A little off topic, even though scripting in itself is quite basic, it still helps me continue to hone my skills in the real world. We are thinking about implementing our own scripting system for our phone apps at work, so I obviously will have lots of input, regarding what I can do with NWScript.

Anyway, back to what people care about. After some of the polishing, I began to create the first of the last tier of custom abilities for party members. I have to admit, it slipped my mind:( Fortunately, it isn't a new system, so plugging in new abilities will be a cinch. I will most definitely finish the first one on the train ride tomorrow. 

Right now, I am debating on if I want to release the BETA or not. There have been significant changes to the existing content they have tested, as well as new content ending up to the end game. Even more, I am really looking forward to playing through the game again. It has been about a month or so... Maybe even more... Besides seeing how long it takes me (which is very important to me), I just want to experience everything from beginning to end, to make sure everything feels right. After developing in isolation for long, I really need to get back in the mode of knowing how the player will experience the game. Sure, I can code up some crazy fighting situations that seems cool in isolation, but perhaps when put with everything else in the game, it may be too much. Maybe at that point, people will be tired of fighting... I doubt I will come across these problems, but these are things I need to keep in the back of my mind. The thing is, I won't be able to test it on the train, since whenever I am in game, the power is sucked out of the battery like crazy... Maybe I can just get these last custom abilities in, add a few more quests, and get some more editing in... We'll see...

In the afternoon, I was able to sit back, catch my breath, and do some more work on the game. I am happy to say that I have finished up all the work on the current sequences I have been working on the past few days. I mean, I tested the hell out of it so much that I don't even think any of the BETA testers will have any problems with it:) So now, I am in the position of what to do next. I admit, I did want to have the final battle finished off, however, I am certainly not going to do that much work on it during the week on the train. So, I might go back to polishing some more things up. Meh, either way, I gotta do it all anyway...

Unfortunately, crunch time is now in effect, even more so than usual. By this, I mean I am going to be very strict on the amount of work I get done during the day. I really need to bring it home, and get this thing released. I won't rush it (you all should know that about me right now), but I suspect I might have some sleepless nights ahead of me. Ah, the love of game making. Also, being able to work from home on Thursday's will help out the situation as well. I also suspect I will be eating lunch at my desk from now on too. Yep, no foosball for me at work for a while. As I have mentioned before, all that is left that is really major is the final 5% of the final battle (why is it taking so long!), the ending sequences, and the polish. As for when I will begin to release the little tidbits of what makes this adventure so much different than The Coming, I will be making that decision quite soon. Could be as early as the next few weeks.

Then, there is the other project that I am a part of, that I have been alluding to the past few weeks. I obviously can't say much about it, but the world will know very soon. Yes, very soon, the gag will come off...

Tomorrow, I will finish up the aforementioned cut-scene, and then start some brainstorming on the last battle. It has been a week, and there have been various ideas floating in my head. Bear in mind, the fight itself is about 95% done. I just need to give it that special something... That special touch... I don't know... I am just not happy with it right now. Oh well, it is what it is...

One of the more interesting systems I made additions to was in fact the first thing I worked on with Cry The Beloved, a mere week after releasing The Coming. It's interesting to come back to code I wrote a year ago, code I know I designed to be able to be flexible, and dammit, have it actually be flexible! I was able to plug and play with ease. Well, I am off to actually take a look at that stuff I have been working on all week in game. I hope it works...

I also discovered something today that is probably known to all the other 3 million plus NWN members... I really had no idea that you could simply drag a potion to a party member, and have them drink it. Why, I don't know, but I think it's pretty cool:) Yeah, yeah, I guess that is what I get for not really playing NWN... Tomorrow, I get to script an entire cut-scene, without being able to actually view it until later in the night. Joy!

Going back to editing real quick, I still have a ton of stuff Jason did for me for The Coming damn near a year ago! I got through most of it, but then I got back into fulltime development of Cry The Beloved. Then, when he joined the team, he focused only on Cry The Beloved, and I forgot about his older stuff. Thank god I am a packrat, and saved his e-mail from last year, with all the changes (I have reformatted my laptop at least 3 times since then...). This won't be a priority, but once I am done with this game, I do want to go back and get the changes in. Some people may think it is weird, but I still want to appease new fans to the series, not just the ones waiting for Cry The Beloved. 

