Refocus (Maybe?)
Friday, May 10, 2013
It's no secret to anyone that I'm fighting a bad case of MUGEN burnout. I thought when I quit my job back in February to follow my passion and join an exciting new startup in Silicon Valley, I'd have way more free time for MUGEN and freelance game development than I did before. Turns out I've been so excited about the stuff we're building (hopefully more on that soon), that I haven't done much else, code-wise.
Plus, getting a house ready to sell is a HUGE time-sink.
Anyway, I wanted to say that I'm going to try something that I haven't attempted for a few years: making myself a blogging schedule.
Like here, my writing over on my other blog has crawled to a standstill, but like here, I want to keep blogging, and keep doing interesting work worth blogging about. Here's what I've started trying to do this week, after my sweetheart & kids are in bed (so far so good):
- Monday & Wednesday: MUGEN character work
- Tuesday & Thursday: Web work (mostly JavaScript game development lately)
- Friday: new post here on my MUGEN blog
- Saturday: new post on my Palagpat Coding
- Sunday: rest
So, with that bit of site news out of the way, what did I work on this week? Two words: Parasite bugs. Namely, play testing the most current version of his code, identifying issues, and starting to fix them. He's slowly but surely getting better, which makes me happy.
I've also got an idea for a new Spoiler Alert (if you remember that old feature of the blog, you've been around here a while), inspired by my going to see the awesome Iron Man 3 with my comic-loving kids last weekend. I think it'll be fun. :)
New Year, New Focus
Tuesday, January 08, 2013
So...
2012 wasn't much of a year for me, MUGEN-wise.
I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm proud of what McCready and I accomplished with the Strong Guy revamp, but that was about it, wasn't it?
We didn't even give you the traditional 12 Days of Christmas, which I know probably disappointed some of you. I'm really sorry about that one.
There are plenty of reasons why, but the most important can all be boiled down to one simple truism: there is paid work, and there is unpaid work, and if I have to choose between them, I prefer to get paid.
Please don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying I want people to pay me to release characters from my "secret hoard." Understand me clearly: no such hoard exists. Even long-in-development Scruffy characters like War Machine aren't sitting in a folder somewhere, waiting for some arbitrary brown-nosing quota from our fans. They're just unfinished and unpolished, and if there's one thing Scruffy has tried to stand for over the years, it's quality.
I'm also not saying that I won't do fan / for-fun projects anymore. That's clearly not the case, because last year saw the release of Infinite Dungeon, my love letter to the original Legend of Zelda game.
The truth is that I've spent most of the past year trying to improve my skills in my core area of interest: the creation of JavaScript-powered web games. For years, Flash and other browser plugins have been the platform of choice for that sort of thing, but the technologies collectively known as HTML5 are starting to change that. So I've been tinkering a lot in that space, and even though I have 15 years of experience in normal development, professional game dev is something I've wanted to do since I was a kid with the family ColecoVision, so it feels fresh and new to me in a way that a lot of modern web development doesn't.
So, what's a MUGEN creator with HTML5 gaming aspirations to do? My current answer looks like it's going to be a little side project I'm calling Fenjin.
Stay tuned for details; I'll try to blog more about this soon. Meanwhile, if you're on Github, you may want to watch this repository.
Labels: 12 Days of Christmas, Meta, news
Fighting Burnout
Sunday, November 06, 2011
Scruffyversary and the 12 Days of Christmas always do this to me, you'd think I'd learn. -_-
Since my last post here, I've been busy with catching up on all the "real life" stuff I'd been neglecting during August. Then I spoke at the DojoConf professional conference in mid-September. Then I got busy getting my new professional side-project, ConfSwag.com, ready for launch. Then I took a promotion at work that means less coding but more mentoring and responsibility (and more money too, which sure doesn't hurt), which makes me want to spend more of my free time doing coding so that the lack of coding in my day job doesn't depress my geeky need-to-code brain. Add all that up, and what do you get? Well, not hiatus, exactly, I don't really intend to ever "quit" MUGEN per se. But it means I've got less time for this crazy hobby than any time in the past, and that makes me a little sad. That said, I still have things I want to accomplish, and I intend to see them through.
I've also been giving some thought to doing more coding tutorials here on the blog, to hand the baton off to the next generation of great MUGEN coders. I've already got one tutorial post on coding beam and chain specials in my drafts folder that I may try to polish up and post soon.
Anyway, long story short, I'm not dead, but I may not be around here as much. If you're into the whole social networking thing, feel free to look me up on Twitter, Google Plus, or Facebook (in roughly that order; I rarely post anything on FB, but I'm pretty active on Twitter).
See you soon.
