Joshua a.k.a sigonasr2’s Blog

May 2, 2008

Yoshi’s Island DS Main Theme Song

Filed under: 1 — Tags: , , — sigonasr2 @ 7:42 am

So, yesterday I took a rough draft of what I’ve experimented and found to be the best-sounding solo piece for playing the Yoshi’s Island DS Main Theme Song, which you hear is the rhythm of almost every song. I have created a sheet music version of it and am posting it here. As I experimented with it on the Alto Saxophone, although it should sound similar on most instruments.

Yoshi\'s Island DS Main Theme Sheet Music

I haven’t posted in 2 days because I have been improving my life and trying to get a grip on my grades and life. Once it becomes stable, I will start using the computer more frequently again, so don’t expect a large amount of posts for the rest of this or next week.

Also, our bus now has 7 Mario Kart Players. I’ve only played with 7 players once, and it was really fun. Of course on Mario Kart DS, there’s always an item shortage as almost everyone grabs the 5 or 6 items before you can, although sometimes other people miss and you get lucky.

April 26, 2008

Video Game Mayhem 0.1

Filed under: 1 — Tags: , , , , , , , — sigonasr2 @ 10:57 pm

About a year ago, I started to work on a game called Video Game Mayhem, so this is kind of like a revival of this game too. Video Game Mayhem is based on Super Smash Brothers, and will have a large amount of similar features to the game. I am declaring this file Version 0.1 as there’s a lot of work to be done. I will explain the game a bit in its current state. When you start the game, you are shown a Select a Character screen, which lets you select from three characters. There’s Red Square, Blue Square, and Purple T. Red Square and Blue Square are obvious, and Purple T is a purple Triangle. Currently all characters have two attacks, and when you choose a stage and use them, you can see how they work. The spacebar is your normal attack and down arrow key is your special attack. Red has a sword that swings around him when you press space, and when you press Space, it creates a small red square that spins downward to the ground and bounces off anything it hits for about 1 second, and then disappears. It’s powerful but quick and you can shoot up to 3 of them at a time. The Blue square has a slightly longer sword than red’s, but is not as strong. The special attack is a lightning bolt that can really hammer opponents under platforms. The Purple Triangle is more known for its great recovery moves and longest survival rates if you know how to use him. Whenever you turn right or left while ever falling, your falling rate slows down by 2/3rds the normal rate, so you can get back on platforms easily when you fly off. It’s normal move is a black line that moves upward from it. It’s very hard to hit someone with it, but can do about 30% at a time when it hits someone as it goes up and brings the person with them. His special move is not an actual attack, but more of a recovery. When you press it, for about 2 seconds, it turns into a black block and moves quickly downward and if it hits a platform, it’ll start bouncing. No one can attack it while it is in the black box, but you have to be careful about using it. Whenever you fly really high up and about to die, you can use that to stop falling. If you do not choose two characters, one for player and one for CPU, it will cause an error currently, but I am going to fix that in future versions. Once you’re actually playing, you’ll see two numbers on each character. The black top number is the percentage of your character. The larger it gets, the farther you fly off with each attack and the longer it takes to regain control of your character when you go flying. The green number is how many lives you have until you lose. The goal is to not fly off and die. Going too high or too low kills you and you lose a life each time. On the character selection screen, you can select how many lives there are by clicking the Stocks:3 button and then it’ll ask for a new number. Making it 0 will cause a game to end instantly. It will also keep track of your wins, losses, and total games played for the time you play that game. The camera system works quite well in the game as I have fixed it from a rather buggy camera system before, but now it always keeps both players on the screen at least. You can download this game here: http://www.box.net/shared/u5nqdrascs. I will update the Z-Gamers site soon.

Enough of that for now. I also completed the next version of Ball Amnesia with a few extra fixes, and the official level 3 added in, so now levels 1-5 and level 10 are now all in the Easy path to play, so I am halfway there to completing the official Easy path levels. You probably are wondering what the medium path will be like, hehehehe. Link to new version here: http://www.box.net/shared/o2m5m2es8s

The reason why I didn’t post for a whole day was because I was at my friend Michael’s house again yesterday, this time with my other friend Charles. It was fun. We played some Super Smash Brothers Brawl and that was fun. At the smash league, I was told that I really should start learning grabbing. They say I can become a much better player if I start implementing grabbing into my move arsenal, so should I? We also played Mario Kart DS and all three of us did go on wifi. At one point Michael and Charles found each other in a match against two others. One was a noobish player and the other was a decent power slider, but it ended up only being against them two. All three of us are snakers and love to play Mario Kart occasionally. We played some Magic: The Gathering. Now, I never was into the game and still never will be, but I guess it was ok. It took me about 30 minutes to learn the basic rules and terms of the game, but I did ok for the dark deck I was given. I was playing against a so-called Control deck and some other deck. My problem was using all my life for cards that were really good but sucked life out of me each term, which I eventually learned was bad. So that was all exciting and such.