So, now to what people come here for. My update... As I mentioned yesterday, I took a step in a different direction yesterday, as I had a severe case of designers block when it came to finishing off the final battle of the game. As always, I am very glad that I did, because I have all but finished off this little Easter Egg side quest. I just have to throw in a few cut-scenes, do some more sanity testing, and I will be done. I will probably look to some of the writers to come up with some flavor text for the area, but besides that, things are coming together quite well. I think I will just finish this off, and then leave the last battle implementation stuff for the weekend. Makes sense to be able to have 8-10 hours of dev time to do that work, not just little snippets of time here and there during the week.

Also, a thread popped up on the forums about how to make a particular custom creature a bit more... well... custom:) It was really just a suggestion, and as always, many ideas came pouring in. I now have a little side project, which I could most likely finish on a train ride to work. It's great when people come up with the ideas, and all I have to do is implement them:)

To be honest, I am not sure if I will continue with it or not tomorrow, because I might get inspired a bit to finish the end game. I mean, I can always come back to it later, and in fact, I have to! Well, I am about to go to sleep now. Hopefully, something will come to me either before I sleep, or even better, in my dreams. Yes people, I have come up with many ideas from dreams (I will write stuff down on a pad of paper after waking up from some crazy dreams). Maybe one day, I will explain how I came up with the Keeper Of The Rose, and more importantly, the entire concept of being reborn various times over 4000 years. I am 100% positive no one can guess where the idea came from:)

As expected, the wedding was pretty cool, although my sore really started to become... well... sore after 5 hours or so. That was my cue to leave:)

Once I got home, as expected, I took it easy. I really want this thing to be gone before I have to go back to work and sit on those infernal seats on the train.

In short, not a very productive day...

Also, I need to explain why I have been late with updates recently. So apparantly there is something called a bed sore, which people start to get when they lay in the bed for a long time. Apparantly that was one of the reason why Christopher Reeve passed away.. At any rate, there is something that is sort of the same, but for people who sit in particular positions all the time.

Now, I have had various ailments over the past year of development, but this takes the cake. I mean, this is all new to me. Just because I sit a lot, now I have to go through this incredible pain? This is another reason why I need to finish this game up as fast as possible! At any rate, bear with me. I am only human, and I am not going to lie. This past week has been hell, and unfortunately, I have a wedding to go to, tomorrow which means I have to get up early (not allowing any extra rest to heal the sore), get a haircut, where consequently, I sit in a uncomfortable barber chair. Then, I imagine I will have to be at this thing for a while, so I will be missing out on rest then too.

In short, this sucks...

Till tomorrow...(maybe...)...

It would be nice if I could be done with the final fight, and the cut-scenes that go along with it by the end of this weekend. Even better, if I could finish the final sequence after the fight, I would feel good about where I am with the game. Once that is done, I can go into full polish mode. At this point, I will most likely start my marketing campaign, allowing people to finally learn about everything I have been doing this past year. I will probably try to take on some more BETA testers. It's always good to have a fresh set of eyes. Yep, I am almost there...I can smell it:)

So, I was a little disappointed this morning. I apparantly didn't charge my laptop last night, so I couldn't do anything but sleep on the train:( On the way home however, though my laptop had power, I was doing some non ROE related stuff on my laptop, but I cannot really get into that right now *looks both ways*

Finally, for the past few days, I have been doing something I should have done a long time ago: Creating my library of old school video game music. The site, VGMusic , has one of the most extensive lists of old school songs, in MIDI form. I don't mind the song format, because well, the damn songs are so old, there weren't even MP3's yet, so the quality is the same anyway:) Plus, I can keep a lot on my laptop, without worrying about space.

I already downloaded all the music for one of my favorite series, Double Dragon. However, the biggest undertaking will be getting all the music for the famed Mega Man Series. The funny thing is, my entire life, I have loved this music. I remember throughout middle and high school, when I moved on to other systems, I could still hum the music to this game. Back then, you have to remember: I was the only person in my school that was like this, so I thought I was just weird. Well, to finally grow up, and find out that most people consider it some of the best game music for the NES system makes me proud. In fact, Gamespot has it listed in their Greatest Games Of All Time section. See, I'm not the only one! Oh, and for the record, I think the music in Mega Man 3 might even be better than in Mega Man 2...

