Got quite a lot of IRL achievements over the past week...

---

Our usual pub had a western themed night, and I got to try riding a mechanical bull for the first time!
That was pretty terrifying. My arms and legs were really sore afterwards from trying to hold on.

I've also been trying to drink less when I go out, because:
• I become an asshole when I drink too much.
• I should be able to have fun in social situations without the need for liquid courage.
• Binge drinking just isn't healthy.

I usually just get coffee or OJ at pubs now.

---

Went on a wee cycling trip to Loch Lomond with some buddies.
We only cycled around 30km, and I was still pretty exhausted. I thought I could do better than that after all the practice I get on my stationary bike, but it turns out that real cycling is a wee bit harder.
It looks like I'm fitter than most of my highschool friends now, which is quite an improvement after being the most unfit a year ago.
At the end of our adventure we cycled up a massive hill. I got to the top first, and a few people never even made it. That felt pretty good.

I've got a long way to go before I catch up with my brother though (he's still studying in Sweden).
He managed to cycle 80km along icy roads on a crappy bike that can't even change gears...

I'm planning on actually buying myself a bike (I've always been using borrowed ones), but don't really know what sort of specs I need. Any advice?
I've been told I should get a hybrid bike with puncture-resistant tires, whatever that means...

---

I did a presentation about online game development for a highschool game dev class. And then I did it again for a second class.
I think I did alright, because I actually got some real questions at the end, which means at least a few people were paying attention.
It actually wasn't as terrifying as talking in front of my professors at University though.

Afterwards I got to chill out with the computing teachers in their staff room, got some cake, and got invited to speak again at the start of the next school year.
So that's another pile of experience earned.

---

Went to my cousin's son's first communion! Never been to one of these and didn't know what to expect.
Even though I was raised Catholic for a while, I still think church is weird.

They made the kids eat the flesh and blood of Jesus! What a crazy cult!

At one point the priest basically said "You guys better come to church every week, or else it's going to be hard for me to explain things at your funerals!".
I'm paraphrasing a bit, but that's basically what he meant to say. Whaaaat. How can people sit and listen to that kind of stuff?

Anyway, afterwards we went to my cousin's flat to celebrate.
Apparently a first communion is a pretty big deal for some people.
The amount of cake was unreal. We barely got through any of it.
There was balloons and presents and everything you would expect at a kid's birthday party. Weird.

It's also weird how stereotypically working class my mum's side of the family is...

---

On the same day as the communion, I went to a party hosted by one of my dad's friends from work. I didn't know anyone.
It was mostly old people and their kids. It was difficult but kind of interesting to casually talk to old people.

The host and his family were Chinese, so the food was pretty interesting too.
Also, they had more cake. So much cake on this day.

I was wearing a shirt that I got in Beijing, so that helped start conversations.

---

I need to find some new achievements to complete now... I don't have any interesting plans in the foreseeable future...
I am actually bored out of my mind now...

I've had it with Facebook!
Comments on pages are no longer in chronological order! They don't seem to be in any order at all!
This makes checking for new comments nearly impossible now...

I don't even... how... why are they trying so hard to ruin the site?!
Sure, a lot of the horrible changes are for profit, but I can't see how mixing up the order of the comments could be profitable in any way!

Anyway, is Google+ popular yet?
I'm gonna go have a look at it, and I'll try starting up a page on there... do Google+ pages work in a similar way to Facebook pages?

I'm looking forward to watching Facebook die.
It might take a while to get back the 46k likes I have on there though...
Actually, those likes are pretty worthless. Most of those guys don't even see my posts unless I pay Facebook to "promote" them. Ugh.

I always complain a lot about the site updates and new features on DeviantArt... but after 8 years, I think DeviantArt is still my favorite social network.
The only thing DeviantArt lacks, in my opinion, is a way of viewing a complete stream of updates by a user (deviations, journals, recent comments, links, etc) in one place, like what Facebook and Twitter are centered on.

