Latest Nature Notes:
We stood in our yard to watch fireworks that are very close by, hooray! A bat zoomed around us in circles maybe 2 feet away, and also cavorted about, hopefully eating those horrible copper beetles. I hate those things. Another bat flew overhead, maybe 20 feet above us, and when it was 50 feet or more away, you could clearly hear its wings flapping, sounded like a dog panting. It was huge. The opposite of huge were what we discovered today! The pair of quails who live in our yard were out front and we were watching them when all of a sudden a
herd of baby quail came out of the bushes and ran, following them like ducklings. They were teensy! There were probably a dozen of them! In opposite of teeny news, there's a track in our yard that I'm hoping is manmade, something getting dragged along the ground. Because if it's not, we have a snake that is upwards of 3 inches in diameter.
Latest Ninja Notes:
Getting into the swing of things for sure. If you didn't know already (don't know if I mentioned it before), there are these poles that stick out of the wall which you can leap up and grab onto. You spin around them like a gymnast, and can tap the button to release in either direction. They just add to the flippy fun. I've also now added the markers for multiplayer - I decided it was too much trouble to do different colored guys for the teams, so there will be markers floating above your head indicating your team. And lastly, besides some fun design work, I've put together a lot of the official editor stuff. It's now much snazzier than it was. It's a WAY simpler editor than Dr. L, because as yet at least there is nothing like Specials in this game. There may end up being a basic version of them, but nothing fancy. This is an arcade game, not an adventure. I hope to have the editor pretty much done tomorrow, though there will surely be room for more stuff in it. In this game, you do a lot of your editing in text files, not in the game editor. You get to script your own bullets, enemies, and items. What's kind of fun is that the enemies all use one button just like you. In theory, any enemy can be controlled by the player, if there's a level set up for the player to control them (of course, the more stationary enemies would be a little boring). I'm adding one level to each Era where you do actually play as one of the enemies from the world. A dynamic and interesting one, not a stationary one.
I've created all the AI code, it should be working (it's not too bright, I'm sure, but it'll give the illusion of some kind of life), but I've been sidestepping into all this editor and multiplayer stuff to get to the point where I can test it. I could've hacked something together, but hey, this stuff needs to get done anyway, right?
Still sticking to the horrible slavedriver schedule. How long will it last? It's hard. I miss having fun. But getting things done is starting to have its own sneaky appeal. Maybe this is how people who aren't lazy feel.
Oh, PS, the title of this entry (if it doesn't get cut short in the database) is a reference to the fact that once you pour oil into a deep fryer, you're kind of committed to frying repeatedly, because otherwise you're just wasting the oil, and it'll go bad. In much the same way, if you buy an MMORPG, you have to keep on playing it all the time, because you're paying that monthly fee anyway. We made fried wontons for dinner. Yum.