So, I usually try to leave the office at 4:50 pm to catch the 5:28 train. Since it is like 100 degrees in Manhattan, I decided I wanted to leave earlier. You see, I usually speed walk to the train station, but since it was so hot, I didn't want to get all hot, sweaty, and sticky, and in general, feel like shit. So, as always, someone had some freaking problems that only I could fix, and they decided to come talk to me as I was about to leave. After helping them, I realized I missed my train, so I decided to get the 5:50 instead. I left the office early, didn't speed walk, and was totally soaked in sweat by the time I got to the train station. I was also sore, as I have been sitting in the same chair these past 3 weeks, not having to walk back all over Manhattan.

As I expected, I found no good seat, so I had to settle for a pretty crappy one. Then it hit me. I was still sweating. What's this? No AC in this train? Of course not! GRRR! I was so hot and sweaty, I couldn't even concentrate on game development, so I just turned my laptop off. Then, about 20 minutes after we left the train station, the train just stopped. It then proceeded to go backwards for another 20 minutes. I won't bore you with the miniscule details, but there were track problems.

In short, my afternoon sucked... Fortunately, I got a nice bit of work done when I got home. Unfortunately, I am so exhausted from today that I am going to crash now:(

In short, I did stuff today, I just don't have time to write about. Well, going to go back to getting ready for my return to real life again. Wish me luck:)

For tomorrow, I might keep it simple. I have various edits to dialogues I need to make, and I might take a look at a bug that has been persistent since last October. Decisions, decisions...

After getting some lunch, and more or less enjoying my last real day of vacation (hey, I'm not a slave!), I ended up going to see Superman Returns. It was a very entertaining movie. I am not a purist, so I have nothing to complain about, regarding if things were to "moviefied".

Once I finish off this ability, I will continue with the battle scene, and the corresponding cut-scenes that go with it. I also need to add more ambiance to what will be the 2nd to last area of the game. I might have mentioned it was the last, but I can't make it that big because of lag reasons. No worries, because I always have a plan B!

I then began designing a new area. This area has the potential to be the last playable area in the game, but I haven't decided yet. I need it to be big, but since this particular area doesn't really need any placeables, I might be able to get away with it. However, if things start to lag up, I will be forced to break it up into 2 areas. It isn't a big idea, but I hate transitions sometimes, as it can take the player out of the action. We'll see...

I am feeling very motivated, mostly because what I am doing doesn't involve any writing, so I am going to sleep, in order to try to get up early, and get a fresh start on everything. I want to make tomorrow one of my most productive days of my vacation!

Till tomorrow...

With that behind me, I took on a bunch of smaller tasks today, as I didn't want to start anything big so close to the end of the night. As always, I am not sure what I want to work on exactly, but I need to make a decision tomorrow morning, as my vacation is slowly coming to an end:(

THE GIFT

So, the polls in the Module Of The Year voting closed last night, and I was lucky enough to win the silver award! Thanks to all who voted for me! What made the win even more special is that I literally just had the 1 year anniversary for The Coming 4 days go. So, it feels good to get recognition for something I released over a year ago. Stefan Gagne took the Module Of The Year (2005) award by a landslide. When I am done with Cry The Beloved, I will definitely try to check out some of his mods, since he seems to be pretty popular.

THE CURSE

...I began to run into some weird problems. More specifically, I was working on the cut-scene, and after adding a new part to it, when I would load the game up to test it out, as soon as it started, it would crash. The first time it happened, I dismissed it as some graphics bug, and reloaded it. Unfortunately, the same thing happened the next time I tried. The worst part is that since the game crashed in the middle of a cut-scene, I had to "window" out of the game, and shut it down manually, using the taskbar. However, this just wouldn't work sometimes...So, I essentially had to manually power cycle my damn laptop.