We now have our general music for next year’s marching season for band, and I decided to take my E flat Alto Saxophone this weekend. I’ll put up some audio clips of me playing the tunes. Obviously just my part won’t sound that great, but I guess it’s ok to hear me play. I am not too good at playing my instrument but the effort is there. I will put some audio clips up tomorrow.

I also did another part of Earthbound today and am uploading the new video now.

So that’s a summary of what I did today and yesterday.

April 19, 2008

Great Day in a Strange Way

Filed under: 1 — Tags: , , , , , , — sigonasr2 @ 9:46 am

It seemed yesterday had a very strange tone with the word “fun” in it. During our lunch period 3 of my friends and I all played Mario Kart DS balloon battle. It was very exciting and I guess one of my friends Josiah got introduced to my first gaming strategy in all games. In most games where you can fight other players in any way, I tend to target players instead of hitting anyone I see. Everyone starts out at a neutral level. If a player decides to attack me, they immediately start becoming the clear target for the rest of the time we play that game. If a player is right next to me and decides to tag team to kill someone with me, until it comes between my allies and I, I will probably avoid hitting them back. Once a player gets annoyed by me targetting them after awhile, they try to go for me only and I target them even more often! As long as you know you can win at the game, this strategy usually works. You want to prioritize your targets from least to greatest enemy so that once your first target’s eliminated, your second target is already chosen. I also did a similar reference during Super Smash Brothers Brawl, which Josiah didn’t fare too well with it either. So he said that is really cheap, so I said “Ok, I will be cheap then.” He said you stink at the game by using those cheap moves (Pikachu’s Lightning attack especially), so I said “Ok, I stink at the game then.” As long as I get to be me and do things the way I choose to, then I don’t mind being called whatever.

I went over to Michael’s house after school, which is why I didn’t post something until now. We played some Mario Kart, then we went onto the computer. I played this game called “Seven Minutes”, which happens to be made in Game Maker. It’s actually quite interesting and fun. You can check it out at http://www.gamemakergames.com/?a=view&id=6520, personally I really loved it and it actually got me scared and frantic as to hurry and get through the level. Try this game too and tell me your opinion…lol http://www.mazapan.se/games/BurnTheRope.php.

I hopefully uploaded my next Earthbound video. It seems to not be showing up for me right now, but we’ll see. Brayney also commented on my blog if you haven’t noticed, that was “Michael”. [EDIT] Video now works.

April 15, 2008

Some Understanding Today

Filed under: 1 — Tags: , , , , , — sigonasr2 @ 9:43 pm

So, today was full of little tidbits of information I learned about that I never knew before. I have finally uploaded the lengthy Earthbound video to Google Video, but it took a long time. Not only to upload, but the processing. I think Processing is only determined by the length of the video, which is actually obvious if you think about it logically. But then again, I always see everything differently. I also learned a bit about how video conversion works. I did my 4th video of Earthbound today and decided to record it at 320×240 instead of my usual 512×460. Then when I put it through Windows Movie Maker, the file only took 16 minutes to turn into a 76 MB video from 989 MB. What’s strange is, when I did that very lengthy video of 512×460, it was only 516 MB and it took 160 minutes to convert to 90 MB. Now what happened here? I think it’s because the program must adjust every little frame to a different size and the larger the size difference, the longer it takes.

I have been watching the people on my bus since last Thursday, and I kept hearing a familiar sound. The sound of the ringing bell/chime sound from Mario Kart DS when you start a race. Now, I’ve had my DS for about 1.5 years now, but I haven’t gotten it out since last summer. So I went on the bus this morning with my DS and went to multiplayer to look for a game session. Nothing there. I noticed that the people I suspected were playing the DS’s were farther than my stop was, so I sat back and waited. A few stops later, I saw the two people I suspected played Mario Kart DS. So I looked on my Mario Kart game rooms after a few minutes, and found one. Then I joined it and played with them until we reached our school. Same thing when I got on the bus afterschool. It was fun, but they are still beginners, and I got first every race except one time. I enjoyed it and will continue playing with them I guess.

I am now uploading the 4th Earthbound video and will be posting it as soon as google video finishes processing it.

I also made my Hello World! Program from a C++ tutorial. I am finally taking on the challenge of C++ and hope to be able to make games with it eventually. That’s my ultimate goal with it.

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