New Challenges Await…Everywhere

So, this week has been rather exciting, probably one of the most exciting weeks I could come up with at the moment. Let me start with what happened at the beginning of the week.

I am going to be driving soon and my father decided that it was time I got some good hands-on experience on driving. We drove a manual shift Toyota truck that my dad has kept for a very long time (and keeps it polished and waxed so that it still looks shiny and new). Truthfully, driving is not that hard at all, the only key things I have to work on is starting off the clutch very slowly (Especially with an older car) and accelerating at a decent speed. Shifting and steering was the easy parts as I’d assume is true to most people.

I also have started playing Fiesta again since I have more time to use my computer now. Getting from level 43 to level 44 was so difficult due to the fact that I could not find any balance in leveling, but now I have found Ancient Elven Woods to be a very great spot to train. I kill about 300-400 of these monsters and I level up, and the recent EXP boost for this week will definitely help with that. On the other hand Liberalphie (warinthestar on BZFlag) has found a much better way to level, quests and obviously people do it to get major experience and level. I just don’t see it as much of a benefit in my opinion, I even recently deleted all my current quests since I didn’t have the interest to continue them. Oh well, I like my method of training and everyone plays differently anyways.

As you probably know, I have been working on Game Maker still and continuing my tower defense game. The current latest version is 0.7c with 0.7d being released soon (probably tomorrow or Sunday). This is one of my first games I’ll actually finish since I have made such a great system out of it (and I learned Particles in the process). My future plans will be a mass multiplayer online game where up to 10 players cooperate to complete missions together in a large amount of levels. I was originally thinking about doing an RPG, but I think it would be better to do a top-down shooter game where you either compete to destroy other player’s units, or work together to defeat computer players as a team. Seems like a good idea to me, I will first have to do lots of experimenting with online gameplay in Game Maker before I start on this though. I will probably be starting this around the time school comes along. Also, private beta testing of Z-Tower Defense begins on 7/15/08, please email me at sigonasr2@yahoo.com if you want to be involved in it. These versions will just be a bunch of level updates and I will be asking for all bugs, glitches, and errors involved to be reported before I release a final product.

I’m pretty much posting here on a weekly basis now, so expect longer posts, but over a larger span of time.

Fun Stuff Happening

So a lot of things have been happening with me recently, and I’m going to take a few minutes to type up what has been happening.

First, I’ll say that I’ve been working on Z-Tower Defense, and it is turning into a quality game. I’ve probably said this a bunch of times, but this release is packed with great new features, graphics, and a lot of new ideas put into it. I spent three days on this release, and I think it turned out good. You can check it out at http://sigonasr2.servegame.org/zgamers/ztowerdefense.php. It is now Version 0.7a and private beta testing will begin on 7/15/08. If you would like to join in, feel free to email me at my email address. (It’s on the Z-Gamers website but if you didn’t know, it’s sigonasr2@spamyahoo.com [remove spam from the word spamyahoo]).

Next up, my friend Charles and I had a great PvP (Player vs. Player) fight in the Uruga PvP yesterday and boy it was some fight. It was a 40 minute long fight, but we recorded the fight and turned it into a 4-minute long video. You can watch it either at http://youtube.com/watch?v=_z36×3juzgA or on this blog right below.

A Virus, Z-Tower Defense, and Fiesta

Ah yes, what have I been up to. Well, on 6/15/08, I got a virus. I was actually shocked to see a virus on my computer and this was a first. I now have AVG Anti-Virus, but before I had Norton Antivirus, and I usually left it off because it was so slow. Anyways, this virus was pretty darn good too. First it displayed a message saying, “You need to download a malware or spyware removal tool NOW! We have found a virus on your computer!” and there was a Yes and No button, I thought, “Weird”. Then a command prompt appeared and disappeared and my wallpaper changed! It said “Download Malware and Spyware Software” in big black letters on a yellow background, I’m like, whoa. And then it shut down my computer. When I rebooted and logged in, it displayed the same message as above, and then shut down my computer, not loading my desktop icons or a start menu. I couldn’t load up task manager either, it just keeps shutting down. So I reinstalled Windows… Lesson here? Get AVG Anti-Virus.