As the hours went on, I kept trying to pinpoint the issue. As you can imagine, this took a lot of time, because every time the game crashed, I would have to wait for my laptop to boot up again. Interestingly enough, I had this problem earlier last year when I was working on a cut-scene that runs half way through the game. It had to do with the way I was rotating the camera. Things got better when I found out I could implement cut-scene skipping, and get out of cut scene mode when it crashed. This allowed me to try out more things than before. I never did find out what the problem was, but I decided to use another method to rotate the camera. I didn't want to bug John "Gestalt" Bye with a bug report, so if I have time sometime, I will try to track it down in his code.

THE AFTERMATH

I have to admit, these are the times that I want to just do something else in life:) Seriously, I have only gone through things like this 5-6 times in the past 2 years, but every time, it seems as if it is the end of the world. In fact, I can remember the first time I dealt with some weird scripting problem.

So, while developing The Coming back in August 2004, I began to start work on North Shinkara Forest. When I began to implement the goblins marauders, goblin archers, and goblin evokers, I began to run into problems. Essentially, after fighting and killing some, they would seemingly respawn in like 1-2 minutes. Now, I had them on the same respawn time as the Shinkara Wolves are today. Now, I cannot remember everything I thought was wrong, but I literally blamed it on everything. I literally rebuilt the entire area 4-5 times, re-created the blueprints for the goblins many times. This lasted A WEEK! And, I mean I was doing this like 7-8 hours a day. I wanted to quit working on the game many times. I really almost did too.

So what did I do? I simply took away the possibility for them to respawn. So people, THAT is the reason why they do not respawn. It was no design choice or anything like that. I was essentially trying to put a band aid over a gunshot wound... In retrospect, I am glad that they do not respawn, as I most people seem to like it that way. Anyway, some of you may be thinking, "Did this happen anywhere else?". The answer... No... I put the same goblins in South Shinkara Forest, and they respawned at the normal rate (5 minutes at the time). This lead me to believe North Shinkara Forest was bugged, hence the reason why I rebuilt it so many times...Anyway, with the respawning stripped out, I could move on.

I will always remember the next months, because that was when I implement for the first time the Last Resort system, and the Party Member Death System. Community scripter Primogenitor helped me with a particular script, that would have enemies not attack the dead party members. Man, those were good times. I knew I was doing something different, and I really thought people would like it. In the back of my head, I knew I would have to implement the first Unison Ability, Whirlwind Heal, and I had no idea how I was going to do it...

At any rate, In April of 2005, I ran into the biggest issue I ever dealt with. Sometimes while playing the game, cut-scenes would just stop. Not crash, just stop. The problem was, it was an intermittent problem, and I was killing myself trying to track it down. I will admit, I stopped developing for 2 weeks straight, and drowned my sorrows in World Of Warcraft. When I got the guts to continue, I tried to ignore the problem. I didn't happen all the time, so I didn't care. Then, I had my 1st internal ALPHA test, and some people complained of cut-scenes just stopping. I then knew I had a problem. Again, for weeks, I dedicated my life to tracking down this issue. You would have no idea what the problem was:)

...Sigh... Anyone ever notice how whenever you are in Aribine after the Ministry Of Justice invade, it is ALWAYS dark? I know you people are out there, because I sure as hell heard it in comments the first week of release:) Well, it isn't anything tricky. Basically, I keep making checks to see what time it is in the area's heartbeat script, and if it is 5:00 am (an hour before the sun rises), I set the time to be 8:00 pm. I won't go into why I did that, because it essentially falls into the category of bad design decisions... Well, wouldn't you know that if you are in a cut-scene, which uses DelayCommands() functions, if you advance the time, those corresponding DelayCommands() are played ahead of schedule. More specifically, for the non scripters out there, for coding cut-scenes, you essentially code certain events, like when people should talk, and stick it in a queue. If you advance the time past the time the event would have been fired, it will simply fire immediately.

So some people may be thinking, "Okay, so how is this happening to cut-scenes not in Aribine?". Another one of my greatest blunders... I had the code running anytime, not only when the player was in Aribine. So, if the cut-scene where Oracine attacks the party is running around 5:00am, it will get messed up, because the time is being set to 8:00pm. Man, when I figured this out, * I did a cartwheel across the living room floor!

