From the Ashes

It's been quite a while since I've made a blog post. The reason for that being quite simple: I haven't been working on much, until now. Sure, at one point I made Wax Champion for OPO, but I didn't believe it deserved a blog post. However, if enough people message me to make a blog post explaining how it works then I'll gladly go over the process of making the tool in an effort to educate those who are interested in making something similar. In other OPO related news, I haven't been given anything to make. I wanted to make more moves for Buddha but it hasn't been approved. To those who are familiar with this video, I'm also willing to make a post on how I created the tool. I won't be going over the code exact, but I can explain the thought process and all that.

Other than declaring this blog not-dead, the reason I made this post was to notify those who are interested that I'm continuing my pursuits on reworking Project Fight Club. I've been very hard at work on the core game. I've redone the main menu, I've fixed nearly half of the tools in the game to make them compatible with filtering along with balancing them, and I've been working on a new map as well, one I'm very excited to see finished. Project Fight Club will be remade to compete with the current line of front-end games you see on the Games page; it'll be ready for modern ROBLOX. What do I mean by that? Allow me to go more in-depth on the changes along with what PFC is trying to accomplish.

Many games on the Games page on ROBLOX share similar elements that make a game seem more polished: a main menu, preloading assets, customization, and microtransactions to name a few. I've always felt PFC was a nod to old fighting games in ROBLOX; games where players were given various tools and fought one another with them, similar to fighting with official ROBLOX gear. In order to preserve this design philosophy, the game's gameplay will obviously remain the same; you'll still see the same tools from before. What'll be new to the game are things like a round based system, a points system to determine a winner as opposed to endless fighting, and player customization. 

The new PFC will determine a winner by the amount of points earned in a single round. Points are given to players based off their actions. Things like: getting kills, healing, attaining high kill streaks, and shutting down players who've amassed countless kills in a life. Once a game ends, players will be rewarded with currency based on the amount of points earned. This currency can be used to buy boxes and skins and whatever else I have in store (no pun intended). Of course, you'll be able to purchase the currency or the boxes directly, but I won't be making them strenuous to earn by conventional means. I'm really against giving players a false sense of progress by making the rewards incredibly expensive, so it's completely optional.

I hope this sheds some light on the game as well as clearing any fog on what I mean by reworking PFC. I hope to make more blog posts in the future documenting my progress with PFC and any other project. In return for your loyalty, here's a sneak peek on the second map coming to PFC:

Long, Tan, and Handsome

Well, less tan and more red. I present: whatever the hell this is. I don't know what to call it, so I'll let a name for it develop over time. For now, for the sake of Spongebob jokes, let's just name this one Octavius (after Pearl's ex-boyfriend in the episode The Chaperone).

But seriously, don't call all of them Octavius, that's a first name, not the name of a species. What if

 fish were named Dave? Sounds stupid doesn't it. You wouldn't want to eat a plate of Dave.

I've been working on Octavius for quite a while actually. Not straight, but I've been working on it on and off. Back in around March or April-ish, I stumbled on a plugin that made rigging Motor6D welds easier. For those unaware, those are the welds that keep your arms, legs, and head attached to your player. Unlike regular welds, Motor6D welds can be detected and manipulated in ROBLOX's official animation plugin. After tinkering with the plugin for a few minutes, I began making a proof of concept AI using a custom rig: the screaming duck. I then had an idea to make an unorthodox zoo and fill it up with some dumb things we rigged and animated. BlazerC and his brother Rhysmon would make the models, MisterObvious would animated them once they were rigged, and I did all the magic scripting. We pumped out a bunch of stupid creatures (there was even a grazing refrigerator), for a solid month or so, until I had family come over from out of the country, which brought development to a halt. One of these creatures was the Biggerhead legs (which is what the original file calls it). Its shape and movement was inspired by the game "Daddy/ Dad's Long Legs", with a lot less of the frustration of making it walk. We thought the idea of it hiding inside its own head would be hilarious, so we made it so, along with the idea of it having a chance to just get up and leave the Zoo.

Fast forward about 4 months later, Aurarus sent me an instant message asking if I can make strange, unorthodox creatures. I then told him I had pretty much done a whole smorgasbord of what he's asking. When I showed him and Archaic our little project, they immediately grew to love Octavius and exclaimed the need to use it for One Piece Online.

After a good amount of time, I finally began to slowly work on the AI, which will eventually be in the game and have a chance to spawn on islands.

In order to accommodate to the island terrain of OPO, and by that I mean not falling into the water, I had to improve its path finding. I made my own path finding system for checking if the desired path would make Octavius sink or take a heavy fall. It constantly looks for walkable paths until it can find a path that matches the criteria.

