Wednesday, August 27, 2014

8/27

8:30p0- Woke up. Three hours of sleep.
9p1- Internetted.
10p2- Ate. Gamed.
11p3- Attempted to go back to sleep. Failed.
12a4- Released some healthy unfettered rage against a consumer product over the internet. I'm one to complain, right?
1a5- Did some proofreading.
Difficulty 1/10 Efficiency 3/10
2a6- Exercised.
3a7- Proofread Stella's story.
Difficulty 1/10 Efficiency 5/10
4a8- Proofread Stella's story. Ughhh so tired. This is how good the story is, folks. Putting me to sleep here.
Difficulty 1/10 Efficiency 9/10

1p8- Woke up with 9 hours of sleep. Usually I would start a new blog post, like 8/28... but the majority remainder of the day's hours will still be on the 27th, so I have elected to make this one really long post.
2p9- Showered. Ate light breakfast. Internetted.
3p10-Over-internetted. Exercised.
4p11-Ate.
5p12- Ate.
6p13- Had an Aching Stomach. Justified another hour of internetting.
7p14- Organized sex files. All primary sex scenes are finished. More sex scenes will be made in the future, but only after the game's release. Worked on Larissa's story.
Difficulty 2/10 Efficiency 9/10
8p15- Worked on Larissa's story.
Difficulty 7/10 Efficiency 7/10
9p16- Worked on Larissa's story.
Difficulty 8/10 Efficiency 5/10
10p17- Finished Larissa's story. All character stories and non-character story events are finished but I still need to go back and proofread, add in BASICS checks to some missions, add in bad endings, and gift reactions. For the time being though, someone could read it like a book.
Worked on replacement barricades. The barricades in the trailer make no sense in the way they're formed, so I'm working on new ones in a 3d program. Basically I'm correcting a logic mistake (plot hole) that probably nobody will care about.
Difficulty 7/10 Efficiency 9/10
11p18- Worked on new barricades.
Difficulty 6/10 Efficiency 10/10
12a19- Finished barricades. Had a snack.
New barricades and unfinished healer enemy
Alright, so I feel that it needs to be explained why these barricades look like this, juuuust in case anybody wants to question their form. If you don't really care and find them aesthetically pleasing, just move along.
Mini IFAQ (infrequently asked questions):
Q: How did the survivors make that kind of barricade?
A: They 3D printed it from raw junk materials. How they get the material is a separate issue, but they basically have a matter condenser that turns discarded specific junk into barricades. Both the printer and the condenser take energy to use, and energy is a strained resource in AD3.
Q: If you could form a barricade like that, wouldn't you want to just line the whole battle area with printed spikes and have the enemies step on those?
A: Yes, but that consumes too much energy and resources. Creating a spike hard enough to puncture someone requires too much from the matter condenser as well.
Q: What do you mean too much energy? I thought they were on a high tech space ship!
A: Yes, but the station's main reactor was taken offline when the aliens invaded. In this future, portable battery technology does not get more powerful, it's the other way around: portable technology is just more power efficient. When battery size is not an issue, people use the station's main reactor, but that's down.
Q: Okay, so then why don't the survivors just print a bunch of hollow large beach balls and fill the room with that?
A: The survivors did experiment with this tactic, but the enemy responded by bringing out more creatures with blunt type attacks to counter it.
Q: So you're telling me that the survivors never use ANY type of traps?
A: They do. The survivors have in-game power abilities that represent these traps. That would mean in the story, you'd probably see a bunch of thumb tacs on the floor, but making these traps into abilities is more fun for the player, so you can consider it a gameplay concession type plothole. They never print any of these traps because the most efficient usage for the printing has been barricades to hide behind, and other non-combat related supplies.
Q: Why do the barricades look like that? Wouldn't you want a pure wall with a tiny slit to shoot through?
A: Yes, but you need energy and materials. The primary concern for the latest barricade design is material consumption. It's somewhat difficult to see at this angle, but the barricade is shaped like a portcullis in order to block enemy attacks and shoot through at the same time, all the while consuming the least amount of res. The barricades are also bent at an angle to make it difficult for enemies to attack the shooter behind it.
Q: What about all that plating on the floor? Why don't they just use that?
A: The floor deck is not durable. AD3 takes place on a commercial vessel, so they're made out of cheap materials.
Q: If they're cheap, then what happens if you shoot through the station?
A: The inner plating may be cheap, but the outer plating is more thoroughly protected from those kinds of attacks. In fact, every ISS security officer is issued a stun gun in order to prevent harm to the station's inner components.
Q: Why don't they use the outer plating then?
A: Because the outer plating is the only thing separating them from the vacuum. The outer plating would be a great form of defensive barricade, but actually collecting the plating is unfeasible without the proper space worthy equipment.
Q: I have more infrequently asked questions!
A: Yep, and by answering these questions I'm just opening more questions, so I'll just end this mini ifaq by saying that you can find the rest of the answers in the bigger IFAQ (10k word count), and this IFAQ will be available for viewing when AD3 comes out.
Difficulty 3/10 Efficiency 7/10
1a20- Wrote this stupid ifaq, worked on destroyed barricades.
Difficulty 1/10 Efficiency 10/10
2a21- Reconsidering new barricade design. While the portcullis design style makes sense in terms of story, the problem is that it adds a lot of production time for a very nitpicky detail. The first problem is that Beatrice's gun does not properly align with the barricade. This is due to the battle mode's fake 3d perspective. The characters are shown at a side angle, but if this a real camera, the characters closer to the camera would have more of the tops of their heads showing. This is unfeasible to represent because I'm certainly not going to redraw every character 3 more times to show 4 different angles accurately. The second problem is that the window of the barricades creates a lot of hassle in terms of layering. Let's say if you shoot a bullet through the middle window (in the above picture, imagine Olga shooting), that bullet would have to be under the layer of the front part of her barricade, but over the back part of her barricade, meaning each barricade needs two layers. Since survivors can shoot at an angle, we also have to consider the bullet's trajectory when flying through other survivor barricades.  When all of these problems are taken into consideration it'll result in either a jarring visual effect, or a lot of work to ensure that the bullets travel under and over separate layers correctly.