Z-Tower Defense is now Version 0.5 and is coming along very nicely in my opinion. Quoted from the site,

“Most bugs found in Version 0.4 and 0.41 corrected and added features.
Bugs Fixed: Upgrading screen does not go away at each part transition, Negative Money is now possible, Tower selling amount corrected, No more getting “stuck” on a part, Upgrading screen now grays out SPD button if tower’s reached MAX SPD, Part VIII looping enemies has been fixed, Saved Game file is not automatically deleted if you press “Reset” button.
Game Changes: Selling Amount raised to 75% original tower price, The bullets created from the super bullet now do the same amount of damage as the main bullet if you upgrade it, Bullets can destroy things slightly outside the playing area, Part VIII enemies have lowered health since they were too difficult to defeat, Reset button depth put under the bullets now making it look less funky.
New Features: There is now a Get Ready screen where you can set up your towers before playing, Brown Background behind the hearts add a nice touch.
“

Download the new version at http://zgamers.selfip.com.

And finally, I have a limit on computer usage, so sadly I don’t play Fiesta as much. Oh no, I haven’t quit, just I usually only play an hour or two a day. I am still level 43, but oh well, I’ll have a day when I’ll eventually level up.

Fiesta Patch Good but Not Perfect

The recent June 9, 2008 patch of Fiesta was anticipated and prepared for release on this day, and many users got on and were shocked and happy. First I would like to mention that Outspark, you did a pretty nice job on this patch and hinted up on some new future patches that will appear, now we just need to fix the minor glitches you see in your typical patch. Let’s list the features and dislikes of this patch.

The Good:

• New Quests and Repeatable Quests now worth more EXP
• More Damage for Cleric’s Bleed and Trip Attacks and some Archer damage increase
• Cleric’s Heal Empower now raises more healing power
• New lv70-79 PVP area
• New Maps and Map Locations
• Cleric’s Ability to run and heal adds some uniqueness to the skill
• Lv80+ Bats give good drops, but do a little more damage
• New noticeable “Q” quest signs make finding new quests easier

The Bad:

• Archer’s skills shoot backwards
• Revive does not always revive the player
• Many mage, and cleric skills especially, have uglier effects now
• Fear is fixed. (May be good, but from a mage’s standpoint it’s bad) The fixed version makes the player run around for 5 seconds.
• Characters feel a bit stiff and unstable

Overall, Outspark had more goods than bads on my list, and I do like most of the updates. If you read the list, most of the bad is just looks and not really gameplay, so most of the stuff is already taken care of, they just have to fix the graphical movement a bit.

Meanwhile, I finished version 0.3 of Z-Tower Defense tonight. New features include 20 lives now instead of just losing money, because you can sell stuff as you lose money and finish the game, which wouldn’t be fair, so putting 20 lives makes it more challenging. Also Parts V and VI are added which get quite challenging. A new enemy type is in this version that shrinks as you hit it, and only the fast towers can finish them off because they are so tiny and you need precision. You can download the new version at the Z-Gamers website, http://zgamers.selfip.com.

Z-Tower Defense Continues

Today and last night my internet connection was down so I couldn’t do much in the online Fiesta world, so I pulled out Game Maker and started working on a game for Z-Gamers again. Z-Tower Defense specifically.

