Last year, I made a VR game about moving through a level as enemies spawned to a beat. It was an experiment to see whether or not moving a player along automatically would cause any form of motion sickness. It wasn’t the most full-featured thing, but it did prove a point. That said, I wanted to go further with the idea.
This year’s game is a two-level game that expands on the ideas a bit, focusing on a more traditional action game format. In terms of player handling, the weapon system has been improved. You can now eject your magazine at any time and put in a fresh one, allowing for tactical reloads. You now have semi-functioning hands, although no real use for them. And you can now switch weapons. The new gun is an SMG I made.
Switching weapons actually involves putting your hand on different parts of your body and pressing the right grip. My understanding is that Boneworks already had a similar system, so it’s not as novel of an idea as I thought, but my implementation works well enough.
As for the levels themselves: The first level is a standard action level where the player moves through a dance club as enemies spawn around them. There’s a part in the middle of the dance floor where the player stops and enemies spawn around them. They then proceed through an office before eventually ending at the last room. Fairly traditional stuff, mostly there just to keep testing that moving the player along doesn’t cause problems.
The second level is the real stress test. The player is standing on the bed of a pickup truck as it drives through a city. Enemy cars spawn as they chase the player, and the player has to shoot them. The increased speed and turning might cause more problems for players, hence why it makes for a good test bed. Originally, there was going to be a helicopter sequence, but in testing that, the up-and-down motion of it made me feel really unwell.
There’s not really much more to it than that. Feel free to give it a go if you have VR.
The SMG that was made for it will be available for purchase at a later date. I need to fix and improve it a bit. There was also another gun that was cut because my friend couldn’t get it done in time due to personal problems. We will get that one ready at an even later date.
So what’s coming up next? Well, a video about 7DFPS to begin with, which I’m currently starting on. After that, the usual end-of-year blog post where I talk about all the games I’ve been playing.
In the new year, things are going to change a bit. I’m going to stop putting unedited first parts of playthroughs on my gaming YouTube channel. It gets bugger all views, and I want to clean out my folders of videos that I, quite frankly, don’t need. I might do more highlight videos or something, or just change the content of the channel entirely.
Global Game Jam is of course coming up. I might join it, but negotiations with the friend I usually do it with have not gone terribly well. I want to use GB Studio to make something, and he wants to use Godot because he hates anything that isn’t 3D. Despite the fact that Godot’s 3D capabilities are less than satisfactory. But we’ll see. I might be able to compromise.
Next year is going to be a wild time. Cybersurfer needs to start being a lot more playable; early access by next year is a goal for me. But it’s going to be difficult.
There’s been quite a long gap since the last one of these. I’ve just been so busy with everything that I haven’t had a chance to sit down and write one of these. Even while I write this, I have tabs open for scripts for at least two videos. Although one of them might appear in this post if I can finish it before this goes up.
With that said, here’s what I’ve been up to.
New Stream Graphics
I decided my stream graphics needed updating, but instead of just opening up Blender and going at it, I decided to spend some time designing my ideas before making them, which I think has led to a much better result than last time.
Let’s start with the game dev scene.
Game Dev – Start Screen
Game Dev – AFK Screen
Game Dev – Cam Screen
Game Dev – End Screen
I’ve gone for a rustic-looking apartment looking over a cityscape. This scene has undergone a couple of reworks and changes since I originally made it. I’m showing its current state here.
Let’s start with the foreground first. There’s a desk with a decent wood material on it, a couple of props, a keyboard and mouse, and a mousepad. The keyboard and mouse models are not mine; I found those on the Internet. However, the textures are mine. It’s a plastic-like material with some grime added on top for believability. The mousepad is the camo pattern I like using, but with some additional texture on top.
There’s a picture of my dog on my desk, of course. And then there’s the two monitors. I made these myself, and they are, in fact, properly 16:9. They also use a plastic material, minus the grime. The screen is an LCD shader mixed with a Holdout shader. The Holdout shader allows the screen to be transparent when rendered, so I can put dynamic objects behind it like animated UI and such. I’ll get to that later.
There’s a brick texture behind the desk. I couldn’t make it as realistic as I would have liked, as it made my performance tank while navigating the scene, which was a real pain. Off to the left is glass, which slightly reflects the inside of the room but mostly just serves as a window to the outside.
Before I get to the outside, here’s the rest of the room you don’t see:
As you can see, there’s a couch and a couple of shelves, along with a carpet and ceiling. I had some ideas about reusing this room with different angles, but it’ll probably require more details if I want to do that.
Now, the outside of the room.
This is a procedural city made with geometry nodes. I followed a tutorial for this as I don’t really know what I’m doing with geo nodes yet. Either way, it’s better than what I was doing before with my shoddily made buildings. The scaling on the buildings is fairly inaccurate, and the glass warps the look of them a bit, but I’m willing to live with it.
Game Dev Cam Screen Example
Here’s the camera scene when all the UI is applied behind the rendered image. I’m pretty bad at making fake UI, but I think this looks OK for now. I might look into actually making a Windows Form application with custom graphics and using that instead. But considering the amount of changes this one scene has had since I made it, I think I’ll just live with it for now.
Overall, I like it, but I think there’s room for improvement. But at the same time, those improvements require me to further develop my own skill set. Plus, the lighting is a bit weird-looking, as the outside lighting doesn’t light up the room enough.
Moving on to the gaming scene now.
Gaming – AFK
Gaming – Cam Screen
Gaming – End
Gaming – Start
I designed this to look like a run-down arcade you might find in a failing shopping centre or motorway service station. Starting with the foreground again, there’s a table with a wood material on it and a brick material under it. The TV is actually the same as in my last layout, but with a Holdout shader on the screen mixed with a glossy shader over it to give it a proper look. There’s a plastic sign next to it with text that changes between scenes.
Behind all that is the rest of the arcade. The red camo material is used for the carpet, with some additional bits to make it look like carpet. And then there’s the cabinets themselves.
I just had to include a Rotaction cabinet, of course. SICKHACKS.root also makes a comeback, as Cybersurfer still doesn’t have an actual name. The other game is Tempo Catastrophe, a parody of the Time Crisis games, which seem to infest every single British arcade. And to top it off, a bog standard claw machine.
The latter of the two aren’t as highly detailed as they’re background objects, but they look decent enough in the final render.
Finally, on the back wall, there’s a text object with an emissive shader that I use as a sign, and an exit door that opens on the ending scene, which is a major light source as all the other lights are turned off.