So the current plan is to scrap all the barricade work I did between 10pm and 1am.
Worked on gift reactions.
Difficulty 3/10 Efficiency 10/10
3a22- Worked on gift reactions.
Difficulty 3/10 Efficiency 10/10
4a23- Worked on gift reactions.
Difficulty 5/10 Efficiency 10/10



Temporary outages expected for Aching Dreams 2 server.

4 comments:

  1. Still not convince you don't hate Stella :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. My least favorite characters are
      Veronica- Doctor that's hard to write for without a medical degree.
      Carmen- Robot that's inspired by Star Trek's Data. I thought that I would be able to give the whole tired robot story a fresh new take because she's a sex robot, but nothing ever really panned out.

      When I first started writing for Stella, I thought that there would be absolutely nothing for such a bimbo to contribute to a survivor operation. All of the other survivors hate her because she's so useless, so while I did believe there was going to be good character interaction, I didn't think I could come up with any interesting stories for her, but I was wrong.

      Here's an excerpt-

      Stella: Heavens no! I don’t wanna go out there alone! I want to drink pop and tease the gentlemen! I can’t hide and shoot all these uglies! I can’t do any of this tough stuff! I’m not a man!

      Captain: No, but you’re a perfectly capable woman, Ms. Howard. (sigh)... well maybe not perfectly...
      -----

      Even the Captain hates her. It's gold.

      Delete
    2. I love reading the updates, keep up the good work man!!!

      And when the games released, I hope its not too much to ask to make it available for purchase somewhere for the ones that didn't make the kickstarter.

      You've definitely got me sold hahaha :)

      Delete
  2. It seems I was right to pick her to be my first story path

    ReplyDelete