I'm currently sitting through jury duty! It's literally a complete waste of time!
They invite us into the court, then ask us to sit in the waiting room, and then send us home after an hour or two because we're not needed. Plus traveling time, that's three hours a day wasted on average, for no reason at all.

Tomorrow will be my fifth and final day, unless I actually get picked to sit on the jury, in which case I could be stuck there for a few more days...
It's like a lottery where you can only lose! The stress!

Well, at least I'm getting up early and making friends in the waiting room.

---

Started learning to drive again! Gonna stick to it this time.
Almost ready for the theory test, but haven't had too much practice on the road yet.

---

Tried mining Bitcoins just for fun. I've got 0.01 BTC after like 2 days!
One of my friends is considering getting some Bitcoin mining hardware. I'm interested to see how that works out for him.

For those of you who don't know, Bitcoin is the latest craze in speculation!
Some people have gotten very rich off of it, others not so much.

---

Continuing my research into tower defence, I played through Orcs Must Die, which was pretty fun.
I don't really have much to criticize there, except maybe that the same strategies worked too often. It didn't really encourage experimentation so much.
Pretty much always picked knights, archers, flame traps, spike traps, wall spikes, barricades, sword staff, and whatever magic works against the current enemies.

Anyone know how Orcs Must Die 2 compares to the first one?

---

Played through the Warcraft 3 expansion.
I cheated to get through 2 of the levels; It got too hard towards the end!

---

Played through Trine 2. It's too similar to Trine 1 to stay interesting, in my opinion.
Some of the new puzzles with the pipes and water were interesting, but they also removed the collectable power ups from the first game, and replaced them with pointless poems! Wut!
They were also a bit generous with the checkpoints right in the middle of battles. Why should I even try to stay alive if there's literally no penalty for dying?!

The graphics were pretty though. <3

---

Currently playing Final Fantasy 13-2... I didn't expect it to be good or anything; I just wanted something I could play without thinking while I cycle, and it's pretty good for that. It's a pretty crappy game though. Most of the monsters are recycled from FF13, the plot is even more confusing, the difficulty seems pretty unbalanced (or maybe I just suck), and it expects me to remember the events of the previous game, which I don't... oh well.

---

EBF4 on Greenlight is going pretty slowly; at this rate it will probably take nearly a year to get through! ):
I might actually start working on the new content soon, just to generate more interest.
If that still doesn't speed up Greenlight, I guess I'll try some alternative services to Steam, like Desura or GOG or whatever.
At the very least the new content should boost sales on Kongregate.

Updated EBF4's Greenlight page a bit, and added the new trailer.
Go check it out and vote if you haven't already: [link]

The game's currently got 33% of the votes needed to get into the top 100, so there's still a long way to go...

Feedback plz: [link]

The script isn't finalized, the audio needs some balancing, HFX is doing some new music for it, and a few other bits are still to be updated.
But I think it looks pretty cool!

Well EBF4's been on Greenlight for almost 3 days ([link]), and although it started out pretty well, I fear that most of the support so far is from hardcore fans, and that things are gonna get worse soon.

I've got quite a lot of "No" votes... more than "Yes" votes now, and the ratio is getting worse...
"No" votes don't actually do anything (except hurt my feelings), but they could have been "Yes" votes.
According to Steam, the top 50 Greenlight games have on average 43,512 "Yes" votes, which is 60% of their total votes.
So I guess that's the kind of stats I should be aiming for.

Steam's stats are generally pretty crap though. They don't tell me how long the top games have been on Greenlight, or where traffic is coming from, and their tips for marketing are really basic.