I feel better about this scene than the game dev one. It’s come together quite well, although it did require a lot more effort with all the additional props needed. If I were going to change one thing, I would probably make it look more rundown, with some added rubbish thrown about. I’m also not too happy with the scaling of the room; it’s pretty bloody massive. Like a Megabowl arcade space, if any of you remember those.
I’m not sure how long these will last, but I think they’re pretty neat. The last layout was used for 2 years; let’s see if this lasts longer.
What’s Going On With CyberSurfer?
Last time I made a video and blog post about Cybersurfer, I mentioned that I was looking into a way to build tracks with the spline tool, and I got something working based on a video I found. Well, after a few months of tweaking and adding to it, hoping it would make it more powerful, I’ve realised that I am being an idiot about it.
The video covers this in more detail, and I would suggest you watch that, but I’ll go over some of the basic points.
Based on the video I found, I was able to make a track that follows the spline with the correct UVs and so on. I looked great. Then I started testing it by adding additional verticality and twisting it around. Like making loops and corkscrews.
This is where shortcomings in both my player code and the track generation became evident. Basically, whenever I would hit a bend on a loop, the player would jitter because of the lack of geometry. And when I hit corkscrews, I had the same issue, along with an additional bug where the player wouldn’t stick to the track in those sections.
Adding additional resolution was possible, but it added it to the whole track. Considering how long it’s intended to be, that might end up being too demanding. So I figured that the best solution would be to increase poly counts, but only in the specific parts where I needed it.
Alongside that, I still want things like tunnels and half-pipes in the level, sometimes going around corners. Again, I need extra geometry for that.
My solution was to subdivide the mesh, although along the width, not the length. I go over it in the video in more detail, but the long and short of it is that although I got the subdivision to work, it was an absolute mess. Furthermore, the idea of making tunnels with it is virtually impossible.
As the code got more complicated, trying to accommodate the idea of adding more vertices to it, it became more difficult to manipulate them.
In the end, I looked at all the code and decided that I needed to rethink it. Here’s a summary of what I’m going to try:
Change how I mark out which part of the track needs additional verts by using knot data instead.
Be able to add additional resolution along the length per section.
Append half-pipe sections onto the edges of the corners instead of manipulating the mesh.
Tunnels and other half-pipe sections might become separate pieces that are attached to the track.
Again, there’s more detail in the video, but this more or less covers everything.
The Godot Video
I finally got around to making a video about my experiences with Godot and the things I like and don’t like about it. I’m not an expert on game engines, so it comes from a place of just spewing out my opinions and thoughts in a very general way.
I’m less critical of Godot, although there are still plenty of things I don’t like. But I did find quite a few things I liked, including specific nodes and example-based documentation.
The video has done a lot better than I was expecting it to, and the feedback I’ve been getting has been fantastic. There are a lot of new things to look at and many things to improve on.
Am I going to use Godot again? Yes.
I have an idea for a project, but I haven’t really had the time to start designing it. But with all these videos out of the way, I should get some time soon. I’m not going to say anything about it until I start making a prototype.
Other Things
I have a new weapon asset. I’m calling it the “Czech 75”, which is a very legally distinct name for a pistol based on a real gun that a character from the anime Gunsmith Cats uses. This is in fact the same pistol from the 7DFPS game, although it has been modified a bit with better topology and several other improvements. And most importantly, it is now textured.
So, here’s a VR-ready pistol that you can put into your games. Enjoy.
In related news, the shotgun asset pack is now permanently discounted. I probably need to improve these ones as well at some point, but I can’t really be arsed. I have far too many things on the go right now.
But I am curious if there’s a demand for more weapons. I should also note that both of these were modelled and rigged by my friend and modified, animated, and textured by me. And half of the money from either of these goes to him. If I make more, I’ll likely have to do it on my own, which means I’ll have to learn more about the creation process. To be fair, as part of my Monday streams, I’m learning various aspects of Blender and trying to create things I haven’t before, which is helping me learn how to do stuff like this on my own instead of having to rely on others.
7DFPS is happening later in the year, so perhaps I’ll use that as an excuse for making more of this stuff.
Again, sorry for the large gap between this post and the last one. I have been very busy. And a new gaming roundup post is in the works, so look forward to that in the near future.
Last week was bloody terrible for me, and the entire month has been a bit shit. But I’m here to give you an update… After nearly two months of silence.
Upgrading & Breaking My PC
The big thing that’s happened since the last blog post is that I finally upgraded my PC. My old system was running a Ryzen 7 2700 and a GTX 1070. They’ve served me well the past few years, but as I’ve gotten more into 3D production, I’ve needed a lot more horsepower. Plus, I’ve been struggling to run a lot of games lately. And very recently, that GPU started becoming the minimum spec for a lot of new games. Anyway, the new CPU is a Ryzen 7 5800X3D and the GPU is a RTX 3060.
I went with the 5800X3D as I’ve heard nothing but good things about it, and it’s likely the best chip for the AM4 board. It’s also the last chip for the AM4 board. So if I do need to upgrade again in the future, it’s gonna be a full upgrade. I’ve definitely seen a performance improvement with it, and OBS is throwing up less of a shitfit when I stream games now.
Getting the chip in was more of a headache than I thought. First of all, it didn’t come with a new heatsink, so I had to use my old one, meaning I had to clean up all the thermal paste and re-apply it, using some old paste my dad dug up that was almost finished up. And then I remounted the fan, but without removing the motherboard from the case. I ended up with a solution where I took a few bits of non-static packaging and a tissue packet and used them to keep the rear bracket from falling out. It worked out in the end, but it took more work than I was originally expecting.
As for the RTX 3060, well with this, I can now do raytracing to a reasonable level. This will make material creation in Blender MUCH FASTER. Working on materials previously was a massive pain in the arse. Plus, it’s nice to know that I should be able to throw any mainstream game at this thing without issues, at least for the next few years.
RTX Off
RTX On
I played around a bit with the raytracing stuff, mostly just messing with Minecraft and Quake II RTX. I might give Portal RTX a go at some point.
Getting the GPU in literally took 5 minutes and was probably the least painful part of this experience.
But anyway, the performance boost is really nice, and better productivity is always a good thing… Or it would be if EVERYTHING DIDN’T BREAK.
Shortly after getting my rig up and running again, my 4TB media drive which contains a lot of my video footage just straight up fucking broke. Inaccessible. There was about 3TB worth of stuff on there. I’m going to try and get it sent off to a repair place, but it’s likely going to cost me a fucking lot of money.
In the process of replacing parts, my PC was moved around a bit, among other things. This was likely to be the root cause of the problem.