Long story short, I was beginning to think today's problem was going to be the same type of thing. Thank god it only took 4 hours of complete dedication to fix it. Now, back to making that damn cut-scene. If it wasn't for this bug, I might have finished today...

Till tomorrow...

Till tomorrow...

Long story short, I was out of the house the majority of the day. I did get some work done, but not as much as I wanted. I still have another week of vacation time, so it's all good:) I mainly messed around with the lighting in a particular area. I also was doing what I call, load test. I would essentially add many placeables to the area I am working in, to see how much I could add, without my system lagging. My laptop is not really all that good, so if it runs on my rig, it most likely will run on anyone's machine:) It may seem silly to some people, but this particular sequence is a key sequence in the game, and it has to be perfect...

Today, part of that was true. The difference was, it didn't take as long to get focused on something. Longer than I would like, but not as bad as usual. However, when I became focused on it, I had a mental block. However, I should step back a bit...

So, as some of you may or may not know, I have known the entire story/game mechanics of this game since 1999. However, it is the high level story/game mechanics. I haven't planned out all the nitty gritty details. That stuff comes as I go. Some may scoff at this, because I know that whenever someone is asking questions on forums about how to get started, the 1st answer is always, "Plan out your game on paper. Write documents. Write the dialogue before you even open the toolset". This just doesn't work for me. Maybe I have an advantage of having this brainchild for 7 years, but when it comes down to it, I don't have time to document everything. Just knowing the basic idea of what I want to do is good enough, and I rely on my ability to come up with ideas on the spot.

I can tell you right now that some of the best things (in my mind) I did in The Coming were spur of the moment things. The opening cut-scene with the Keeper Of The Rose is one example. For the first 10 months of development, that cut-scene wasn't there. There was the small concept of a "Keeper Of The Rose", but that was it. Then, while listening to a piece of music, I got inspired, and the ideas just started flowing. The result was that opening cut-scene. The Unison Ability system was a late addition, and something I never thought of before I even knew of NWN. In fact, most everything that had to do with combat was stuff I just implemented as I went along. That fight with Oracine, for example. I knew the party had to fight someone from the Ministry Of Justice at Challseus' house for many years. When I came to implement it however, I realized I had no idea what type of enemies/bosses it should be. That day, I literally fumbled around with various creatures, and weapons, and Oracine was born. Heh, Mathewin  was added one day because my friend wanted to be in the game so bad (Mathewin was his character from Everquest).

So, my way of development is, have a high level idea, and then when I implement it, the ideas will come to me. HOWEVER, sometimes, the ideas just don't come to me as fast as I would like. Such is what happened yesterday. I was creating this new area, and I just wasn't inspired. I had the music playing on my laptop that would play in this area, but I had no idea of what I was going to do. Again, I knew at a high level what needed to happen, but when it came down to implementing it, I was at a loss. As I usually do, I would add various placeables, and run around in the area, trying to get a feel for what should happen. Oh yeah, if you haven't guessed it, I am working on a very important cut-scene. Anyway, I was running around the area, testing out various camera angles, different perspectives at different parts in the music, and I just wasn't happy with anything. I was so pissed, because in my head, at the high level, I just figured everything would fall into place. I have a pretty big imagination, so I knew what I wanted it to look like. 

Then, it hit me. The idea I needed hit me like a ton of bricks. I exited the game, added a particular placeables, moved some around to other positions, and got back into the game. I was so happy. I now had something to work with. I now had the baseline for how everything in this cut-scene would flow. Essentially, I did it again. I made something out of nothing. I was able to go into the implementation not sure how I was going to do something, and came out on top, as I always do.

But, don't get the story twisted, because there is more:) Now, the entire time I have been doing this, I haven't exactly liked it. I just do what I have to do. You seen, I have always been under time restrictions. Now, I am in no way saying I am rushing things, because I am not (hell, it has been a year since my last game!), but I develop the way I do because it saves me time, and I know I can do it. HOWEVER, if I had all the time in the world, and I was working with a large team of people, where all I had to worry about was say, cut-scenes, then I would go the way of having storyboards and whatnot. I guess what I am saying is, I have to adapt to my situation. Do I like Extreme Programming this game? No. Can I do it effectively? Yes...