Despite all the "No" votes, I'm not really getting much good feedback.
So far people have mentioned:

• "It looks like a Flash game (and those crappy Adventure Quest games)!"
Well there's not much I can do about that. I'm not going to redo all the graphics just for a slightly better chance at Steam. Maybe I should put more emphasis on the cutscene art though, or use some fanart for promotional images.
• "Why should I buy this if I can get an almost-complete version for free?"
This is a fair point. I guess the premium content and the advantages of playing offline aren't really enough incentive for some people. So I'm going to add something that got cut out of the web version: a battle/survival mode! This will be independent from the main story, and will include harder versions of bosses and long endurance battles and stuff like that. Of course that'll mean delaying the release even longer, since I'm not going to start working on that until it's Greenlit.
• "Why no Linux support?!" I dunno how easy that'll be to do. Edmund McMillen seems to be having problems with getting Binding of Isaac onto Linux, so I'm guessing there's some difficulties there.

I've been doing a bit of research about marketing for Greenlight, but the advice is still pretty divided. Some developers say you should take advantage of social media, and your existing fanbase and all that. Others say that most of the votes will come from Steam users browsing Greenlight, and you should instead focus on making your Greenlight page really professional looking.

Unfortunately I can't really get much traffic from users on Kongregate and Armor Games, because they don't exactly want to lose paying users to Steam.
The web version is still pretty profitable, so I don't want to stop doing business with those guys just for a better shot at getting Greenlit.

Anyway!

The plans for now are the following:
• Make the Greenlight page look more professional!
• Get some popular YouTubers to do Let's Plays or reviews of EBF4 and talk about Greenlight. (If you know of anyone that you think may want to cover EBF4, tell me about them.)
• Use some of those review videos on the Greenlight page.
• Maybe make a better trailer.
• Start using Twitter again. (I made my Twitter page look nicer!: [link])
• I think I'll try posting on Reddit and doing an AMA or something. (If anyone actually has experience making successful posts on Reddit, tell me how. I'm a long time lurker but have never posted anything.)
• Maybe I should try using Facebook's promoted post feature? I really don't want to give them money, but I've got quite a lot of fans on FB and normal posts don't reach them all....
• Maybe I should form alliances with other developers (I've seen some DeviantArt users with games on Greenlight) and share some traffic with them.

That is all.

Linky link: [link]

Vote up, tell your friends, flatter me in the comments, and all that kind of stuff.

Hundreds of people have gathered in Glasgow's town square today to celebrate the death of Margaret Thatcher. ([link])

Stay classy, Glasgow.


For those of you who don't know who Thatcher was, here's a bit from Wikipedia:
Margaret Thatcher was a British Conservative Party politician who was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990. She was the longest-serving British Prime Minister of the 20th century, and is the only woman to have held the post. Her political philosophy and economic policies emphasised deregulation (particularly of the financial sector), flexible labour markets, the privatisation of state-owned companies, and reducing the power and influence of trade unions.

Basically poor people hated her.

Woop! Finished Skyward Sword! Nintendo tried really hard to ruin this game, but it was still pretty awesome, despite being designed for 5 year olds.

I had two major problems with the game, and you can probably guess what those were.

So I didn't end up completely hating the motion controls; they actually work pretty well for the sword fighting aspects of the game. It takes a while to get used to the motions you have to make for sword swings, and even then it's still quite hard to do them correctly if you're panicking. But it's a pretty fun control scheme for some of the boss battles, especially that one part with the thunderbolts. It also works okay for throwing and rolling bombs.

However, every other use of motion controls was retarded. They just don't feel right for steering a bird, jumping off ladders, playing the harp, doing forward rolls, or all the other gimmicky uses. All of these could have easily been implemented with the analog stick and some buttons, and there was really no reason not to support both control schemes anyway. Flying was so frustrating that I didn't bother doing any exploration at all; I only visited the areas that I had to. I ended up doing zero of the optional content. Feel free to tell me what stuff I missed. I didn't even have a shield for 95% of the game.

The motion controls are also damn inconsistent. You swing the wiimote to use the bug net, but you can scoop things up with a bottle by just pressing A. Surely they should be used in the same way? Sometimes I couldn't even remember whether I was supposed to use the analog stick or motion controls (for example, when controlling your fall direction), so I would try both at the same time while screaming at the TV. Even by the end of the game, I still wasn't familiar with the controls.