Following this however, I decided to take advantage of the Black Friday deals and get myself two new SATA SSDs. One to replace the media drive, and the other to clone my documents folder.
It took a few days, but when I got them, I started by putting in the new media drive. I left it in for a few days before doing anything with it, and then decided to download a whole bunch of shit. And then it eventually stopped accepting downloading, and some of the files it did download were corrupted. Following that, I couldn’t access the drive at all.
But when I booted the machine the morning after, I could access the drive again, and all the files that had been downloaded properly were fine. The corrupted ones were still busted, but I just deleted those and re-downloaded them. So I’ve decided to just take it slow when downloading stuff to that drive.
I also cloned my documents drive onto another SSD, which for some reason didn’t work when I first tried the process, but did work the second time around. I waited a few days as this was during the issues with the new media drive, but this morning (5th December when I write this) I finally swapped it over.
It didn’t replace my original drive immediately; I had to go into disk management and change the drive letter from Q to F. Once I did that, it worked, but then the SSD I have for games was no longer showing up, so I restarted again, and Windows gave me a blank screen. One more restart later, and everything finally booted up properly.
However, that isn’t the end of this story. I still have a 2TB NVME SSD to install, which I will probably do later this week.
But this whole endeavour has ended up costing me A LOT of money. I don’t like begging for cash, but if you’re reading this and appreciate the game dev work I do or generally enjoy my streams, and have a few bob to spare, consider donating to me on Ko-Fi.
CyberSurfer Progress
A lot has actually changed in the past couple of months in regards to the project. Last time, I mentioned all the rail grinding stuff. Well, that’s actually been changed significantly. Using the Spline Utility part of the spline package, I’ve rebuilt the whole system so that it can finally follow curved rails, or bezier curve rails. There’s a video tutorial a little later in this post, but the results are much improved over what I previously had.
But the big thing that happened was the first public demo of the prototype. Here’s a video of me talking about it, alongside some other things.
The demo didn’t go over all too well with players. Most of the complaints were about the speed. Players didn’t like having to slow down for obstacles; the placement of them seemed poor; collisions were a bit messy; and so on. I didn’t get too many complaints about the game feel. The only complaint I got about the grinding was about how jumping between the rails kills your momentum, which is something I thought I fixed, but in further testing later on, when I increased the speed of the grinding, it became clear that it wasn’t fixed.
The game as it is now is quite different compared to the original GGJ game. Especially the aspect where the player can move however they want, compared to the original, where they were limited to only left and right. But that change brings about a very different form of level design, which I did not account for. However, instead of adapting to that change, I’ve decided to go back to the original idea of pushing the player down the track like in the original game.
However, this time, I will not be spewing waypoint triggers along the track in order to rotate the player. This time I’m going to use splines to create the track and rotate the player’s aiming based on it, similar to how I handle rail grinding.
After a bit of work, I can finally generate tracks from splines. In addition to this, I can generate colliders on the sides to keep the player within bounds. So now I can have non-flat tracks with the correct colliders. I haven’t fully tested the track generation, but it should be fine for most scenarios.
Well, when I say it’s not flat, I mean the track as a whole. But I am thinking about having the actual surface be curved, especially around corners, and maybe even having half- or full-pipe sections. But that’s going to require even more complicated programming, and I barely understand what I’m doing as is.
Finally, the rail grinding tutorial.
Pretty basic stuff. The differences with my old code were mostly the spline utilities stuff. I am calculating the direction of the player slightly differently. Instead of using the dot product, I’m calculating the angle between the player’s forward and the spline tangent (Read as: Forward) of the point of the spline the player is in contact with. It seems like it works better. There’s a GitHub repo linked in the description of the video if you’re interested in seeing the code.
With the track generation stuff in a good place, the next thing I’m likely going to be focusing on is level design. And following that, a lot more animation work. I’m not sure when I’ll be working on an overhauled trick system, but that’ll definitely be part of the upgrade.
VR Development
In preparation for 7DFPS, I decided to learn how to develop VR-specific stuff in Unity. Following their starter tutorials, I built myself a room and placed a few objects in it. Including a mirror.
The tutorial covers things like locomotion, grabbing objects, objects having correct physics, and socketing. The last one is the act of placing objects in specific places, like putting a hat on a hook or on top of my head, like in that image there.
It’s given me a good jumping-off point for learning how all of this works, although I must admit, it is a little jank in places.
7DFPS
Following that jumping-off point, I decided to get started on building the 7DFPS game. To give a general overview of the game I’m going for. Imagine Pistol Whip but with your own music, and the gun handling of Half-Life: Alyx. I mentioned it in one of the videos I linked previously.
But for my idea, I’m setting up a spline, splitting it up into a random number of sections, and turning each section in one of three directions. I should also note that each section is the same length. That’s just to make my life a bit easier. After that, I have the player use spline animate using the song’s duration as the total time it takes to traverse the spline.
To top it off, I spawn a few cubes to act as buildings along the sides of the path. In theory, these were meant to act as cover points, but as I’ve been working on it I’ve gotten a bit lazy, and now they’re just decorative. The enemy generation is soon to follow, but I haven’t quite gotten it to work yet.
What I just recently started working on is putting the gun in the game. It’s actually been easier than I thought to get the model and animations set up. It’s not fully done yet, but it’s getting there. Following that will be enemy spawning, enemy AI, and then finally loading in user tracks.
There’s still a lot to do, and as of writing this, I’ve still got about a week left until the originally set deadline. But it’s my understanding that it will be extended out to the end of the month, like last year. Hopefully that gives me enough time to really make this something worth people’s time. And hopefully enough to give it a decent amount of paint so it doesn’t look like a mess of placeholders like it currently does.
Well, there’s your update. I’m working on the year-end GOTY list stuff like I usually do; hopefully it’ll be more on-time this year compared to last time. But I still have more than half of it left to write, and I’ve still got games to play. So maybe don’t expect it in as much of a timely fashion as I hoped.
Hello again. A thing I bought a year ago finally arrived, and it’s pretty sweet.
The Analogue Pocket is an FPGA emulation device that specifically plays GameBoy and GameBoy Advance games. FPGA is hardware emulation, not software, so it leads to greater accuracy in terms of emulation. This generally means less visual glitches but also has the downside of emulating the slowdown in games that would suffer it on real hardware.
Although you can play real cartridges on this thing, the OpenFPGA side is the most interesting part. You can just load FPGA cores made for it and then boot games off the Micro SD card. I have Neo Geo, NES, SNES, and Mega Drive cores on mine. Pretty much all the games I’ve tried have worked perfectly, and GameBoy games especially look gorgeous on the screen.
