Steven D Podcast Episode 4: …Kick your ass!

This is a special episode of the Steven D Podcast.

Sam, Carter, Alec, and I are all hanging out at Sam’s house for the week. In this episode, all 4 of us take turns playing a few small competition games, to see who can get the highest score. Among those are The Great Toy Robbery and Super Egg Hunt from L-Works, and one of the games from Sam’s not yet released Constant Motion project demonstrated in Episode 3.

As usual, the four of us have a great time, and you won’t want to miss this!

Unearth, my first attempt at a larger scale short story

Hey guys,

Steve here.

This semester, I joined a creative writing class. My first assignment was to write a story about anything of my choosing, as long as it was at least 1000 words and had 3 or more characters. The following is my result. It’s just over 3600 words. I apologize for coming back after all this time with such a long post. Anyway, enjoy; and feel free to leave feedback.

Unearth

Early on the morning of reentry, the service droid assigned to maintenance of the habitation decks on board the Curious Beast stood in the sleeping quarters of the meager scouting party assigned to the ship. The droid stood no more than 4 feet tall, but despite his short stature, his features were made with intricate design – from the slight dimple on the right side of his face, to the slightly pointed nose, currently scrunched in exasperation.

The ball-shaped lenses that served for his eyes rested in their unnaturally rounded sockets above his high cheek bones, currently illuminated with a red glow, to perpetuate his glare. His immaculately groomed eyebrows were raised above them to complete the look. His ears were abnormally large, jutting out from the sides of his head like mini radar dishes; a testament to the fact that even robot design artists were still just human.

Read the full story

A Busy Couple of Weeks

Hey guys,
Steve here.
Unfortunately, I did not complete my 1 week challenge to make a game, though I still believe it is within my abilities to do so. It was more so the timing I chose, which turned out to be pretty bad, something that the post title clearly suggests.
There is a lot that has happened in the last 2 weeks. I’ll go ahead and rewind back to week 1, which was the week following my last post, and when I was originally supposed to have completed the game creation challenge. I actually managed to squeeze in 3 or 4 days of work on the game that week, though I was majorly hindered by the need to purchase sound affects from a source I’d never used, and thus didn’t trust yet. Furthermore, this mistrust was enhanced when my friend spent $85 on their sound affects, and didn’t receive his sounds for several days. As a result, I didn’t get the necessary sounds until Thursday of that week, so I decided to give myself an extra few days to work on it, and thus decided to delay the blog post a few days as well.
Well guess what? After getting a few more consecutive days of work done on the game challenge, I found out I had a summer reading assignment to complete for school, and that my family vacation to Maine would indeed be happening, — on Friday! of that week. And while I only considered the former to be a bad thing, both meant that coding a game would be quite hard, if not impossible for a little bit.
That said, vacation was great. There’s not too much to say about it, except for that it was relaxing, I didn’t have to put up with 110 degree Texas heat, and I did not work on my summer reading assignment or coding games or anything that required the use of my intelligence. But even though I got home on Wednesday of last week, I had a camping trip with my church youth group in Oklahoma on Friday and Saturday, then spent all of Sunday at church.
Today has been a day of rest for me. I didn’t really do anything productive, as I’ve basically been non stop the past several days. But for those wondering about the status of the game challenge, I’ve decided not to finish it, because honestly my timing was bad, it was meant to be only a week thing, and once I get back to coding I really need to start porting my main projects over to Python. That will have to wait a bit though, so that I can get this school reading assignment done before it’s too late. And believe me, I want to code games this week, but I’ve already had 2 dreams that involved me walking in on the first day of school and realizing that I didn’t complete the summer reading assignment because it totally slipped my mind, and that I’d be starting off the school year by failing English. I’d much rather leave that in my dreams.
Still, in the free time I did have during that time, I managed to create a little recording, that I would like to share with followers of this blog. I hardly ever post audio on the blog itself, so you know this is going to be good.
I had one of the text-to-speech voices from my computer commentate a recording I made of myself playing Red Spot, an audio first person shooter. This voice is named Microsoft Sam, and has been used to create funny skits and recordings all over YouTube. Anyway, though I didn’t think it would, this recording received quite a bit of approval from those I showed it to. It’s about 10 minutes long, and is bound to make you chuckle at some point.

In case the comments seemed untimely or out of place at certain points, this was basically my process for creating this recording, literally:
1. I recorded a segment of myself playing and owning on Red Spot.
2. I played it back, paying attention to key events in the game.
3. Once I came upon a turning point, major event, or just felt like Sam should say something, I paused the playback, recorded a piece of Sam’s speech, and inserted it into the recording. This was kind of hard because I had to focus on timing.
4. I listened to it, made sure there were no errors, and saved it.
I should note that none of Sam’s speech was scripted. These were all responses I thought appropriate to the occasion.
Thanks for reading,
type you later,
Steve.
P.S. that file received quite a bit of positive reaction, and I hope to create more. But like Sam’s speech in that recording, the decision will likely be made two seconds before its execution, so don’t count on counting on or not counting on it.

