming out very soon, I’m hoping that test grade won’t cause me to fail. Another not so good thing that happened is that I was feeling pretty bad for a few days last week, a cold or something, but I am, and have been, feeling better since Sunday.
Moving on to more pleasant things, I’m really enjoying reading about Ender Wiggin; it’s fascinating. It is the most Sci-Fi book series I’ve ever read. For one thing, the first and second books were set 3000 years apart, and Ender Wiggin, the main character, is still around. It is something to do with relativity or something; he travels by star ship to different worlds, and he’s able to travel at the speed of light, so I guess time passes differently for him. I’m not really sure how such a thing is possible, or how science could possibly support that theory, but it’s an interesting concept, all the more reason I’ve come to like these books so much. While 22 years can pass for us, it can only feel like a week or so for Ender while he’s traveling at the speed of light.
Aside from books and school and the like, I’ve done more gaming, though not very much of it. Since this week’s podcast episode is over Shades of Doom, I had to download and play it, and of course it’s another good one. This game is pretty old, but some one suggested it for me, so I went ahead and demonstrated it. Apparently, for those of you who are familiar with such things, Shades of Doom is the first Audio FPS, contrary to my thought that it was Audioquake, a game I really don’t know about.
As for letting you hear me play Minuet, the pretty easy first song I’ve ever learned on piano, I haven’t forgotten. that is to be on this week’s podcast.
OK. I’ll quit stalling and just admit it. I haven’t yet done the episode. Just as I was getting ready to do it last night, I had to do a chore, then take some medicine that would help me sleep better, since I’m still a bit congested, so I couldn’t really do the podcast. I know, that’s not really a valid excuse since I could’ve done it earlier, but still. That’s what prevented me from doing at the usual time I record, around 9 when the house is quieter and I’m less likely to have disruptions.
Anyway, to end this post, I found out about Windows 10, the new release Microsoft will be coming out with. I’ve never in my time of using computers thought that I’d hear Microsoft say that they would be making a new web browser, rather than the old internet explorer we’re all so accustomed to. IE will still be shipped with Windows, though. Also I heard they’ll be implementing some sort of holographic technology? Man, sometimes, I wish I could see. Anyways, the link to the article I read is:
http://money.cnn.com/2015/01/21/technology/windows-10/index.html
Well, I hope you enjoyed this post. Please be on the look out for the musically doomed podcast episode…
Thanks for reading,
type you later,
Steve.

I'm back, at long last

Hey guys,
Steve here.
At long last, I have returned from my extended break from this blog, and it is definitely good to be back. Though I’m sure you agree with the preceding statement, You are undoubtedly wondering why I was gone for so long.
This time, the main reason I was gone for such an extensive amount of time wasn’t “lack of motivation,” which seams to be the primary excuse most bloggers use for inconsistent writing. Instead, the primary factor in this most recent absence was my highly addictive gaming habits. Just recently, in fact it was around the time of my last post, I got really addicted to Quentin C’s game room, that social platform featuring a wide variety of card and board games that I demonstrated in an episode of my podcast. Since Quentin C’s game room has so many games, as soon as I would lose interest in one game, another would take it’s place. That being said, I had no inclination to sit down and write a post, as it would’ve given me less time to play games. On the bright side, however, I posted the Road to Rage podcast, and it turned out to be quite awesome, as Danny and I played while talking over Skype resulting in a near half hour of constant joking, laughter, and battle; 3 things that normally don’t go together.
aside from that, though I still find Quentin C’s playroom quite addictive, I’ve remembered the truth–my blog is much more important than my games.
Besides spending a lot of time on Quentin C’s game room, my life over the past month has been dotted with the occasional significant event. First of all, there was sports extravaganza, which took place the week after my last post. Since I have attended this event every year since I had this blog, I will not go into an in-depth explanation. But to summarize it, for those who don’t know, there was a goal ball tournament on Friday night, then on Saturday there were track and field events all day such as races and other competitions.
Besides Sports Extravaganza, my church also had its annual fall festival last week. Not much to say about that–it was quite fun, and I spent the day with someone significant to me. On a related note, I also got to spend this past Sunday with the previously mentioned individual.
As life would have it, unfortunately not every day was as good as those I just talked about. There was still that struggle called school, but on the bright side today was an early release day. There was also another early release day last month, after my last blog post, and I must say that was a lot funner than today. While there were still only 4 hours of school today like the last time, and there wasn’t too much work to do in my classes, it was still unlike last month when I had the extremely rare luxury of sitting in one classroom all day long, having absolutely no work to do, and spending the whole time reading and playing cards.
On a completely unrelated note, the weather the past couple days has been unseasonably cold, thanks to an arctic blast that is affecting a lot of the United States. Fortunately, though the high temperatures here in Texas are not in the single digits, as they were in places such as Denver, and our lo temperatures aren’t -21 degrees below 0 as they were in places such as Casper, Wyoming, our high temperatures didn’t even hit 40, and the lo this morning was in the 20s.
In addition, there is also a, slight, chance of snow Sunday night. Since that is far away, it’s impossible to determine if we will get any accumulating snowfall yet. However, I will closely monitor that situation, however since it is so early in the season I’m not very optimistic.
Well, I guess this wraps up tonight’s post. Thank you for reading, and as I previously said, I am very glad to be back.
Thanks for reading,
type you later,
Steve.
PS. My cat turned 10 today. I cannot believe he is already that old!

games and updates

Hey guys,
Steve here.
As most of you guys probably know, the game Swamp, featured in several podcast episodes, went paid a few months ago. The program itself is still free, but to get on multi-player, you need to purchase a Kaldobsky (Kaldobsky is the last name of Swamp’s creator) gamer account. The reason for this was due to the numerous hackers who tried to destroy the server… and Jeremy Kaldobsky figured that if people had to pay $24 per year for a gamer account, it might deter them.
Well last weekend, I finally got around to buying a gamer account, and resumed playing. I was a level 44 when I bought it, and am now level 46. One of my favorite things in the new version is that on all sporting rifles (Marlin, Remington, and Winchester), the reputation and experience you earn per kill has been doubled. Due to this change, I now make sure that every time I die, (which is a lot because I tend to take stupid risks), I purchase a Winchester before doing anything else.
Also, Kaldobsky made it to where you have to go to different maps to buy some of the basic armor. So in order to get a leather jacket, (it provides low protection but doesn’t slow me down like some of the alternatives), combat boots (because they provide medium protection), and a football helmet which can provide a random amount of protection, I have to go to map 3, where there are dire zombies which are very dangerous and hard to kill with the weapons I can afford. In addition, to get there, I must cross a map which is swarming with hoards of zombies.
Because of this, when I level up next time, I will spend 40 skill points on speed (40 is the maximum number of points you can have in that skill), and the remaining 6 on sneak which quiets your footsteps so it’s harder for zombies to hear you. Well, I guess I have a lot of playing to do, because I still need around 8000 more experience points until I can level up. I guess that beats the 11400 I needed when I first reached level 46.
In other news, I’m officially out of middle school, something I’m actually quite happy about. As for summer plans, I am going to the Texas School for the Blind in 2 weeks for a 2 week long writers workshop class, and since I like to write, I’m looking forward to it. The week after, I think I’m going to Texas Lions camp, a camp I’ve attended for the passed 2 years.
Later on in the summer, in August I believe, I think we’re going to Maine, but don’t know exactly what day we’re going.
As for what I’ve already done this Summer, not much. Just relaxing, playing computer games, and forgetting about school.
thanks for reading,
type you later,
Steve.