Well, I did it. I finally killed him.
にゃんてね！ (As if, nyan!)
I've said before that important life events such as my marriage or ordination into the priesthood would be what spur me most readily to devise a new post for this here blog. Neither of these things have happened yet* but what has happened is my recent putting of a conclusion to not one (1) but TWO (2)** of my long-standing projects.
That is to say, I quit dilly-dallying and finally took them out behind the barn and BANG! I shot the locks off their cages and released them out into the wild! Or, well, out onto itch dot io and Bandcamp (dot com). For the former project was my text adventure "Fkreb," and the latter project was my debut album "Fourteen Cats Are Better Than None."
As a break from the usual linkage, let's put some embeds on here to liven things up! Since I haven't already plastered these embeds over my site enough, heh heh heh... They might bug though, so, uh, please reload if that happens...
Fkreb was a text adventure I started programming – let's see when the Visual Studio solution seems to have been made... Ugh that isn't telling me anything. Well, I was definitely in high school when I started writing it, so that would be about 70 years ago, since I'm going on 82. It's been awhile, is what I'm trying to say.
It was a project likely started on a whim that saw me putting together a little framework with which one could make a simple choice-based text adventure. This framework wound up being relatively robust and with it I wound up contriving an odd little world of puzzles and such that grew in scope to a rather frightening degree, thus making me a "scoped creep," as I believe the term is used.***
While the system was robust it wasn't particularly clean.**** Fkreb's code is very much what the Italians call "spaghetti code," and has some rather horrendous, or at the very least bad, features in its architecture. For instance, while the framework has its own file of reasonable length and scope, the game itself which makes use of it is written in a single code file that is over 10 000 lines long. That's at LEAST as long as 10 0000 football fields. Maybe more. I'm no footbologist.
Fkreb actually had been released before. However, its original iteration was a C# console program which you had to run an unsigned exe to play. This made it look rather suspicious, like a virus, even though I don't actually know how to code a virus. I was too busy coding Fkreb to learn how to do that.
Between the last blog post and now, however, I realized that I could, in fact, hook my Fkreb code up to a modern game engine such as Godot or Unity by simply programming my own "Console" class for it to interface with. In layman's terms, the original version of Fkreb tells your computer terminal "Yo, print this." but I could make it tell a mock terminal in Godot "If you could so please print this, sire, I and those of my pretigious***** house would be mighty grateful."
Hey, I'm pretty good at this explanation stuff. I should start a coding tutorial Youtube channel.
The bottom line is that I was able to make Fkreb run as a Godot game, rather than as a suspicious looking exe. (I mean, it's still an exe, but it has a pretigious house now.) That was an improvement. And thus it marked Fkreb's second release.
And now, well, they say third time's the charm, eh? The other day on a bit of a whim (as all things seem to begin) I made a Mac build of Fkreb's Godot version, gave some of the lategame a play, and WHAM! A crash!?! And not only that, KAPOW!! A softlock?!?! Maintaining my ever-stoic composure, I got those issues fixed up pronto (i.e. in a couple business days) and made a couple other minor improvements to the build, such as to icon stuff and splashscreen stuff, as the technical terms are.
With that all done, two (Z) days ago to the day of this writing, I finally released a version of Fkreb that's probably playable from beginning to end. Huzzah! Here's hoping there still ain't any particularly vicious bugs that will hamper anybody's otherwise butter-smooth Fkreb experience. You know, if anybody actually plays it.
Regardless as to whether anybody actually plays it, I have recently been working on its long awaited (by me) sequel: Fkreb 2. It's to include amazing innovations in game design such as "audio" and "graphics." I think this will really breath some new life into this dying industry.
I'm still in the process of programming the sequel's overall framework before putting its world and so on together. It's nice to be working on a programming project again, after quite some time of avoiding code. I figure that as a computer science student, I should probably know a thing or two about code. Uh, syntax, ammirite guys?