My major issue with the thing is that I don’t find it particularly comfortable to hold for long periods of time. Much like actual Nintendo handhelds. It’s not as bad as the 3DS or Switch JoyCons, which cause literal circulation problems for me, but there’s still things I would have changed.
I mean there is one more issue; the price. I think I’ve spent £400 on the thing all-and-all. It was £300 for the thing and dock, plus shipping, then the FedEx tax was £70 (Customs charges are a fucking scam), and then another £40 for a Micro SD card and UK USB-C plug. Yeah, it comes with a US plug. Be fair warned.
But I like the thing, and I’m gonna enjoy playing it. I actually did a stream soon after I got it where I played a bunch of games, check it out:
In other news, Indie LIVE Expo is happening soon. Why am I bring up here? Well Rotaction is going to appear during the first day when they discuss currently released games, so keep an eye out for it. But this is the first time one of my games has appeared at a major event, although it’s the second time it’s been promoted. The event will be streamed on the 3rd and 4th of December. Check it out, there’s loads of cool games.
Now, I’m going to talk about what I’m currently working on.
7DFPS (7 Day FPS) Jam is coming up in December, and I’ve decided that I want to take part. So I’m putting together a few things to practice and learn how to make stuff for it. I’m looking at stuff like Probuilder and Pro Grids for fast generation of levels, and learning how to do raycasted bullets with appropriate effects, as you see in the video above.
Now I know what you’re thinking, the Jam hasn’t started yet and I’m over here making stuff. Well, there’s no rule that says I can’t work on stuff a little early and most of this work isn’t going to be used in the Jam game. But it’s better I figure out these problems now, rather than during the Jam.
As for the side project I’ve been working on:
Well, progress is slow. I can shoot a bow now, but it’s a giant mess. Unity’s Rig Builder tool is such a giant mess to use that making it this far is generally surprising for me. But to explain the issue, layers upon layers upon layers. At some point I had to undo a lot of work and replace it with a canned animation, which is how I got the bow aiming and firing to work. Although I can explain some of that as well. When I started with the rigging, I was basing it on the idea of driving the player animation in relation to the bow. That was dumb, now I’m driving the bow animation in relation to the player, which is simpler to implement and has lead to better results.
Well that’s it from me for this time. Now I have to publish this before my power goes out. Which is a thing that’s happening today. Fun times. At least I have some books to read.
Well the weather is getting colder, so I guess summer is finally over. The season that is, my dog of the same name is doing fine.
7 years after graduating university, I have finally updated the “Uni work” pages of this site. Better late than never I guess. Annoyingly, there’s still a lot of stuff missing from the pages because there’s stuff I just don’t have anymore, or can’t post. There’s also things like documents and such that aren’t programming related.
Either way, it’s something off my whiteboard.
Anyway, you might be wondering what’s going on with my side project. Well you’ll have to keep waiting because I’m working on something else now. A certain place I hang out on, on a certain anime image board started a Asset Jam, a two part game jam where the first part has users submit assets for games, and then the second part has users make games with those assets. Well I didn’t make any assets for the first part, but I am making a game.
Behold.
The beach ball of doom.
It’s a game I’m titling “I MUST CONSUME”, and it’s basically Katamari. But instead of gathering items in a massive ball, you absorb them instead. I’m using the game as an excuse to get familiar with Cinemachine and a few other things. I was thinking of migrating the camera system in my side project to Cinemachine, and used this project as a test bed for it. I’m fair happy with it here, so I think I will be doing the work needed to switch.
I’ve got until the morning of October 15th to finish it. Hopefully I can get it done by then. As usual, I’ll be streaming development on Twitch.
Nothing else is going on really. Still trying to find a game industry job, at least they’re actually replying to me now, even if only to reject me. I’ve started uploading some of my regular gameplay streams to my YouTube channel, and getting some decent view numbers. I think I’ll be doing more of that, especially for the demo & VR streams I do on occasion. Maybe some highlight compilations at some point too.
I was warned that gaining viewers solely on Twitch was a fool’s errand, and they were right. So maybe I’ll try this method. On that note, I am thinking of streaming my game dev stuff to YouTube as well, although I don’t know what the state of restreaming is these days. Maybe I’ll take a look at Restream.
That’s it from me. I’ve got a busy few weeks and maybe months ahead, I’ll try and post when I can. Later.
Later this year, this website will be 10 years old. You think I would have done more with it.
Anyway, do you like the new makeover? It’s not that big of an improvement, all I really did was change the theme and update some images. Either way, there’s a proper dark theme now and everything is less of an eyesore. Better fonts too.
Let’s start off with an update on that headphone story from the last proper post. Turns out the headphones I was using with my phone were APTX, meaning low latency. And the new ones that I was using with the Quest via that transmitter weren’t. So I’ve swapped them and I’ve noticed there’s even less latency when using VR now. And for an added bonus, the new headphones are much better at noise cancelling, making it superior for when I’m out walking the dog listening to stuff on my phone.
I mentioned last time that I got Oculus AirLink working with my quest. Although I’m fairly happy with the results, it’s not completely perfect. I certainly notice some jitter or stuttering from time to time and occasionally the picture resolution will drop in quality. But for being wireless, I’ll happily take the shortcomings. Unfortunately, I can’t use it wirelessly for long because it drains the battery very quickly.
Messing around with VR also led me down the road of thinking about using a virtual avatar to display while playing VR games, so that viewers can get an idea about some of my body movements. And so VRoid comes into play.
It’s a me! Albeit with really long arms. Work in progress.
The software is quite easy to use and very detailed. Think of it as a more elaborate character creator that you might find in games like Saint’s Row. The default clothing options are very limited though, but you can edit the textures to create your own interesting designs. In the image above, you can see that I modified a texture to try and recreate my jacket. The bad news is that I didn’t have any decent tools for image manipulation or image creation. Although as I’m writing this, I’ve recently installed GIMP. Perhaps now I can do a bit more work to it.
Speaking of software, I’m starting to think about getting back into video editing and I’m considering downloading and trying out Da Vinci Resolve. I used to do video editing with Premiere and After Effects, but money is getting tight, so I’m looking at free options these days. We’ll see if I actually do anything though, I got a lot going on right now as I’ll get to later.
Another thing that’s been bothering me about my VR setup is the microphone. The built-in mic for the Quest sounds like muffled crap for me and no amount of audio adjustment seems to solve that problem. So I was looking at getting a new microphone with my Xmas money, but as it happens, my sister decided to gift me the microphone I wanted as a present. Saves me some money at least.