Labels: news
Stealth Mode
Sunday, June 05, 2011
So you haven't seen much from me since the big release of Blackest Night Hal almost 2 months ago (holy cats!!! has it really been that long?!?)
Then some of you probably noticed that this blog (in fact, most of my site) disappeared for a couple of days.
Um, yeah. Sorry about that?
A bundle of things are to blame for this "stealth mode" on my part:
- Work and family life both got really busy these past two months
- I'm building a chicken coop during most of my free daylight hours (long story, I'll likely go into it on my personal blog at some point in the near future)
- I'm building a pretty complex web app in most of my free night hours (I've been trying to get it ready to launch for a few weeks now)
- Popcap finally released Plants vs Zombies for Android this week!
- I'm also in the middle of a huge, long-overdue overhaul of my entire site
- Frankly, the final deathmarch to get Hal ready for release kind of burned my out on MUGEN for a little while there =\
So... lots of reasons, but none of them would have stopped me from at least posting something here sooner to explain what was going on. For that, I offer my apologies, and the promise that I do, in fact, have a few things in the pipeline for the MUGEN public.
Finally, a note on Scruffyversary. I explained back in April that we were moving it to the summer to allow for more lead time on the various projects we're all working on. Today I can announce that this year's Scruffyversary will be in July; not sure if we'll launch on July 1st or wait until the 3rd/4th (which would be the start of the first full week). I'll post more concrete details soon, but for now, know that you have something to look forward to next month.
We'll try to make it worth the wait.
Labels: news, Scruffyversary
Yesterday
Saturday, April 02, 2011
Many of you may have noticed that yesterday was "don't believe everything you read on the Internet day", otherwise known as April Fools Day. Our little contribution was the Latino "takeover" of the ScruffyDragon forums for the day (in fact, as I write this, they're still like that). This is a real announcement, hidden in a joke — in fact we DO have a Latino forum now (which I'll call SDL for short) whose real URL is ScruffyDragonLatino.com. If you speak Spanish, and would feel more comfortable hanging out there instead of the English site, please feel free to sign up over there. The domain for the English forum will switch back soon, but both sites will remain up. The neat thing about SDL is that you're likely to see members of the ScruffyDragon team over there that hardly ever (if at all) post on the English side of things: ArielCo, JeffPR, and probably others as it grows.
That leads me to thing #2: Scruffyversary, our annual celebration of the cool stuff our team is doing. In a nutshell, this year is going to be a little different: instead of April being a month full of teases, videos, and releases, it's going to be much more low-key, and we'll be moving the official Scruffyversary celebration to the summer. There are a few good reasons for doing this:
- The senior Dragons are all pretty swamped in April, and our schedules free up quite a bit around June/July, so we'll be able to do more cool stuff.
- It spreads the big Scruffy celebrations out a little more evenly: the 12 Days of Christmas in December/January, and the Scruffyversary around 6 months its opposite.
- It gives us more time to finish the thing we want most to finish (I'll let you figure out what that might be ;))
So, yeah. No Scruffyversary this month, sorry. :(
BUT!!!
I have plans for my own creations this month. I know a few others on the team do as well. Plus the main forum will be marking a cool milestone sometime soon, and we'll likely organize some forum activities around it (think sprite contests, design challenges, that sort of thing). Plus there's now the new Latino Forum to grow, if you're into that. So despite the potentially disappointing lack of Scruffy holidays this month, there's still quite a bit going on. Stay tuned to this space, and both ScruffyDragon Forums, for much more to come.
Labels: news, Scruffyversary
Blame Netflix
Sunday, March 06, 2011
So.... yeah. February, I hardly knew ya.
A lot of people have been asking about the status of my projects. This February, while full of many good things for myself and my family, has not been so good for my discretionary time. I've been quite short on it, in fact.
Even worse for my MUGEN projects has been the way I chose to spend what little free time I did have: catching up on my DC animation. Netflix, bless them, have made the recent DC comics flicks available for streaming, so I finally got around to watching Batman: Under the Red Hood, Superman/Shazam, and Superman/Batman: Apokolips. All entertaining enough, and definitely a good thing that I didn't watch them with my kids (would have made for nightmare city). But all the same, I had to take that time from something, and that something was MUGEN creation time, alas.
Now that I'm caught up, though, hopefully I can get back to finishing Blackest Night Hal and Parasite 2.0. On Hal, I've resolved 50 of the 65 issues that came up in the beta, so expect to hear more on that front soon.
