It's pretty amazing for me to look back on this blog and realise I haven't posted anything for nearly 3 years. And it's funny that the last post mainly mentions my first ever analog lenses, because I've done so much ever since with them - well, the Helios at least, the other one was quickly replaced by a better Miranda - and I've had my filmmaker career so far pretty much built around that, it's just overwhelming and quite curious to say the least.
2016 in particular, however, was a year of deeply mind-changing experiences for me, and I've had a longing to get back to writing ever since. Not necessarily write on this blog (which I honestly had somewhat forgotten about), but just writing. It truly soothes the soul. Well, to me at least.
I'm probably the only person who reads this blog, like I've said before, so I'll just use this to check in on myself every few years or so.
Thus, my "feature accomplishments" since my last post, heh:
December 2014 finally saw the release of my band's debut album, which I'm very proud of :^)
In July 2015, I released the soundtrack album for Pokémon Universe, a Pokémon fangame for which I was composing the music (d'oh) and also doing some occasional map design. The game ended up being cancelled, so I took the opportunity to release what was done in a neat packaging. The full thing can be downloaded for free on my Bandcamp.
And, finally, most of my time was spent balancing between college and videoish-ing. Most of my work can be found on my Vimeo.
And that's sort of the bulk of what I did these last three years, in terms of productive relevant stuff at least.
I'll attempt to get back to writing things soon :^)
I recently had the pleasure to acquire a couple of M42 lenses for my Canon 600D. A Carenar 28mm f2.8, and a Helios 58mm f2.0 (which I test out on the video below):
Which means I'll be more focused on photography and filmmaking again this year, or so I hope. In the meanwhile, gaming-wise, I finished Alan Wake yesterday, and South Park: The Stick of Truth a couple of weeks ago. SoT was an amazing game, thus me finishing it abnormally fast, it just kept pushing me to pick it up. Alan Wake was alright, the mechanics do get a little repetitive, but I did pull it through until the end, so yeah. It's a good game and it was worth the ride. I'm currently playing God of War III, I should be somewhat near the end, but I rarely have the time to pick it up. I'll hopefully finish it in a month or so. And that's pretty much it. I'm not in the mood to care much for this blog at this instant.
(Yes, I'll continue my Green Light 10th Anniversary series of posts soon enough).
I've had a lot going through my head lately, without taking into account the massive amounts of work I've been doing during the last couple of months. Plus I'm currently having exams and whatnot, and my grandmother's pretty sick long term.
With all this, I haven't had much time for gaming. This also made me realise this post isn't really very gaming-oriented as it usually is, is it? No, it's not. I figure this is a good time to make this an everything-oriented blog. I might not be posting every time I finish a game, because sometimes it just seems like it's suddenly not so relevant when bigger things are in motion. But I'll find a corner for that too here, naturally. Even in this post. So, first things first, I am currently in the process of completely remodelating my room. All my fragile and absurdly crappy PS1 games had to be temporarily moved to a confined space, along with all my other games, which now looks like a spot in a small retro videogame store. Wow. This includes my newly acquired Parappa The Rapper 2 and (*sealed!*) Um Jammer Lammy! I pretty much stopped getting new games about a year ago, occasionally getting one or another if an opportunity was too good to miss, and this was one of those (getting painfully rarer) ones. While cleaning up my room and stumbling upon all kinds of nostalgic memorabilia, I found an absolute relic I assumed lost forever:
If you've read the only music related post I've written before this one (I won't link you, ha!) you noticed my favorite music album of all time is Nobuo Uematsu's brilliant OST of Final Fantasy VI. Not only because the music truly is amazing, not only for the nostalgic factor - it truly is - but this song in particular (link to the Black Mages version, I know, but you'll find the original one on YouTube as well) was THE song that made me want to learn to play the organ when I was 12 years old. It's not that I was bad at it, but I was pretty lazy. I had organ lessons for a year back then with a good teacher, but I was never really into following his instructions. I didn't want to read scores, etc. I stopped playing altogether for a few years, until I picked up the guitar in 2006 and started learning by myself. I picked up the piano/organ again by the same time and definitely improved alot at it (I suppose). At least it's been a fantastic companion, aiding me on my musical compositions, mainly for my band and for games.