The new mic seems to be OK. It boosts the volume and helps the clarity a bit, but there does appear to be a small amount of interference or crackling on occasion. More tests are required I’m sure.
Just as a last thing; over New Years I watched They Shall Not Grow Old. Now I bought the physical Bluray of it, and my Bluray player of choice is my PS3. About 3/4 through the film though, I was getting horrible graphical artefacts and glitches. I had hoped it was just some weird HDCP bug caused by my capture set up, but when I adjusted my cables and reset the video settings on the PS3, it became apparent that the GPU was most likely dying.
My options were to go back to my other, older PS3 which a disc drive that didn’t function properly or buy another PS3. I originally picked the first option. But once I got it connected, I received the YLOD. That only left me with one option left and a day or so ago I received a used PS3 that was in fairly decent condition and decided to do a full system transfer.
I’m on my 4th PS3 now. I thought hardware failure of this kind was something only original Xbox 360 owners had to deal with. Either way, my plans for playing through PS3 games that are still on my backlog have shot up in my schedule because I should probably enjoy them before this machine conks it as well.
New Year Plans
It’s difficult to make plans for this year all things considered. I’m still hoping to hitch a ride to Japan with the help of a friend of mine and his mate. But God knows if that’ll happen.
But I will do the language proficiency test (JLPT) this year, if available. Starting with N5, although I have a feeling it might be too easy considering the Kanji levels I’m studying at the same time. I’ll look into it more soon.
At the tailend of last year I submitted my CV a couple of times to a few job openings, but I was unsuccessful on all accounts. I’ll probably keep trying, but I might start looking into going back into training. Perhaps online courses or something like that. I’m not sure if I’ll stick to games or maybe go back to traditional software development.
I would also like to get back into drawing again. It’s been well over a decade since I drew anything seriously and I’ve still got a desk full of art tools. I gotta start from scratch again and re-learn everything, and then education myself on new things like drawing humans and animals, and animation. But it’ll be a serious time commitment.
I can’t really commit to anything else for the time being.
Plans For Current Projects
I’m going to go back to the Game Template Project and start getting that into a somewhat releasable state. I need to add more multiplayer functions and game modes, as well as fixing and improving a lot of the game types. Specifically making them more flexible and expandable. I intend to sell this thing, so it has to be of a relatively high quality, or at least packed with features.
Space Cart is a bit up in the air. I know what needs doing, but it’s intimidating as Hell. There’s a ton of inter-locked systems that I now need to break up, remake, and put back together again. And then make all the new UI work with a controller. I need to figure out a way to motivate myself to just get it done.
The fighting game prototype is hold-on until further notice. I just don’t have the time or knowledge to be able to make anything competent right now. I do have some of the animations ready to use, but the actual system itself will likely require an overhaul as Unity’s default animation GUI can get messy with a lot of animations. Or perhaps I’m just doing it wrong. Either way, I can’t deal with it anytime soon.
Bunny Jammers Redux really only existed as a test for me to make a networked multiplayer game. And I haven’t achieved that goal yet, so I will probably work on that either alongside or after the template project.
I really hope this year is better than the last two. And I hope Windjammers 2 is good.
In late October, I decided to get myself a new phone. I got an Sony Xperia 10 III.
The phone is alright. Taller screen due to the 21:9 aspect ratio which I am not really into. I tend to prefer my phones as compact as possible, and greatly miss the days of flip phones. Anyway, all my stuff still works, although there’s some getting used to because they keep changing the dumbest stuff between phones.
But onto the first story. The phone was promised to come with some wireless headphones, decent Sony sound cancelling ones. But when the phone turns up, it’s just a package with the phone. So I end up calling EE, who I bought the phone from, and asked them where the headphones I was promised are. That’s when I learnt about a waiting period, that was never mentioned on the site, and that Sony were running it and were supposed to send me a text or e-mail about it. A couple of days later I get that text, fill in the details, and then get told I’ll get it within 3 weeks.
While I waited, I pondered on what I would use these new headphones on, as I already had Bluetooth ones for my phone. And I figured I would use it for my Oculus Quest, removing one more cable from my setup.
Over a month passed, and I was getting rather impatient. I contacted Sony multiple times, only receiving one reply saying that it was something on EE’s end, and after contacting EE they told me to contact Sony again.
Just as I was starting to consider serious dispute options, lo-and-behold, the headphones just turn up on my doorstep. All’s well that ends well I suppose. But this only leads into another series of problems.
I paired these new headphones up to my Quest and found out the fun way that the thing doesn’t support low latency Bluetooth codecs, making it absolutely useless to use with games. I don’t know why they allow you to pair headphones if it doesn’t work properly, seems like a pretty big oversight.
Following that, I did some research and found myself a Bluetooth transmitter. A MaedHawk one specifically. It’s not too bad. The delay is dramatically reduced, although you can definitely notice it still, but it’s now at least acceptable.
But now I enter my next problem; I have more devices that need USB to charge than places and ports to charge them. Plus I need somewhere to put all these damn headphones I now own. Leading me to buying an Anker USB hub, and some metal hooks held to the bottom of my bookcase using sticky pads.
So after spending a bit more money than I wanted, I’m relatively pleased with my set up.
Now, I was planning on ending that story there, but there’s a new problem.
Lately I’ve been having issues streaming VR stuff with OBS, crashes after 15 minutes or so. Furthermore, the mic on the Quest is utter crap and sounds terrible when streaming. Meaning my next side quest in life involves finding a new mic and trying to figure out why OBS shits the bed whenever I stream VR stuff. For now I’ve found a workaround for the latter where I’ve just made a new source collection on my main scene collection, where OBS doesn’t crash.
I have a few candidates for a wireless mic solution, but I’m unsure about the quality; and in one case, the price. I’ll keep doing some research into the matter and see if I can find something decent.
In other news, I finally got Oculus Air Link working. It involved editing some values in Oculus Debug Tool that I had previously edited, to lower them far enough that it actually operated properly. Anyway, I’m now completely wireless in VR. FREEDOM.
Tested out Elevens: Table Tennis and Half-Life: Alyx. Both worked well, no serious delay. There’s certainly some visual downgrades compared to using a cable, but it’s a small price to pay, plus I hadn’t fully adjusted my settings to allow for a higher bitrate.
Game Dev Stuff
Last post I mentioned I was going to goof around with Mirror in Unity. It’s certainly more mature than MLAPI in terms of features, and I can certainly see what MLAPI influenced by.