A Lot of Coding and A Lost Friend

Hey guys,
Steve here.
Tonight, I bring to you all some very sad news. Unfortunately, me and Nevaeh are not, friends. I tried to talk to her again the other day, but instead of replying, all she did was look at Danny’s I Pad, which he was using to Skype with me. Oh well, so be it. For all she knows, my name is Meow, I’m from the great state of Meow, I’m meow years old, and my ultimate goal in life is to meow. You can’t really blame her for never wanting to talk to me again, because judging by that conversation I’m quite a big loser. (LOL)
On the contrary, I actually have quite a bit to talk about, all of that being productive, well not really if my ultimate goal in life is actually to meow. But as it turns out, school is going along well this year, especially my Digital Interactive Media class, which is surprising since I was really scared at the beginning of the school year when I found out what the class actually was. I’m not talking about Business Information Management, the class I’m referring to is a massively visual class, where it’s barely the fourth week of school and Adobe Photo Shop is being used already. Fortunately, the teacher is allowing me to use that time to work on S Quad Racing, and setting deadlines for things, a plus since I now have another person motivating me to get things done. Anyway, he asked that I finish the regular racing mode, and I’ll be pretty well darned if I don’t. Maybe opponents won’t be perfectly matched with players, but he asked me to complete the racing mode, and he’s the only person pushing me to go forward, and I’m not letting him down. I have a lot of people who are proud, but he’s the first that is pressing me to get things done in a certain amount of time, and that’s what I’ll have to deal with in the professional workforce. And when telling him about the game, he especially got pumped about the Aggressive mode, and I will provide that to him by the time I leave his class in 8 months if it means halting progress on all the other aspects of the game until it’s complete.
Aside from that, the day after my last post, I finally broke down and employed a beta team for S Quad Racing, due to frustration at having to find and fix bugs on my own, bugs I thought were fixed already. I felt bad for them for having to test such a primitive product with so many bugs, but thanks to them I’ve been doing all the coding and fixing, and letting them test for the bugs for me to fix. This has definitely been a great help to me, because it lifts one of the most annoying jobs of being a developer off my shoulders, and results in me not having to sweep over sections of the game I thought I’d already tested through and through.
For one thing, today I solved all the crashing issues known to S Quad Racing, and also made it impossible for anyone working on a track to lose their work due to closing the application or it crashing. When I say I solved them all, I don’t literally mean I came up with a magic formula that made everything work 100% as I envisioned, however, rather than crashing, the program will simply log the error, notify the player, and save their progress. So, while I’m off coding a new feature, or doing something else entirely, the program will be logging vital errors, allowing me to pop over to that section of the code and fix what needs fixing, though my testers will still need to report bugs that don’t halt program execution to me.
Another plus side to this, is that now I’ll definitely be able to record the audio demo, without having to worry about the program hanging on me like it did in my last attempts. So, and I say this with the finality of a slamming solid stone door, there will be an audio demo by Saturday!
On a final note, I once again decided to revisit BGT, and am surprisingly grasping the subject matter fast, and more completely than ever. My main reason for doing so is a complex game idea I have, one that I’ll save for another post. For now, though, I am signing off, and will more than likely going to bed here shortly.
Thanks for reading,
type you later,
Steve.

Back To School

Hey Guys,
Steve here.
Well I found out something very interesting yesterday! Apparently, it’s actually possible to carry out a Skype conversation with a… cat!
I was in a Skype call with Danny, trying to record an episode of my Podcast. However, Danny had to take a break in the middle to eat dinner. While he was gone, his cat started meowing for no apparent reason, so I meowed back at her to see if she’d answer. Guess what? She did! And since I still had the recording configuration used for my podcast set up, I was able to record a little ten second clip of it.