Provided I can keep my Netflix queue clear. ;)
Sporadic Updates, Tragedies, and Other News
Friday, October 01, 2010
I missed posting anything here last weekend. I've been pretty focused on updating my programming site over the past few weeks, and I'm still not satisfied with it. I also virtually attended (and reported on) a big web development conference that stole a lot of the attention I would have otherwise given to MUGEN, but the good news is that it inspired me to make some long-needed updates to the coding and design of my blogs. (My recent redesign here was a first stab in that direction, but I'm not yet where I want to be)
Anyway, the upshot of all this is a bit of forewarning: I'm in the process of moving my coding blog off of Blogger and onto a lightweight blog engine I'm writing myself; if that effort goes well, I'll be migrating this blog pretty soon too. The change should be mostly transparent to those of you that follow my blog via my buyog.com domain, or if you subscribe to my updates via RSS. The big changes will be that you won't be able to follow the blog anymore via Google Friend Connect, which honestly I don't think many of you were doing anyway, and the comment system is going to be quite a bit different (hopefully easier for everyone to use, especially for that portion of my readers that don't have Google accounts -- no more need to comment as "anonymous"). Expect that to happen in the near future.
On another subject entirely: DC vs Marvel. SethZankuten and I have been talking this week about what's left to be done for Phase 1, and I found out why things this year haven't gone as quickly as he hoped: unbeknownst to any of us ScruffyDragons, he had a pretty severe accident a few months ago that has led to abbreviated work days and no small amount of physical therapy. So, yeah, MUGEN's going to take a back seat to that. That said, he's coming out the worst of it now, and together, he & I are going to drive DCvM Phase 1 through to completion. I'm not going to quote you a release date, because these things can change in a heartbeat (see above discussion about the accident), but I think the train is now back on the tracks and moving forward.
Which is good news, indeed.
Labels: DC vs Marvel, news
Redesign!
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Starting today I'm trying for a much simpler, lighter design for this site. Overall it should be more mobile-friendly, as I've eliminated a lot of the unnecessary JavaScript (goodbye, Dojo; farewell, Google Translate!), and streamlined the CSS quite a bit. So far the main page is the only one that reflects the changes; the other pages will probably follow suit in the next day or two.
What say you all? Like? Dislike? Let me know in the comments.
Labels: news
Vlog #2: On Hard Drives and Master's Theses
Sunday, July 25, 2010
Data on the thought-dead hard drives has been recovered. Whew! Oh, and I'm a day or two away from being done with my grad school work. So, Hal's finally being worked on again. :)
MAGNETIC Screwdriver? Oooooops...
Friday, July 16, 2010
So last weekend I was moving my main PC's hard drives into a new case (the old processor fan died), and couldn't figure out why none of the drives would boot up when I got them installed. After an hour or two of fiddling with them over and over, I realized that my computer toolkit's screwdriver had somehow become magnetized... and my guess is that putting it up close to those magnetic hard drive platters had a, shall we say, negative effect. Hoping my MUGEN work wasn't lost, because it's been a while since I've backed anything up. :( I'll know more in a week or so, and will post here when I know the extent of the damage (if any).Labels: news
Vlog #1: New Stuff is on the Way!
Wednesday, July 07, 2010
I just realized it's been over a year since I've posted any new videos to YouTube, so I just did this one as kind of a status update / signal of things to come. Don't know how regular these will be, but at least it's something. Bottom line: the time-hole that is grad school is done for me now, except the thesis defense in 2 weeks. Woo! So MUGEN stuff is back on my plate, and coming down the pipe soon.
Labels: Blackest Night Hal, DC vs Marvel, Elektra, Mandarin, news, Parasite, Sinestro, video, vlog
Inspiration
Saturday, July 03, 2010
Finishing my Master's thesis. No really, this time it's real... was supposed to have it done a little over a week ago, and now it's really "do or die" time. No pressure or anything. =P
So... no time lately to sprite or do MUGEN coding. But that will change... very soon. :)
For now, take a gander at the gameplay in this new preview of Marvel vs Capcom 3:
The new effects look gorgeous. And I really love the new style of animated hyper portraits during the superpause before the hyper attacks. Oh, and Hulk's got some killer combos I may want to think about adapting.
All in all, there's plenty in this new game to get excited about... and plenty for a MUGEN creator to take inspiration from.
More soon.
Labels: news, Savage Hulk, video
Thesis versus Updates
Saturday, June 19, 2010
Soooo... yeah, it's been too long since I've posted an update. A lot going on at work and trying to finish my MA thesis in the next 7 days. In the meantime, while you wait for a more substantial update, enjoy this tease of the smart palette my Parasite partner-in-crime Jet the Phoenix made for Sinestro:
So, y'all have that to look forward to later this summer, once I get this pesky thing called "school" out of the way. ;)
April Fool! (2 Days Late :-P)
Saturday, April 03, 2010
As some of you no doubt deduced, the timing of my "I'm retiring" post wasn't an accident. But then, April Fools' Day had to go and play a trick on ME! :-P For a couple of real-life reasons I don't want to go into here, I've been essentially offline for the past two days, and until now, haven't had the chance to log on here or at ScruffyDragon to kick off this year's Scruffyversary event.