But you may remember some months back when I did ThreeThingGame and made a pretty crappy Windjammers clone called “Bunny Jammers”. I was never particularly happy with that game, I thought it played terribly. So recently I decided rebuild it, with networked multiplayer, in Unity.
Currently, I’ve just about got the absolute basic gameplay features working. The player can grab and throw the ball, the scoring works, and movement is getting there. Unity undoubtedly tried to make building this more complicated than it ever needed to be, and furthermore, their physics system is absolute trash. I’ve rolled my own, which isn’t too bad because it’s fairly simple.
I’ve still got more to do for the gameplay, but once I’ve got that done, I can start working on the networked side of things.
As for Space Cart… I got nothing. I haven’t touched it in months. There’s still a lot of systems I need to rebuild for that. But quite frankly, I’ve lost pretty much all of my drive to develop that idea. I’m not gonna make any promises that’ll get worked on any time soon.
That’s it. Next thing from me will be the year-end Den post with my top 10. See you then.
Summer has been pretty rough for me. The heat wave got to me pretty badly and made it difficult to do anything productive. Then it cooled down and I somehow managed to catch a cold which I initially thought was my allergies going haywire. The joys of being allergic to dogs and then deciding to own one.
Tiny Towns!
Anyway, this isn’t a post about Townscaper, I figured I’d just use some screenshots to pretty up the thing.
The first batch of templates for the Game Template Project is done, or at least in a usable state. It mostly covers 2D game types. There’s Tennis (Read as: Pong Clone), vertical and sidescrolling shooter, top down shooter, top down shooter with a map, and so on. Plus a couple of 3D types; FPS, and Infinite Faller. And just to top it off, a generic main menu.
They’re not the prettiest looking templates, but they do serve the purpose I originally set out of having a “Starter kit” for getting game ideas up an running. Next chance I get to take part in a game jam, I’m sure they’ll come in use.
As for when I’ll publically release them; Soon™️.
Slightly Less Tiny Towns!
As for other updates, I finally fixed the camera in FIST-EM (God, I need to change this name) so that it now rotates around the players without dodgy jerryrigging. And because I’m such I nice guy, here’s the code for it:
//You need to get the centre point of both players, referred here as midPoint. "playersCentrePoint" in an in-game object that is set at that midpoint. You don't need to do it that way, but it helps in visual debugging.
//This gets the direction of player 2, in this case on the right side of the screen.
Vector3 direction = players[1].position - playersCentrePoint.position;
//This gets the perpendicular vector of the previous direction
Vector3 directionRight = -(Vector3.Cross(direction, Vector3.up).normalized);
//Then set the camera position using the midpoint and perpendicular vectors, then offset it with the camera distance. Then set the camera to face towards the correct direction.
camera.position = midPoint + directionRight * camDistance;
camera.forward = -directionRight;
Now that’s obviously pseudocode, but that should help anybody looking to figure out how to do that.
But now that the camera is operating as it should, I can finally move on to the meat of the thing; the combat. I can probably fudge together some animations nicked from Mixamo, but getting them re-targeted and blending together well is a whole other bag of worms. At the very least, I’ve made a start on what the button combos are going to look like and what kind of moves occur in those scenarios.
Not much else to report on at the minute, and certainly nothing on Space Cart. Although I did mention I didn’t know if the project was missing things due to the HDD troubles I was having, and after a few quick tests and looking at the files; it seems like everything is in order. So that’s good I suppose. The next Demo Day is at the beginning of November, I’ll try and get something out for it, but no promises, I will very likely push it into next year.
There is one more thing, I bought couple of new mice. Both Logitech. A G502 HERO and another G300s. To use on my main rig and ITX rig respectively. The old mice were giving me terrible double click issues, so I replaced them. I feel like mice don’t last very long these days, the ones before were only a few years old at the most.
This time Windows decided to inform me that one of my HDDs was biting the dust, at first I thought it was an error on Windows part as it only came up once and then disappeared. Then when my bios started telling me the HDD was buggered I actually went and checked it, and sure enough, it was in a really bad shape. The noise of the thing while testing it was horrendous.
Anyway, this HDD was the one I was storing my documents on, so it’s kind of important that it worked. And so began my journey of trying to find software to clone the drive before it bit the dust.
I downloaded Acronis True Image and Macrium Reflect hoping one of them would work. As it happens, True Image only lets you clone the drive if you pay for it. Thankfully, Macrium Reflect would have done the job.
“Would have” is the key point there, as every time I tried to perform the cloning it would error out because the drive was so buggered that it didn’t have enough speed to start the operation and time out.
So I went to Plan C; format the new drive and give it the same name and drive letter as the old one, then manually copy over everything. The only reason this works was because I cocked up when initially formatting the old drive when I originally got it and setting the whole drive as “My Documents” folder. This ended up working in my favour, as once I got everything copied over, the programs linked to those original folders automatically found them again and started operating as normal. Steam also relinked the games back up.
It’s not completely perfect though; after getting back to my Unity projects, I found that several files were missing. Not too big of a deal as I had them backed up on my repo, but I am a little worried about the projects I never got to commit or didn’t have repos.
Space Cart might be in danger of being too messed up to continue development with. I’ll give news on that soon if that happens to be the case.
In the grand scheme of things, it could have been worse. But it did set my schedule back by about a week.
On that note, the Game Template Project is progressing. 4 templates are ready to be used, and several more are being worked on. However, my estimate of taking a month to make these was maybe a bit conservative. So I’ll continue working on this until at least the end of July. But I really don’t want to spend any longer than that.
That’s it from me. Don’t expect another post for a while.
Welcome back to my thoughts on video games and anime throughout the first half of 2021. Keep in mind that I write this post over a period of months, so aspects of it might not meld all that well together.
Persona 5 Strikers
I fucking hate this game.
Persona 5 was a great game, although it’s not my favourite Persona game. But hanging out with all the side characters and finding things to do was a blast.
Well you can forget about any of the side characters because you’re stuck with the main cast for this one. And the side activities revolve around resource gathering, fetch quests, and mini-bosses.
[HEE HO IN UNISON]
The musou gameplay isn’t the worst, but the magic use being extremely limited by SP and then having the bigger enemies be very spongy leads to a lot of SP item usage during boss fights. And I do mean a lot. Just simply attacking the bosses will lead to miniscule chip-damage that makes you wonder what’s the point of buying better weapons.