I guess Nintendo has to push their hardware, but if they had only used the wiimote for sword controls, then I probably would have been okay with it overall.

The second super huge problem was your fairy helper thing. She just doesn't stop talking.

She literally spent the first 3 dungeons telling me that my wiimote batteries were low. There's already a flashing red battery icon on the screen at all times telling me that. You think I don't fucking know already?! How did Nintendo honestly think this was a good idea?
And why the hell does she feel the need to tell me when my health is low? Does the HUD just not exist or something?

She even repeats tutorials for stuff that I've done several times before! You don't need to tell me how those spirit trials work every single time! You don't have to mock my failure by saying words! Just stop talking!

At least she had the decency to tell me how to defeat bosses when I couldn't figure it out. Except she usually let me take a beating first, before offering any advice. What a bitch.

Urrrrghhhhhhh....

So that's the really bad stuff out of the way!

Don't really know what to say about the good stuff. It's a Zelda game, so it's good in the same ways as all the other ones: interesting dungeon designs, new art style, lots of collectables, fun boss battles, references to the other games, etc.

I actually quite liked the stamina system, as it makes running around and climbing more interesting. It's also a good way of stopping you from spamming sword spins, compared to randomly getting dizzy or whatever they did in previous games.

The cutscenes were pretty awesome. The musical parts, the villians messing things up, Zelda being adorable, and all that stuff. I wish there were more of them though. Sometimes you'd finish a dungeon, and all you'd get was a boring conversation with your dumb fairy thing.

It was cool that a lot of traditional items like bombs and arrows have added features. In the case of bombs, you can now put bomb flowers into your bomb bag, you can roll them, you can throw them accurately, etc.

Flying around looks like it would have been fun too, if it weren't for the controls.

Some more minor complaints:
• There were too many lava and sand areas. There was no ice or snow area! Pffft.
• Most of the music wasn't too memorable in my opinion. The only music that really got my attention was Zelda's Lullaby, and that was for nostalgia reasons.
• A lot of the bosses were impossibly difficult until you figured out the trick to beating them, and then they became really easy. This is especially true of the last 2 bosses. They were still fun, but the difficulty felt a bit cheap.

tl;dr: I still hate the Wii. This game should have been on a real console, and should not have to speak to me like I'm 5 years old.

I wish DeviantHEART wasn't a joke. ):

---

Anyway, I bumped into my highschool computing teacher at the pub, and invited myself to give his students a presentation about game development!
This should be interesting... I'm terrible at public speaking, but I gotta learn.

Also, new Game of Thrones!
First episode was disappointing though... nothing really happened.

I haven't really played any proper JRPGs since they stopped making Final Fantasy games 10 years ago, but I kinda feel like playing one again... are there any good JRPGs for xbox or do I have to get a PS3?

Also, after 7 months of putting it off, I finally got round to setting up the Wii again!! Finding batteries was a pain.
I'm gonna start Skyward Sword now!

Making an FAQ about EBF4 so I can just link to this whenever people ask me boring questions. Feel free to copy and paste these answers anywhere.
Hopefully my explanations aren't totally crap.

Q: Why do my save files keep getting deleted?
A: This is caused by browser privacy settings, and tools that delete cookies. In Chrome especially. Just make sure you don't delete cookies ever, basically. The Armor Games version has online saving, which could help, but you'll need to make an account there, and you'll always have to be connected to the internet.

Q: How do I move my save files to a different computer (or site)?
A: Do a full system search for "EBF4" (or Google the location of Flash cookies (.sol files), it's different on each operating system). If you don't find anything, then your search hasn't searched everywhere. Copy all the files you find, they should all be in the same folder. If they're in different folders, check the folder name to see which one is relevant (the folder name/path will probably contain the website's name). To find the destination folder, start and save a new save file on the new computer or site, and do the search again on that computer. Replace the files in the newest folder with the files from the old folder. You'll also probably have to re-open the game after that.