So I now have 5 different kinds of towers instead of 3, and 4 different versions of each tower instead of 1, making for 20 unique towers total. You have the default towers, the basic tower, the red hard-hitting but slow tower, and the fast but weak hitting yellow tower, then you have your 2 new ones. One of them is a far range one that shoots a bullet and becomes a homing bullet attempting to kill a targetted enemy. If the targetted enemy is destroyed, it starts moving straight. You then have a laser tower, which shoots a steady beam of energy at nearby enemies hurting anything in its path. Don’t be fooled by the ATK: 2 you see in the stats, that’s really 2 for every moment the enemy is in the energy path (and with 30 game frames per second, that’s 60 damage every second!) and the laser doesn’t just disappear when it hits a person, so it can be really powerful across multiple, slow enemies. There are 2 new versions of each tower that remain the same across all towers. There’s double damage towers (second row) where all the normal towers do double damage. You have faster damage towers (third row) in which the tower’s attack speed is doubled. And then you have the fourth row. The default three towers before have range increase, but the price increase isn’t as high. Range is good for when you need to cover a large area, but don’t want to spend extra placing towers in every single corner. The fourth long shooting homing tower has a special power called “SuperBullet” which creates a stream of bullets as it moves across the field, hurting anything that hits the streaming bullets, or the main bullet itself (Which hits for more than the bullets left behind. An example of this is in the screenshot at the bottom). The laser tower has a special power called “Growing”, in which the laser grows larger and a bit wider to shoot across the whole field itself and hurt things around it a bit more. This is useful for when you have a large amount of enemies scattered in every edge and corner of the screen, and the enemies will stay in the laser range longer due to the increasing laser width. Sounds exciting eh? I quote this last part from the Z-Gamers Main Page:

I now have added Parts III and IV which make the game a lot more challenging. Part I was all about the basics, with simple enemies to get you started right, but then Part II introduced some more difficult concepts with some speedier enemeis with more HP to deplete. Part III introduces slow enemies with lots of HP, and then part IV features fast enemies with quite an amount of HP to deplete, in which you need lots of fast towers to finish them off. Part III enemies also come into play on Part IV, adding even more pressure to trying to deplete all the enemies!

A screenshot of the new version of this game:

You can download the new version of this game at http://zgamers.selfip.com. I realized for some time that the link was down and the site was inaccessible, but I have fixed the link and the site is now back up.

My best score so far?

 4316 gold. A score for this game, is selling everything (by right-clicking towers) and then seeing what your final gold amount is after everything is sold. But to be fair, it must be once enemies stop appearing. Besides, you won’t get 4316 gold in part I anyways .

I also have obviously been playing Fiesta for the past week. I still love the game, new things to discover and love and such. I hope that I get to level 50 by the end of this week, (Saturday I hope) but obviously leveling is slowing down. I am level 42 right now with 90% exp, so I am about to become level 43 and get to wear a Mini Dragon Ring, which raises all stats and by a good amount too. I really am using it because of the STR +12 and END +6 part of it, as I need a lot more strength as being a cleric I am pretty weak, and I just love having a lot of HP. I have 1171 HP at the moment, and a ittle over 1300 SP.

Lazy typers gotta stop

Maybe you should support this too, but I totally agree with this little animated image right above. This isn’t good, for any of us! Usually I wouldn’t mind a few “ur”,”LOLZ”,or “ty”, but some people I know it gets ridiculous. I played Fiesta this morning, and found someone saying “Hi evry1! how u doin 2day?”. I’m like, ok, so you are just greeting everyone, that’s fine but wouldn’t it be better to just spell it all out? “Hi everyone! How you doing today?” That seems a lot more correct and professional to me. I find some kids that try to write an essay, and occasionally type a “u” for the word “you” and “2morro” for “tomorrow”, of course when it’s a school paper, you fix it, which is what they do, but this stuff is getting to our heads. I especially point out to the occasional IM’er and phone texter that type really short words to type quickly. I mean, you could just spend 10 extra seconds to spell it all out, but then you have to go typing all small and quick, plus who said typing was a bad thing, right? I just feel that sometimes this nation is poisoned with sick grammar, and spelling too. Constitution, institutionalize, mispronunciation, I find people that cannot spell these words sometimes, and it kinda saddens me, especially people in high school. I think we need to start learning again, and get out of the mindset that life is a big joy ride you can sit on and watch all day as it flies by. Sometimes I just think, where am I…