But the thing is, it really was the music from Final Fantasy (pretty much from all the first 9 numbered entries, but especially I, II and VI) that made me acquire my taste in music from a very young age. That and Pokémon too. So much, that as a young kid, in my last year of elementary school, I actually burned CD's with every piece of music from these games' soundtracks that I could find online in random websites.
I was very lucky to have internet access at the time, the ol' dial-up, most of my friends at school didn't have it. But I was a geeky kid and learned my way through it to download all this musical goodness in a way I can't really figure out today.
Yes, I burned the battle themes from FF 1 through 9 to a CD.
Pokémon as well (a couple of years after elementary school). Actually, I ripped music from the games using the emulator. I didn't know they actually commercially released the soundtracks of the games at the time (specifically the GBA games Ruby/Sapphire, it was by the time they came out), so they sounded like crap, but I'd just listen to them every day while spending the day at my grandmother's house, with my trusty Sony Walkman.
It's funny because I still do these kind of playlists on Foobar, like "battle themes from SNES RPG's" and stuff like that. Even after over a decade. I'm pretty eager to play these on my computer, though I actually wonder if they still work.
Oh, nostalgia.
And this is all relevant because all of that eventually led me to this:
And what's this, you might ask? It's the vague release date of my band's debut album. Yes, after nearly 4 years of uncertainty, fuckedupness and a couple hundred lineup changes, it's done. And it's almost finished recording. So yes it WILL be out sometime around March/April I very much hope.
This is another one of the reasons I haven't been very active lately, obviously. Being in the studio is a fantastic and very calming experience, mainly when the studio is located far from civilization. And it's been great to just chill out and forget about social connections, Facebook, and whatever's been going on in my life. Also take photos of nature and shit.
It's been somewhat physically tiring, but very psychologically stimulating at the same time, so I'm actually sad I'm just about to finish my guitar parts. It's been a great way to practice guitar though since I'm usually lazy on that side, generally giving priority to actual composing. And if you've read it this far and are still interested, chances are you'll be interested in this as well, so I gladly invite you to check us out. Shell From Oceanic!
Gaming wise, since my last post, I've finished Limbo, Max Payne 3 and (FINALLY!!!) Final Fantasy VII. All of them wonderful experiences. I'm still playing Darksiders, but I'm pretty damn near the end now, so I should be finishing that anytime soon and then moving on to something else.
As for tonight, I'll be sleeping on the floor since I have no bed. Just like the good ole summer nights. Excuse me as I'm getting myself a hot cup o' milk now and off to watch either Six Feet Under or FFVII Advent Children.
Welcome! Be warned, this post might as well be called "Story of my Life, Part 1". I'll try to keep it short, but at the same time I'm gonna inevitably put a lot of heart into this post, because this is pretty much me, texted up. There's alot of uninteresting stuff going on, but this is essentially that, pretty much, even though it focuses mainly on Green Light.
Oh, it's 2013? Green Light Games would now be 10 years old! If it still existed and/or was minimally relevant to anyone!
Green Light Games was a small (and not really very significant) game making group founded by me and my great friend José Pedro, who at the time was mostly known by Bonesman. It started as a small community in 2003 and on it evolved until its predictably incoming death in 2007.
I was still a young kid some time between 2002-2003 when I found myself in the most defining moment of my life.
- - The Butterfly Effect
I loved videogames. Unfortunately, I didn't really have the monetary power to purchase many. Luckily, this was a time when a game would last for quite a long time. A few years before 2003, I had a few PC games, namely Tomb Raider 2, Lode Runner 2, Croc 2, Frogger 2, and a bunch of other games ending in "2". Oh, Age of Empires 2 as well, that was one beast of an awesome game.
Eventually I got a PS1, and PS2, but games were still scarce because of my limited budget (I'd buy around 2 games a year if I was lucky). But then the internet appeared! Even though back in 2002-2003 Miniclip already existed, and probably Kewlbox, my internet couldn't handle such things. So I'd just have to go into the wild and find freeware games.