Onto the next item on the itemerary: the album release. Man, I'd been meaning to release Fourteen Cats Are Better Than None, the debut album of my music project, Fourteen Cats Named Billison, for years now. With this much experience under my belt, they should put me in charge of meaning to do things for years now.
I must admit it's pretty cool to see a Bandcamp page for my own album, not to mention the funny embeds I've been putting on this site, like so:
Wait, wrong embed. Whatever.
I must admit, I fear that the audio quality of some of the songs, particularly Proliferate Prolix, may be rather poor by Bandcamp's standards, but, um, hopefully it doesn't prove to be a problem. I reckoned it would be more effort than it's really worth to try remastering these old songs now, as it would serve me better to work on new stuff, which is part of why this release is a load off my back. A release, if you will.
Though to be honest, I've not been Billisoning, as I call it, all that much lately on account of focus upon my other endeavours, such as Fkreb 2, and writing silly blog posts, and my gaming backlog, I mean no not that last one haha. Well, I'll have to write Fkreb 2's soundtrack sooner or later. Gotta show the world that this "audio" thing has a place in gaming!
Ah, however, I would rather release my next full album, "Fourteen Cats Maimed Billison," sooner rather than later, so have been considering setting a deadline. I liked the fact that my debut album coincidentally released on the 14th of July (just yesterday as of this writing), but admittedly would have liked it more had it been on a Saturday, or should I say... a Caturday.
A swift net search revealed to me that the next instances of Caturday the 14th are in November of this year and August of next year. Furtunately, there did not seem to be any Caturday the 14ths that land on Friday the 13th. How lucky!
So purrhaps, if I stay on top of my business, I may try for a November release. Otherwise, next August doesn't seem too bad either. Time will tell.
Now, I'd prior planned for this blog post to cover a myriad of topics besides my mere media releases, but it came to my attention that it's already rather long, and that for a blog post to be narrower in the topics it covers may prove for more comprehensible reading.
That's right, I've started to consider User Experience. Or as I believe it's called in the industry: Execution Points. Ugh, I feel disgusting. Next thing I know I'll be rounding the corners on all my textboxes******, sanitizing my dubious remarks, and adding an AI assistant to my homepage... No... NO!! The only "ai" I care about, is YOUR 愛*******！キュンキュン！
This is Not Billison, who, don't get it wrong, doesn't like you or anything like that, signing off! Hmph!
Addendum: Man, I meant to write the follow-up post to this in the same day (and already have the opening to it), but I may postpone that to tomorrow or some other day given the time this one has taken, among other reasons. One such reason is that I spent additional time in the midst of writing this to update my blog_post_formatter.py program. Say hello to blog_post_formatter_mk_ii.py, who you can thank for the fancy way you can click on my myriad asterisks now. This modern convenience will breed complacency in you and I that will ultimately result in our downfall. Curse you, blog_post_formatter_mk_ii.py!!! (Said whilst shaking my fist at the py.)
Oh right, I'll be embarking******** upon a trip to Japan at week's end. Now that I think about it, the plane ride is slated to be rather long so perhaps to type a blog post would be a nice way to pass the time. At least until I inevitably have to answer a cry of "Is anybody here a doctor?!?" with "Yes! I am a doctor... of EVIL!"
* Shaman Stone jilted me and the seminary found my 3DS.
** For those unfamiliar: 2 > 1.
*** This is not how the term is used.
**** N-not in that way! 何考えているの？バカ！
*****I know how to spell prestigious, but wish to show solidarity with my beloved daughter Haru Urara from hit media franchise Umamusume: Pretty Derby. Unless you think that's weird. Then, uh, yeah, pretigus, eh? Hard word to spell! Like yaght.
******Websites need childproofing. Otherwise, the internet would be too dangerous for our youth and children.
*******Also Ai Hayasaka from hit manga/anime Love is War.
********Like a dog, or a tree. But not like an embankment.