Q: How do I send my save files to Kongregate from other sites?
A: Leave the game open on the original site, and leave the menu with the transfer info open. Then click Natalie to open the game in a new tab on Kongregate. Let the game load on Kongregate, and you should get a message on the main menu about the transfer being successful. It will only transfer the save you have open on the other site, and your medals. Options won't transfer. Some browser settings may possibly interfere with the transfer, but I don't know anything about that. If this doesn't work for you, you can do it manually with the instructions for the previous question.

Q: I purchased the premium content, but now it's gone! Help?
A: The game just failed to contact the server, for whatever reason. Either reload the game, or click the 'buy' and/or 'activate' buttons again.

Q: Why doesn't the game load?
A: Sometimes things don't load on the internet. Try a different browser. Try blaming your ISP. Try restarting your router. Try again later. I don't even care.

Q: When's the Steam version coming out?
A: When the web version is fully distributed and starts losing popularity a bit. And then it still has to get through Greenlight.

Q: When's Epic Battle Fantasy 5 coming out?
A: P̶l̶e̶a̶s̶e̶ ̶d̶i̶e̶.̶  Go away.

More to be added later!

Finishing EBF4 has left me feeling really bored, much like when I finished school and didn't know what to do for a while.

I'll get over it in a week or two, but for now it feels like everything I want to do requires me to wait:
• Having awesome plants - Gotta wait for them to grow up.
• Watching TV shows (Game of Thrones, Dexter, Breaking Bad, Adventure Time etc) - Gotta wait for new episodes.
• Going outside - The weather is still really shitty. It got warmer for a while, but now it's winter again.
• Social life - Most of my friends have jobs now, so I can't go out as much as I'd like.

I guess I should take this time to catch up on all the Wii games I've neglected.
I should probably get driving lessons soon too. And learn how to cook.

Yeah.

EBF4 still has the highest score on Kongregate though, even after getting badges, which is pretty cool.
The Armor Game's version will be delayed a bit by the looks of things. It's almost done but I've been waiting for email responses for a while...
The online saving feature is pretty cool though. I almost regret not choosing Armor as my sponsor, just so EBF4 could have had that on all sites.

I haven't written about what I've been doing in my free time lately, so here's a list:

• I've given up on softdrinks and sugary food. It took 3 or 4 weeks for the cravings to stop. I don't really feel any healthier yet, but I guess it will pay off eventually. I'm also phasing out pigs and cows, and replacing them with more birds and fish.

• My plants are getting huge. 4 of them are half a meter tall now, and can still grow a bunch. I've got 19 plants in total, but I'll probably give away some of the tomatoes. I got a Venus Flytrap too! Can't wait for the wasps to come back. Also ordered another Moruga Scorpion, since my first one died. ):

• I've started watching Adventure Time, and quickly got through the first 4 seasons. It's amazing. But I wish there were more story episodes about the main characters, and less filler episodes.

• Watched through the second season of Game of Thrones again, in preparation for the third season.

• Got a collection of the first 5 Heroes of Might and Magic games. I mainly got it for 3, which I played as a kid. I really can't be bothered playing the others. 4 seems to be very similar to 3, but it just somehow looks worse. It feels like a weird bootleg version of 3 or something; everything is similar, but different in an uncomfortable way. I'll try 5 eventually.

• I'm playing Plants vs Zombies in order to study the tower defense genre. It's actually pretty fun. I started experimenting with different strategies, and there's actually quite a lot that work. I can see why people like these games; they're easy to get into, can be played in short sessions, and allow you to be pretty creative.

• I played through Warcraft 3, and will probably get the expansion pack later. I'm not particularly good at real time strategy games like this, but it was fun due to the RPG elements that the heroes get. I kind of feel like playing Starcraft as well now...

That is all.

According to my stats, I've spent at least 22 hours this week reading user comments and emails, and watching let's play videos... that and another 20 hours debugging and making last minute changes....