Till tomorrow...

So, 1 year and 1 week ago, I was sitting in my room, pondering if I should upload the game. You see, I was so paranoid that it would be released with some critical bug, that I literally sat on my hands for a week. Instead of uploading it, I would just play through it everyday, trying to break it. I really wanted to make a name for myself, and in my mind, releasing a game that had bugs all over the place wasn't the way to start it off. I figured more established authors could get away with it, but since no one knew who the hell I was, or cared what the hell I was doing, I couldn't give them any excuses to not play through the entire game. So, after a week of playing the game (I really hated the game at this point), on July 6th, 2005, I released it.

I was greeted with the first comment for my very first released game! Come on people, this was a really big moment in my life! I will never forget it, because it was more or less a comment of someone asking why they had to use the Aramus/Challseus supplied characters. I knew I was going to be faced with this dilemma, I just didn't think so soon. After some clever talking, I got the person (who happened to be DaNippers, of all people), to stick with the game. Well, wouldn't you know that when I went on vacation that weekend, DaNippers liked the game so much that he ended up fielding just about every question anyone had. I had no internet connectivity, so someone had to pick up the slack:)

So, after the first week, I had a little under 1000 downloads, and tons of high votes. I was obviously on top of the world. I mean, I had the mindset that I would be happy if 200 people downloaded it. My expectations were obviously a bit lower than reality:) During this time, I also began to find out more about the community, and the things that they did/did not like. The main one, was cut-scenes...More specifically, long cut-scenes, where a normal dialog trigger would have just been fine. This really started to bite me in the ass, as every 10th comment or so was about how some people thought they cut-scenes were too much. In fact, it was really a love/hate situation. People either loved them, or hated them. And that was that. Mentally, I was already thinking of how I was going to change this with Cry The Beloved. 

The other recurring complaint that came up was the too simplified fetch quests, and the go kill X wolves hunting quests. Again, some people complained about them, some people wrote about how they kept fighting wolf after wolf towards the end of the game (they spawned like every 5 minutes) just to get enough experience to get Clopon to level 5 to see her new summon. There were other complaints, but on the whole, the game, statistically, was doing great.

I will never forget the time when I got my first troll vote (I thought it was a troll vote at the time). In hindsight, it was not a troll vote (6.25), but what the voter said was what pissed me off. He basically said the mod was overrated because since I used doing EVERY hak released that year, I should have given the inn keeper in the beginning of the game a custom tunic, and not use the standard NWN stuff. Oh, and he thought the Aramus' lime green cloak was hideous:) Now, there have been many arguments this past week concerning how module authors should react when they get low votes. I simply ignored him. Inside though, I was pissed as all hell. I am not going to try to act like I was cool with it, and it just brushed off my shoulder. The argument of, "Get a tougher skin, it's a cold world" doesn't apply to everyone. And when I get mad, it stays with me the entire day/night. By the next day, I didn't care:)

Now, when I get low votes, I get pissed inside for like 10 seconds, and keep it moving. And trust me, there was a stretch where I was getting a vote of 2-4 once a month for like 4 months. Hugie remembers, because he would tease me about my monthly troll vote:) In all seriousness though, to any of you voters/players out there: Don't just have the attitude that people need to toughen up. Having that attitude helps no one. Yes, I can deal with troll votes just as good as the next person now, but if someone kept telling me, "Stop being a baby, just deal with it...", it wouldn't have made things better. I had to learn on my own how to not care. Perhaps getting one once a month helped me out:)

Wow, now that's how you go off topic! At any rate, as months went on, I obviously kept getting more downloads and votes. I also was starting to make a lot of friends around the community. More importantly, as work began on Cry The Beloved, many players of The Coming were requesting to help out with the development. Heh, I remember the first post Jason Melancon made at the download page. It was more or less something like "I was going to play this game, but the grammar mistakes in the description are horrendous. Should I even waste my time?". I could have gotten pissed at him, and flamed him, but instead, I challenged him to help me with some editing. Can you believe he is still here today, editing Cry The Beloved. As a matter of fact, I probably have some edits from him, sitting in my inbox right now:)

Others that contacted me early on were Joseph Portello, who did some early Dematol dialogue, and Amy Laurin, who dabbled in dialogue, poems, and even took the initiative to set up some official forums for us. Also, very early on, ShrikeKnight & DaNippers helped me come up with some new custom skills. ShrikeKnight would end up staying on to help me design one of the biggest new systems in the game. I remember having this idea, and telling him about it. He then took that raw idea, and make it like 200 times better. After some back and forths, we had something very cool, and it is only now (1 year later) that it is finally implemented fully.