So, first of all: no, I'm not retiring. At least not yet; there's still soooo much I want to do. The bit about having a major school deadline is 100% true, though, so I fully expect to drop off the planet for a little while AFTER Scruffyversary is over. Until then, though, we've got some great stuff planned. :D
Secondly: no, Scruffyversary isn't canceled. The email sent out by the forum admins was Magus's April Fool for everyone. Gotcha!
Scruffyversary 2010 has begun!
Labels: news, Scruffyversary
Hiatus
Thursday, April 01, 2010
This is hard to articulate, but I've felt it coming for a while, and I have to do it.
As of today, I'm officially going on MUGEN hiatus. Sorry to those of you who were looking forward to my updated character projects, but between family, work, and a very large, very final grad school deadline looming in the near future, I have to give something up. For now, at least, that something is MUGEN. Hopefully at some point I'll be able to find my way back, as Loganir has recently done, but I have no idea when that'll be. Until then, take care, my friends, and be excellent to each other.
Labels: news
Scruffyversary is coming...
Friday, March 26, 2010
Nothing I can show today, because I'm on vacation for a couple of days and only have my netbook (which doesn't have all of my MUGEN work on it). But I have two items of news to share:
- I think I've now fixed most of the code and stylesheet problems caused by the move to Blogspot. I'm still not 100% satisfied with the way I'm doing things, but I still think it's better than no updates at all, or (shudder) doing my blog updates by hand.
- As in the past several years, April 1st marks the start of our annual Scruffyversary event, marking the anniversary of our ScruffyDragon team's inception. Also as in previous years, we have quite a lot of cool stuff planned. If you read my blog regularly, you can probably guess what some of my contributions will be, and if you participate in the ScruffyDragon forums, you can probably think of a few others (the speculation thread has already started, in fact). Still, notwithstanding all that, I'm pretty confident that we've got some surprises nobody will see coming.
Stay tuned for more news soon. As always, I thank you or your interest in our work. :)
Labels: news, Scruffyversary
Grr!
Saturday, March 20, 2010
You may have noticed that my last post was supposed to have images. You may have wondered why they weren't there. The answer is because my web host is disallowing all hotlinking of my images from anywhere other than my own site (buyog.com/buyog.net)... including my now-hosted-by-Blogspot blog!
Clearly, this is not what I had intended.
For the time being, I'm going to most my more-recent images over to my Photobucket account, or you can hit my real site URL and see the images over there.
Labels: news
Update is coming...
Saturday, February 27, 2010
I've been out of town the majority of this week on a work trip to San Diego (nice change from the cold and snow here in the Washington DC area!), and as such haven't picked up this week's comics yet. Once I do, I'm sure to have some fodder for new MUGEN updates, so look for something here tonight.Labels: news
Character page redesign
Monday, January 25, 2010
Sorry the blog's been quiet lately; I've been in the middle of rewriting the character pages to fit in with the visual theme I established a few weeks ago with the stages and add-ons pages.
I'm not quite done yet: there are still a few issues related to overflow and cross-browser compatibility. But when done, the pages which used to look like this will look (more or less) like this.I've also got v2.0 Release Candidate 2 coming up soon for Parasite; it'll have bug fixes, sprite improvements, improved AI, better effects here and there, and a few more filled-out power sets. Look for an update on all of that later this week; I want to get it out of the way so I can get back to work on Hal and Sinestro!
Labels: news
Finished Tweaking
Sunday, January 10, 2010
Okay, I've fixed the stuff I broke the other day. My web server supports PHP, and I figured that would get me most of the code reuse I wanted, even if it is duplicated on the front page and all the archive pages (there are apparently ways to get Blogger to serve up PHP )or at least PHP-friendly content) instead of HTML, but I haven't figured them out yet, so this'll have to do as a stopgap. Note that Stages and Add-ons are both PHP-ified, but Chars isn't yet, because when I do that page, I'll also need to do all of the character pages at the same time... so that's a task for another night.
Earthquake special from Juggernaut
Rudy Smash! hyper from Hulk
Oh, and Parasite's finally got a cool ground-smash anim for Juggernaut's special and Hulk's hyper, thanks to ScruffyDragon forum member GODzilla and my partner Jet the Phoenix. (thanks to both of you!) I've got almost all of the changes done to him that I wanted to make for the next v2 release candidate, so I think that'll be done and ready for download sometime next week. I also owe a new YouTube video showing off all the cool new stuff he can do; more on that soon.