I just wanted to play games. But during my quest for free games, I found GamingWorld. GW was a website dedicated to amateur home game making, and at the time it was one of the main sources of development apps such as Game Maker, RPG Maker, and many others, and it also hosted an enormous amount of games created with them. I'm pretty sure it was the no. 1 go to place for this. As I was writing this paragraph, I actually just went to the Internet Wayback Machine to check out the old website from 10 years ago, and it literally just brought a tear to my eye. The fond memories are just too many. Just remembering how I could change my avatar to any picture I wanted to was a fantastic experience for me as a kid in the days of Geocities and Altavista, where many of my colleagues didn't even have internet access or didn't care much.
CLICK HEREfor a snapshot of the old GW website from October 2003.
We're talking early 2000's here. Most kids my age were talking about fast cars, skateboarding, Linkin Park, Eminem, Coyote Ugly, movies with cheap sex scenes in them, the beginning of MTV's dreadful decline from music TV to what it is today, and whatever the fuck else was "cool" at the time. I was into something else.
- - 2003 marked the first of what I consider to be the two most defining moments of my life. By that year I was starting to learn basic algorithmics, and I started making games with RPG Maker 2000 (this was by the time RM2003 came out, but I only moved on to that one a year later). My first venture into the wonders of game making was a pretty basic RPG called Light Defence: The Power of the Orbs. At the time, I was playing Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars for the SNES (excellent game by the way, I'll play it again some time), so I kind of took inspiration from that for the storyline. The game was essentially about the "planet", and two sacred orbs that kept its balance. The orbs were stolen by an evil witch, and a young man, Kennethen, was entrusted with the task of defeating her. Upon attempting to do so, the orbs are destroyed in the proccess, and everything pretty much gets fucked up from there. He eventually finds Buck (what a crappy choice of name), who he thought was dead (gasp) and they eventually find out that they are brothers. Oh, and they are the Light Soldiers! Entrusted with the power needed to defeat the evil witch and restore balance to the world! Cool, eh?
So, it was pretty crappy overall. And it had pretty crappy graphics and map design too, as you can figure from the picture. But then again it was my first attempt at a game. I've had a consistent flaw when it comes to game design. I'd always make the first 10% of a game, then the last 10%, and then I'd pretty much just make random tiny bits until I abandoned the project because the ideas were flowing so hard and it was simply a mess.
And this didn't only apply to the games themselves, but also to the project managing. Very soon after LD, I started work on its sequel Light Defence 2: Star Barrier. I had already made the ending of LD1. The witch was actually a crazy alien superbeing, and after being defeated, a tear in the spacetime is open, and sucks Kennethen right in, and he is transported A THOUSAND YEARS INTO THE FUTURE!
By this time, I was playing Final Fantasy X, so if this sounds awfully familiar to the beginning where Tidus gets transported a thousand years into the future by Sin, yes, it's no coincidence.
The "Star Barrier" that protected the solar system has been destroyed by an unknown entity. This time Kennethen is all by himself, and he's at some kind of hub somewhere in space, with portals to four other planets. In each planet, there's a star piece of the barrier (again, Mario RPG much). Upon going to each planet and finding the scattered pieces, and meeting some friends along the way, he finds out that the lady that's responsible for the warp hub is evil, yada yada, you go defeat the final boss which turns out to be Kennethen's father (lol) and he's actually the evil entity, but he's been doomed to be it and has no way of denying his destiny.
Kennethen defeats the man, and it turns out that this guy would eventually turn into the being that was the evil witch's true form back in the first game. However, as he was killed, the events of the previous game technically didn't get to happen, and so everything fucks up from that point forward (backward???) and a stream of alternate universes pops up.
Before moving on, I'd like to mention that these screenshots are from the 2005 version of the game (I redid the two first Light Defence games from scratch two years later, that's why they look more fleshed out, I'll get into that later on).