I think the biggest, and most obvious thing that happened to me (in terms of getting my foot in the game industry's door) was winning the IGF NWN Module Competition. That damn near gave me the confidence to know I am doing what I was born to do. Besides people who know me personally, or people from the development team, most think I am a confident guy. In some ways, I am, and in some ways, I am not. Ironically enough, I am confident enough in myself to be okay with my lack of confidence:) I don't know...I guess I am confident in some things, but not in others. My goal to be a cocky son of a bitch in a year, and not have to worry about anything:) Yeah, that would be great:)

I think the best thing I came away with this past year was the friendships. This is the only community I have ever been a part of, and dammit, I don't even want to go to another one. Even if I ever made it big in the game industry, if I wasn't making a commercial version of Rose Of Eternity, after work, I would still be making it in the community. Some people would just drop everything (which is their god given right), but not me. It's just the way I was raised anyway... 

ROSE OF ETERNITY - CHAPTER 1 - THE COMING - UPDATE

So, to celebrate the 1 year anniversary, I have upload an update to The Coming, which makes use of some portraits done by famed artist, Olaia Ferrando. You may have seen then at the Cast Page, but now in game, you will see portraits for Aramus, Clopon, & The Keeper Of The Rose. It isn't a big update, but it is an update nonetheless. It is also paving the way for another set of updates that will occur around the time I release Cry The Beloved. Stay tuned for more info!

Also, for all of you Rose Of Eternity fans (who else reads this damn thing:) ), don't forget to vote for the top modules for 2004 and 2005. No way in hell I would get mod of the year, but it would at least be nice to get the bronze award, which I am currently in the running for. So, if you haven't voted, what are you waiting for! :)

When I was able to work, I was pretty busy working on the dialogue for a particular cut-scene. There is nothing extraordinaire about it, but it is a very touching sequence that not all people will see.

Well, I need to keep this short, as I want to get back to development. I already missed time due to going to the worse fireworks show I have ever seen, and unfortunately, I cannot get that time back...

In all seriousness though, I am really big on that. I have sampled way too many games where the first 20 minutes were so boring that I didn't have the heart to go on. Even if the game has the best middle and end sequences, I sure as hell wouldn't know, because I was too damned bored at the beginning. I have to assume there are many players who think like me, and I definitely don't want everyone playing the first 10 minutes, only to quit and say, "Man, this was boring. Where's the story? Where's the action?". I hope my ideas work out:)

So, Alazander's game is called, Tyrants Of The Moonsea. I don't know what the hell a "Moonsea" is, but I am sure it is some FR thing:) Well, I don't know what else to say, except for the fact that this was a Premium Module from Bioware, until Atari pulled the plug on it. I won't get into details of why and whatnot, but if it was considered a Premium Module, and it is now free....C'mon, I don't have to do the math for you people, right? :)

So, there has been an inside joke that they will probably finish up their next games before Cry The Beloved comes out. I am determined to not see this happen! Seriously though, I am happy for them, but now, it is my turn...

So, we might as well have called the last part of the week, Polish Time. Because dammit, that is all I have been doing. Don't get it confused though, because I am loving it! I actually flipped back to the first page of my notebook, and began knocking things out that I initially wrote about like 3 months ago. One area in particular has really been getting a good spot of polish on it. 

Oh yeah, before I forget...Many thanks to gaoneng of DLA fame for helping me with some CEP hak compatibility issues. Essentially, I have had NPC portraits sitting on my hard drive (well you can see them over at the cast page as well) for Clopon and the Keeper Of The Rose. Because my lack of understanding of haks and 2DA's, I wasn't sure how I could use them, without overwriting the ones