Maybe, just maybe, she was meowing for a totally different reason, but I’m humorous. So I say she was chatting with me. And it’s not like she can deny that… or can she?
Anyways, besides chatting with cats, life has been pretty good over the last month, even though school started back up last week. Most of my classes this year aren’t bad, well not really, although some of them are a real pain to get to, which is why I got lost twice so far.
Besides getting lost, I’m already getting homework. In fact, that started the second freaking day I attended geometry! However, the teacher seems nice and helpful, so I don’t think there will be any trouble there.
In addition to the homework, I’ve been having some technological issues in a few of my classes, and am afraid I’ll have to leave one of them for that reason. I don’t know what it is with Microsoft Office products, but they just keep going down hill in terms of accessibility. Worse still, they are practically a necessity in college and the work force these days, so I’m not really sure what I’m going to do once I get to that stage of my life unless something can be done.
That said, Microsoft Office is practically the back bone of the class in which I’m struggling. So unless they manage to fix their accessibility issues, I’m not quite sure how I’m going to pass that class.
On a more positive note, development with S Quad Racing, sluggish as it is, is going quite well. I had to fix some annoying bugs this evening, bugs that of course didn’t pop up until I tried to record the audio demo (figures). But rather than make sure all current bugs are patched up, I’ll just go ahead and throw together a demo recording, because in the next couple days I want to code in surfaces, but before I make such a big change to game play I really think I should get a recording of the game in its current state. Besides, that demo is pretty much 2 months over due, so yeah.
That concludes the posting for tonight. Be sure to stop by and listen to podcast episode 38, which demonstrates RS Games, and is as usual packed with mine and Danny’s twisted sense of humor. Please, listen to it. It took us 3 attempts to record that thing!
Thanks for reading,
type you later,
Steve.

Poems and Updates

Hey guys,
Steve here.

Two days have come and passed,
Wednesday is here at last.
Oh how life can go so fast,
some times don’t you wish you could make it last?
Well during that time I worked on my game book,
with which my goal is to get you hooked,
and not complain about how long playing it took.
And in this post I plan to give you a quick look.
Also I have a great surprise,
This is sure to make your spirits rise.
But be sure not to close your eyes,
for in this post the excitement lies.
Also the weather has been quite cold,
and honestly I think it’s getting old.
A warm cup of coco I wish I could hold,
I want it to be hot, but not to scold.
But instead I sit here thinking of what to write,
on this cold but happy autumn night.
Bundled up, nice and tight,
where the temperature is just right.

How did you like my poem? It was kind of a clever way to sum up what I have to say in this post.
First, since that was the first stanza, I’ll talk about the past two days. On Tuesday, I’m proud to say I got another item on my to-do list out of the way. Trashua is officially nine! Talk about wanting to make life last and wondering why it has to go so fast, jeez I can’t believe that cat is already nine!
Also, I have worked more on stranded. I can’t give you a summary, but have enough info to tell you what to expect close to the beginning. Let me do it in a fun way…

Introducing…

Stranded part three! The third installment of the stranded series!
Today’s forecast is, slugs the size of simi trucks, portals, modified google self driving cars, and mysterious forests!
Okay let’s get serious again. On the part where I was telling you the forecast above, those are the objects you encounter at the beginning of the story. Spoiler alert :).
Expect more information about the game, along with insight into more erratic things that you will find as I continue to set up the world for Stranded part three!

Onto podcast news, I’m proud of myself! I didn’t actually let you loyal blog readers down again. You appreciate my work, and I respect and appreciate you guys for reading this stuff. So, I decided to go ahead and do the right thing, despite my severe case of I Don’t Feel Like It itis, and get at least one podcast episode out of the way. As I said in stanza three of my poem, I have a surprise, but don’t close your eyes. The podcast has once again gone through changes. These changes, however, are far more significant than a simple name change, one of which occured a couple months ago when the Steven D podcast became the Steven and Devin podcast. Now, I have deleted and added new segments. Instead of a life and weather segment, my podcast starts with news and announcements segment, which covers news about the site, game and/or software previews that I might be covering, new developements such as storm or game recordings, and anything else I think would be revelent for that segment.
Next, I have the intresting things segment. Here, I will share intresting tips, such as hooking your microphone to your computer, getting your computer to talk back to you, doing a backflip across the solar system from the moon to Pluto and other stuff like that. 🙂 🙂
By the way, while the microphone thing is still fresh in your mind, I got a really funny comment from my spannish teacher, mister_madrid on Monday’s post. “You should work for the government mr Bond,” it said. I didn’t get it at first, but now I do. He was calling me James bond, the fictional character created by Ian Flemming, and featured in 12 novels and 2 short storie collections. James bond was an intelogence officer who worked for the secret intelligence service, commonly known as MI6. James Bond’s code name was 007. Don’t you think 007 would be the best thing to name a someone?

Getting back to what I originally came to write about, the weather has been very cold the past two days. If you remember Monday’s post, I said it would be that way for a few days. What I said about that coco in my poem is actually true. I really want some hot chocolate right about now.
This weekend though, it is supposed to warm up. It is supposed to get to eighty on Sunday, in sharp contrast to the upper fourties we had yesterday.
And finally, I don’t know if you know this or not, but this morning was the first official freeze of the season! Well I can say, it sure is freezin’ in this autumn season.

Thanks for reading,
type you later,
Steve.