This led to Light Defence 3, the final game of the trilogy. This one had a more complex storyline. It shows the story of Kennethen in one of the alternate universes. He goes back to the time of the first game, but since its events never actually happened, things are drastically different, and the world is more evolved. Instead of a medieval/magic/wizardry kind of age, there's some modern technology going on. This is where I really ripped off chunks of story from FFX, mainly the ability to summon creatures, the presence of a summoner and its quest to defeat an unknown being of neither good nor evil, but it had some interesting subplots to it, like a character who's an angry android seeking revenge on its makers for reasons that I honestly can't seem to remember. But I remember it was somewhat interesting....... possibly. It was 10 years ago. I was a kid, so what do I know.
Unfortunately I don't have any screenshots of the game, as I never really actually did much map design or overall work in it. So I guess I'll move on.
Amidst all this, I was an active member in the GW forums. There were a lot of in jokes going on, let's call them internal memes, and I was sort of trying to get used to them. I was slowly getting used to the sarcasm of the internet, the sarcasm of a huge community with members who had literally dozens of thousands of forum posts and were already well known and treated almost as internet gods. And man, the humor was really dark on the internet at this time. I still have an image folder full of pics from that era.
Boy, I'll never feel the joy of being in such a community again. Things were so fun.
Besides this, you could only really communicate through email, Windows Messenger, or the godawful AOL Messenger, and what a fucking piece of shit software that was. Luckily I only had to use it a few times to talk to a guy who had partnered with me for a short time to make an RPG before he just mysteriously vanished.
The anal cove of the forums, appropriately located at the bottom. Fun times.
I was trying to fit in the community, just like in real life. Trying to understand their memes, their conversations, their humor, only to fail many times and even get banned at times for sharing shock site pictures like Tubgirl or Goatse or Pain4.jpg, (which were matter of discussion at the time because it was around the time they appeared), and I'd be like "What? Why was I banned? What did I do wrong?"
My mind had already been pretty much raped by 2003. I was afraid to go to bed at night because I thought the Goatse guy would come up to me at night and shake his rectum in my face while some creepy music would be playing in the background. I lived in the internet. It was my home. In school, I tried talking about the internet and my games with my friends, only to be obviously slapped in the face. They had no idea what the fuck I was blabbering about. And they didn't give two shits. I was the proverbial geeky kid. And that was, well, pretty uncool. To anyone. But I didn't really care. I wanted to hype up my "internet cool". So I created my own community, and thus the founding pillars of what would be Green Light Games were erected. I egocentrically called it, the Hitergaming Forums. The most embarassing part is that these non-nazi forums (many people thought they were called "Hitler Gaming", which is hilarious) still exist. I could take them down, but I never got around to it because from time to time, a couple years go by and then in the depths of my mind I stumble upon the fact that I had this a decade ago, and I laugh. And I'll shamefully post a link to them here. Click here if you dare. I suppose all I wanted was really the power of administration. The power of being an admin in a community. The power of banning people, and locking inappropriate threads, and shit like that. Boy it felt good. This community lasted for a little over a year (I think?) but it was meaningless. Anyway, moving on to where it starts getting more relevant, also more pics.
- - 2004 was rather interesting. This was when I got Bonesman to join my game making adventures.
A little before that, however, I wanted to make a website. I only had the community forums, which were for discussion. But I wanted to have my own place. My place to show my creations. I didn't really know squat of webdesign at the time besides a few notions of HTML and, surprisingly, PHP, from my knowledge acquired from working with the Invisionfree forums.
I met this guy who went by the name of Soul somewhere, and we hastily came up with this oddly primitive design. It was 100% flash.
Nevermind the horrible spelling. Hey, English isn't my native language, alright!? I named the thing Echorill Network. I just thought it was catchy, I don't know. But it didn't look catchy. It really didn't catch on, and I abandoned the project. This was shortly before I got Bonesman to work with me in another project. Well, that's not exactly the correct way to put it. What happened is that I had to teach him to work with RPG Maker, because he was pretty interested. And all those test maps we did together starting piling up, and they soon became about 70% of what was our first project together, which was also the first (and last) that actually reached completion. The Empire of Arkantos. Bonesman named the game from the start, so I won't talk about the naming.