This doesn't feel as rewarding as I thought it would...
Here's some of the most annoying types of comments I get, paraphrased a bit:

"EBF4 is good enough to be a "real" game! herp derp"
"I can't find item x, this must be a bug. plz fix."
"I found an actual bug, but I'm not going to describe it at all."
"make the tips go away, I don't want to play the game properly!"
"make this work on my iPod/kindle/other-crappy-device plz"
"the game isn't loading. fix my internet connection plz."
"plz give me some tips that will instantly make me an awesome game developer like you."
"this game has tits. I think I'm the only person to notice this. I better tell everyone."

Sorry to everyone I've just offended!
I just needed to get those out there.

Dates to remember:

• EBF4 will be up on Newgrounds and a lot of other sites next Monday.

• EBF4 will be up on Armor Games the Monday after that.

• EBF4 will be up on Steam a long time from now, probably. I'll worry about that later.

I'm currently reading piles of comments and watching Let's Plays, while still doing a bit of balancing and debugging...

The Kongregate launch went pretty well. I failed to fix a few bugs that came up during beta testing, but they seem to be very rare now.
The premium pack is selling well, and the game has the highest score on Kongregate for now.

The guy that makes the elephant games gave me some cool code for transferring saved games between websites really easily.
He works for Kongregate now, apparently, so I'm really only allowed to transfer saved games to Kongregate, and not from. Oh well.

Cool stuff, but I can't relax yet. ):

Linky link:
[link]

I was wondering how hard it would be to hit 3 million damage (for the achievement) without the Newgame+ feature.
I managed to do it at level 40, but it's possible to do it at level 35 or lower.

Here's how!:

•Give Natalie all the Cake (x1.6~ damage)
•Give Natalie the equips with the highest magic attack (x2.7~ damage)
•Give Natalie Hela's Staff to boost Dark skills (1.5x damage)
•Give Natalie Black Hole (500 power)

•Find a foe that's really weak against Dark (x1.8~ damage)
•Buff Natalie's magic attack to 70% (x1.7 damage)
•Debuff foe's magic defence to -50% (2x damage)
•Give Foe weakness status (x1.5 damage)

•Use Black Hole with Natalie
•Get a critical hit (either stagger the foe or use brave status) (1.5x damage)

I hit 4 million damage like this against a Chimera Bear at level 40.
If I had managed to freeze the foe (x2 damage), it would have been 8 million!

Since player damage roughly doubles every 5 levels, 3 million damage should be possible at level 34! (with some luck and lots of planning)

I'll lower the lvl 44 achievement to lvl 40 though.

Game's almost done!

All that's left to do is implement premium content and test the last few features, such as the intro animation, links, API integration and all that.

Speaking of which, I should probably go over the plans for the premium content, so I can get all of the backlash and complaints out of the way.

The premium pack includes 20 equips, 4 skills, and 3 summons. (You'll have seen the equips already if you cheated.)
Originally, I made these a bit overpowered, but I've changed them now, so they're only a tiny bit better than regular stuff.

Kongregate have also recommended that I make the Newgame+ feature part of the premium pack, and I pretty much agree with them on this one.
Anyone who finishes the game has already been playing for around 20 hours, and therefor can't really complain that they haven't had a full experience.
And the long-term players are the guys I should really be targeting with this stuff.

The pack will probably cost $7.50.
This figure is based on sales science, so it must be good.

I know most people don't really like premium content in free games, but it kind of needs to be there for a Steam release to exist too.
Why would anyone buy the Steam version if the free version had everything?

Kongregate says that translators and other people who helped out can get some free currency on their site.
So if you're in the game credits and you want the premium pack, you should send me a note with your Kongregate username.

Anyway, that is all.
If nothing else comes up, the game should be published within a week. Then I'll start working on Steam's Greenlight after that.

I suddenly ran out of harddrive space and Flash crashed while saving and corrupted my main .fla file!!!
Good thing I backup my files every day, and my to-do list says I've only made 1 change to the file today.

Everyone should learn from me.