Another annoying thing is that there are checkpoints throughout the dungeons that you can use to save and return to the “Real world”. However, time does not pass when returning back to reality, and there’s nothing to do in the real world hubs other than to buy supplies anyway. So you go back into the dungeon soon after leaving it, sometimes immediately. This process is also the only way you restore HP & SP without using items. Why they couldn’t just have the checkpoints restore them instead of leaving the dungeon is beyond me.
The story is completely forgettable, but it basically doubles-down on the concept of adults being assholes and wanting to control people. But now there’s AI voice assistants involved and the overhanging association of the tech company that created it. Unfortunately, if you’re like me and hated the main cast of Persona 5, you won’t find anything being done or said even remotely interesting.
Even the novelty of going to different cities across Japan wears out its welcome once you realise just how boxed in you are and the lack of anything interesting to do.
At least the music is still banging.
Dead Or Alive 6
In my ponderous research of learning how to make a fighting game, I decided to install a few example games to take inspiration from. Of these, Dead Or Alive 5 & 6 ended up making their way on my PC. DoA 5 had a lot of technical issues and saving my game simply could not be done due to the fact the developers hardcoding the save file directory to be “My Documents”, which due to the setup of my machine meant that I would get an error everytime it attempted to save.
So this section is on DoA 6 instead. I see why people are upset with this game. The utter avalanche of DLC is extremely off-putting and also makes the base game seem extremely barebones. Especially considering that characters that were featured in DoA 5 like Nyotengu, Momiji, and Rachael are now DLC unlocks instead of just being in the game. The single player story might as well not exist, but nobody ever came to this game for a thought provoking narrative anyway.
The fighting system is still fairly solid, however the new attack moves that fill up a bar that basically give you easy counters and supers seems a bit excessive. I’m not really a fan of super meters and DoA didn’t really need them. I suppose it helps very casual players (People who are somehow worse than me) pull off flashy moves, but does make fights a lot easier now.
The new character Nico is extremely fun to play as, and I also quite like playing as Tamaki. In terms of how it affected my learning of how fighting games work… Well that’s for another blog post.
Puyo Puyo Tetris 2
There really isn’t anything significantly new about Puyo Puyo Tetris 2. It’s mostly refinement with some additional modes and the inclusion of boss battles in the single-player that lets you build teams with special abilities and such. It’s still a good game, but not really worth writing reams and reams about.
Vr Stuff
Played a few things in VR over the month, mostly demos.
Spider-Man Far From Home
I was kinda worried when starting this one about how much motion sickness it would give me. Weirdly though, the swinging wasn’t too bad, but the on-ground movement being locomotion based did make me feel ill. I also had the anti-motion-sickness settings turned all the way up.
Anyway, it’s super short experience. You swing around a city for a bit, then a boss appears, and then you waggle your shit around until it dies, because the tracking constantly goes to crap. I don’t really much care for it, but it is free.
Warplanes: WW1 Fighters Demo
Now this was the demo that made me hurl. I always find flight games to be the worst when it comes to my motion sickness with VR. Additionally, there weren’t any recalibration options, so my original stance of standing couldn’t be changed even after pausing and getting a chair to sit in.
From the gameplay perspective though, it pretty interesting. You’re flying a plane and manually aiming a machine gun in front of you, firing off flares from another gun you can pick up, and manually aiming bombs that you drop by hand. I like the idea of it, but unfortunately my motion-sickness put a pretty quick halt to playing it any further. I’ll check out the full game some other time perhaps.
Into The Radius
This is one of those VR games that has locomotion movement rather than teleporting, so I got real sick after playing it for a bit. I didn’t even get past the tutorial.
That said, there’s a lot of fiddly gun stuff in this. Ejecting mags to check on ammo count, storing things in specific pockets, manually adding attachments, etc. It would be cool if VR tracking was better than it currently is.
I might come back to this, and I was intending to before I published this post, unfortunately, other games got in the way.
Borderlands 2 VR
I tried to start this game and then it soft crashed after the opening cutscene. Again, I’ll need to come back to this one, but I don’t have high hopes.
Job Simulator
I was expecting this to be super short and underwhelming, but this is probably up there with Alyx in terms of fun VR experiences. It didn’t put any excessive wear on to me.
You get a bunch of levels about remedial jobs like office working, being a store clerk, car mechanic, etc. Of course these are extremely dumbed down and humorous versions of these. So you can throw trash into people’s cubicles in the office one, or fill a fuel tank with energy drink in the car mechanic one.
It’s more fun than you originally think it’s gonna be, which is great. And it didn’t make me want to throw up which is a plus.
Eleven Table Tennis
You would think table tennis would be VR’s “Pong”. A basic game that would easily help people to understand the potential of VR and get them comfortable in using it. Unfortunately it runs into the same problem a lot of melee weapon-based games do; a lack of tactile feedback.
In table tennis, the paddle essentially acts as an extension of oneself, but there’s still a weight to it and a certain way of holding it that making hitting the ball back and forth a comfortable experience. In VR, the paddle is now a relatively heavier controller, and you’re not holding in a similar way. Furthermore, with tracking being what it currently is, the amount of precision that you could use to finesse the ball is not really there, leading me to end up hitting it too hard or too softly. Sometimes the tracking would just fail on me and I don’t hit it at all.
That said, when I could get the rhythm down, it did eventually feel pretty good to play. But still not as good as the real thing.
So it’s not perfect. This game is also very expensive for what it is, even when bought at a discount. It’s very multiplayer focused, so if that’s your thing, I suppose you could get some fun out of it. There are a fair few options for practicing and various cosmetic options as well, if you like looking silly for other people you play against.
Sairento VR
Much like Into The Radius; this also has locomotion movement, and teleporting. At the same time. And melee combat, along with guns.
Again, I need more time with this one, but the locomotion movement and pseudo-parkour really did a number on me.
Borderlands 3
I gave my opinion on this game back in November, and I bought and finished this game since. And Christ is it a headache. I’m not even going to try and play the DLC.
Just don’t.
Forza Horizon 4: LEGO Champions
Cute.
Forza Horizon 4 came to Steam a little while ago, and after it was discounted I decided to grab it and the DLC. Although there was only one thing I wanted do with it and that was check out the LEGO island stuff.
Honestly, it’s a bit of a mixed bag.
The LEGO versions of cars are really cool and there’s a lot of the LEGO charm and humour that one should expect. But the island isn’t completely LEGO, there’s still a lot of real world materials and items, and the races are still done with real cars rather than the LEGO ones. That’s probably because there’s only half a dozen LEGO cars. The McLaren Senna, the Ferrari F40, and a Bugatti that’s a variant of the Veyron; to name a few.
There’s still some neat stuff, like pirate ships, a raceway, and a desert filled with crashed UFOs. And the LEGO specific events are still pretty fun.