Basically, and to try to make the whole thing more interesting, it's the story of Arkantos, a young boy from the countryside, who upon reaching a certain age, sets out to explore the world of Arkantos (what) with his three best friends. He finds out, however, that not everything's wine and roses!! He finds his childhood friend, Laura, getting raped by some guy. As he tried to chase him, he escapes into the wild, and Laura disappears. Arkantos then finds some aliens. What happened? Is it a secret alien plot? Who knows! And so the adventure begins, and it makes no sense at all. The game took somewhere between 2 to 3 months to be completed, which was pretty fast, considering it has a little over an hour of gameplay. There's a very enlighting article about the game HERE, and you can also watch the trailer:
One very interesting aspect of Arkantos is that me and Bonesman just discovered this Summer that it's an excellent drinking game! By drinking a shot of [insert heavily alcoholic drink here] every time the "old man" pops up proudly stating that he is homosexual, you WILL get completely FUCKED UP. I've tried it myself. Twice! The first time had pretty hardcore results. I was more cautious on the second. Great fun was had overall.
After the arguably *great success!* of Arkantos, we moved on to something that would actually be appealing to anyone over the age of 13. Legaya: The Sword of Destiny was out attempt at making a funny RPG that kind of had some Easy-Quest humor to it, but was supposed to be a much larger game in scope.
Too bad it never got more than 5% done at best.
Conspiracy 2004: The Revelation was done around the time of the US presidential elections, and again, it was our attempt at nonsense stupid humor while dealing with the Iraq situation, John Kerry, Saddam Hussein, aliens and whatnot.
Yes, it even has George W. Bush in the title screen.
Because this is clearly what Iraq looks like.
During these times of mindless fun, me and Bonesman went on with our website, after the failed Echorill Network thing. We had to give ourselves a real name, so we picked the abysmal HAXOR GAMING NETWORK.
And thus, what was to become Green Light Games, was born.
Green Light Games v1.0
Just as a side note, as of this post, the website is still online. Find it if you want to.
By the look on your face, you obviously don't.
There's not much to say about it. Now, while this was going on, I was working on a game of my own.
Cagemaze was the first game in which I actually attempted a fully original storyline. It was the story of Ruben and his two best friends, who were orphans, because of the endless war that was going on throughout the world due to its insane ruler, a mad emperor, much Kefka-esque (I even ripped his sprites from FFVI). And it's pretty much an anti-imperial game (this sounds much like FFVI at its core, but it was different).
I made a bunch of maps for it and started working on a sequel as well (d'oh), but both games never really saw much progress.
- - 2005 was where it started to get interestingly funny. First off, I started working alone in another project. Unbeknownst to Bonesman, my next game had its story centered around him.
After the events of the first game, Arkantos 2: Quest for Bonesman is pretty much what the subtitle says. Bonesman has disappeared for some reason. And it's up to me to make the game. So Arkantos and his friends go on a search to rescue him.
The game had Arkantos travel through four worlds. The first one was a Pokémon world, which utilized Pokémon graphics, enemies, etc, as I've always wanted to make my own, well, Pokémon world.
Although the game never got finished unlike the first one, I had the chance to start working on some original mechanics, even though primitive, but I had never done nothing of the kind before, like "The Hacker". This proved useful in later games.
A little later on, I started working on revamped versions of Light Defence 1 and 2. This is where I really started to improve on my map design and overall getting my shit together. Already posted pics from LD2 on this post, so I'll leave some here from the *new* LD1:
As usual, project abandoned.
At some point during this year, we also changed the website layout, and made ourselves a new logo:
Ain't that hardcore?
So we got this flashy new website, that would now consume much less energy out of your 1024x768 CRT monitor (800x600 in my case, poor times).
Green Light Games v2.0
And that's it for now folks! My next post will be less focused on games and more focused on my own personal storyline, as well as in Haxor Gaming's evolution from a small website nobody gave a fuck about, into a very awesome potential source of wonderous games and magnificient success and fame that lasted for only a very short amount of time.
A story filled with adventure, awesomeness, failure, geocities, freewebs (actually the lack of, because I got my shit straight when it came to HTML/PHP/CSS) early interwebs, 4chan, and MOAR!
Thank you for taking the time to read, you weren't really supposed to. But I love you. <3