In addition to just wandering around, Octavius will hide when there's players nearby. They can be very shy when around something they don't know. They'll retract their legs into their heads, which isn't really hiding but you get the idea. If the player sticks around too long, Octavius gets impatient and just sprints away hoping you won't follow it. Though, they do find a liking to certain people and can easily be tricked into being your friend.

Octavius is super social, and will get excited when a friend is nearby. Octavius will begin walking towards a friendly face to greet it. Octavius also loves to talk to others of his kind, but only for a few seconds.

Okay now I'm going to stop calling it Octavius and start referring to the species as a whole and I'll be using pronouns such as it and they. The reason being is because they can actually be fertile. When they spawn, they have a 50% chance to be male and a 50% to be female. When female, the AI will check every second if it can give birth. These odds are 1/2500 every second. I don't wanna spoil much of what happens when these things have kids, all you gotta know is they need a momma and the momma needs them. 

You don't want to know what happens next.

I hope a name for them develops organically overtime, where the species name is just whatever the people start to call it.

The reason for them to be in OPO is for adventure. Aurarus couldn't emphasize the importance of adventure enough to me. All the things I was tasked to do so far were pertaining to exploration and giving reason to set sail. He wanted things that'd drag a player's attention while out at sea and to pursue anomalies that appear from a distance, events and entities that do not reward the player for finding, rather granting them the experience of having witnessed such a strange and unique encounter. The kind of stuff that'd make the player tell their story proceeded by the audience believing the player is insane and lying.

I SAW A BUNCH OF REFRIGERATORS GRAZING WANO I SWEAR IM NOT CRAZY IT CAN HAPPEN!!!!!"

If only there were a reason to add it. I would get that fridge in OPO in a heartbeat. Maybe roaming refrigerators are how we get people out into the sea.

The status of Project Fight Club

Immediately after starting this blog, I thought I'd do it justice by addressing something many (and by that I mean about 6) people have been asking and that's "What's up with Project Fight Club?"

I want to remake it. Sorta.

PFC started out as a showcase of a few tools I made within the week prior to the game's inception. They were never meant to be a part of a bigger game, they were just weapons I made for fun (two of which were skills from Dota). Because of the nature of the game, the interactions between the tools were very wonky. In addition, the game wasn't clean; I didn't use module scripts so editing an element that's shared between tools was a pain. The worst part was that the game wasn't developed to be filtering enabled compatible.

Now don't get me wrong, I love PFC and what it brings to the table. I try to capture that old 09-ish feel of combat with a modern-esque twist because I miss games where you're sort of just dropped in a field with a bunch of weapons and you gotta make them work. I wanted to create a fighting game with no leveling system and no microtransactions that would give players an edge. I wanted a good player to be defined by their experience and knowledge of the game instead of the size of their wallet or because they've unlocked more stuff than you. 

I love the community it created and I love their dedication to the game, but it was a bit overwhelming. I found myself getting frustrated at all the forced bug reports I was getting, bugs that are just so specific that some weren't even worth fixing. Some bugs were game breaking and my options for fixing them were very very limited. All the reports and the amount of people begging me to update the game didn't help me with what I was going through so I took the game down for a while, but I want to work on it again, by remaking it.

I've actually already been redoing some of the tools, mainly the swords. Since they all work on the same script (courtesy of stickmasterluke), I only had to update one of them to update almost all of them. Once I finished remaking Mr.Slice, the rest of the swords were a snap. The only one I haven't finished redoing was the Rogue Dagger. I redid the status effect system to be way easier to work with along with adding some new effects like silence, damage amplification, and root.

I started a private Trello with my friends who are helping me redo the game. I've already finished a completely new level that stays true to the style of Raven Rock and adds a breath of fresh air to the suffocating diversity of PFC's repertoire of maps.

Here's a sneak peek: 

Hello world!

So I started a blog. I don't know what I'll do with it but I'll post whatever comes to mind whenever something comes to mind. I'm going to be posting progress on whatever I'm working on like for One Piece Online or Project Fight Club, or maybe my opinion on a certain update or on a popular game. This blog will have a more serious tone, but that won't mean I provide a post with the usual snarky or stupid remarks I make. Just know I won't be making stuff like shit posts or hollow rants.

Why should you, the reader, care about what I think? I dunno maybe you can only construct your beliefs off others' opinions and you're trying to find another source to annotate for your "totally" original concepts. Maybe you're curious about one of the projects I'm working on and want to know its progress. Maybe you just want to see what I got to say or what I'm up to. Whatever it is, I appreciate you stopping by.