Maybe they should make a LEGO Racer game proper. But with better handling because SimCade is still a terrible handling model.
It Takes Two
As someone who really enjoyed playing A Way Out with a friend, I had relatively high expectations for this one; and for the most part, it hit them.
It feels really good to play, very tight controls that compliment the variety of game mechanics that they throw at you. The mini-games can be hit and miss though, particularly when one of you has an advantage due to being on a keyboard. Surprised they managed to program a working chess game though.
I wish I could speak highly of the story though. Without spoiling to much, it seems like the two main characters would have been a lot happier with their lives if they never had a kid. And quite frankly the whole game makes them seem like fucking assholes to their child anyway. With some very dark humour to compliment that point.
Last note, there’s one easter egg that I very much enjoyed listening to. I won’t tell you what or where it is, but I’m sure you can imagine considering Josef Fares is involved with it.
GTA Online: Diamond Casino Heist, Doomsday Heists, and Cayo Perico
God, fuck this game.
Anyway, a friend of mine recently got his new PC set up (Minus a GPU, which I am currently letting him have an old GTX680) and he proposed to me that we should play GTA Online. I was curious about the new island they added so I agreed.
I’ll complain about GTAO in a minute, but let’s actually talk about Doomsday, Diamond Casino, and Cayo Perico. The Doomsday heist requires you to buy a facility for about $1 Million or so and then you get your usual setup missions, except it’s different this time. You get prep missions before the setup missions, and the prep missions can be done within the current online lobby, and other players can interfere with it. Another thing is that you don’t need all 4 players to do any of the missions, although you still need a minimum of 2 for the setup and heist missions.
The money is OK, but it does give you a price discount on multiple key vehicles, including a flying car. Although it’s difficulty in the last part is pretty damn harsh. I didn’t like it overall.
The Diamond Casino heist is similar, this time requiring the player to get an arcade. Prep is actually more important here as depending on how you scope out the casino you will gain access to additional approaches. This time there are only prep missions, but the heist still requires a minimum of two people. But the payout is considerably higher than the previous ones, although you are limited by time and the loot that you get, which changes each time you do the heist.
I enjoyed this heist, but it’s probably the most difficult to deal with. The stealth is bad, and the game is very inconsistent about whether or not it wants to knock out enemies when you punch them. But the approaches are probably the most interesting in the game.
And then there’s Cayo Perico. Which comparatively is fucking El Dorado. You can get so much damn money from this place and it’s a near literal cake walk.
So you buy a submarine, scope out the place, do some preps, and then go to the compound on the island and steal the target and a whole bunch of other stuff. But basically, if you scope out the drainage tunnel near the compound and then do the setups related to that approach; you can basically access everything on that island with ease. Do it with a friend, but you can get even more dosh.
THAT SAID.
GTAO STILL SUCKS.
Let’s say you play for about an hour. 15-20 minutes of that hour is spent in loading screens. Another 20 minutes is spent driving to the place you need to go because they always put it as far away from you as possible. And then the rest of that time is spent actually attempting to do the missions, until a hacker turns up in an invulnerable jet and kills you several times.
I can’t wait to uninstall this game again.
Nier Replicant Version 1.22…
Nier is one of those games where the less I say, the better.
Unfortunately, I went into the game after playing Nier Automata, so I knew about a couple of references, plus as friend of mine told me about several things in the game, albeit with certain details omitted.
That said, this isn’t your usual bog-standard remaster. There’s new weapons, new costumes, and new quests; plus an additional ending. The combat has also been considerably improved and is apparently a lot less clunky now, although I can’t vouch for that point because I never played the original Nier.
Additionally, they added the original Japanese voices. Which is probably the sole reason why I decided to wait for this remaster instead of playing the original (Although I still own a copy). That said, the English subtitles are based on the dub, so expect inaccuracies and Americanisms.
The PC port is also somewhat concerning. It does work better than the legendarily awful Automata port, and I didn’t have a crash during my whole time playing. But holy shit, if you’re gonna remaster a game, spend the time and make sure the game logic isn’t tied to frame-rate, especially if you have no plans on locking the FPS. So this game is very sporadic in terms of game speed.
That said, that’s kind of the only major complaint other than the performance. The game just doesn’t utilise resources properly. But it’s difficult for me to explain why, but I’m sure you can find videos on it.
Anyway, I enjoyed this a lot, even with the back-tracking. And now I need to play the Drakengard games.
Record Of Lodoss War: Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth
As far as Symphony Of The Night clones go, this one was pretty good. The game feel is fairly snappy and responsive. You become fairly overpowered pretty quickly, but despite that, the difficulty curve is still fairly wobbly. Bosses can jump between mildly annoying to a cake walk. It’s also pretty linear with it’s progression, not much in the way of exploring for optional bosses and such like you would see in SOTN.
The story seems to take place many years after Lodoss War as Deedlit is the only person still alive in the merry band of adventures, no doubt due to the fact she’s an elf and they live for hundreds of years. Unfortunately, my experience with the source material comes down to watching a handful of OVAs a few years back. I might watch the TV series at some point though.
I had fun with it, and I’m looking forward to playing Touhou Luna Nights, which came out before this and developed by the same guys.
Anime
Vlad Love
Mamoru Oshii’s new show. I was expecting vampires, ended up getting a homage to a bunch of movies that Oshii likes; Castlevania, Street Fighter, and Darkstalkers references; and a whole lot of weird shit.
It’s an interesting show. The OPs are excellent as well.
Uma Musume: Pretty Derby Season 2
How the fuck does an anime about real world horses and real horse racing end up being one of the best sports anime ever made? I loved every damn episode of this. All the horses have their own weird quirks and jokes, the emotional moments work well, the overall story of Tokai Teio beating the odds despite multiple injuries; it just works.
Yasuke
Yasuke is an interesting bloke. He went from a slave to one of Nobunaga’s retainers, and was devoutly loyal to him to the end. So how does the anime portray him as? Well, something akin to that, but then they decided to set it after Nobunaga’s death, add in a whole bunch of magic and mechs, and then centre the whole thing on some annoying girl with DBZ power level magic.
It’s a fucking horrid anime. And the fact it barely talks about Yasuke as a person and his history is an insult to him. If you want to see a better representation of him, play Nioh. On the plus side, the anime has some decent animation and some pretty good music. The OP is quite good especially.
That’s it.
That should cover half a year’s worth of stuff. It’s not everything but it is the most important stuff that I actually feel like talking about. Next Den post will be in December or January.
