Hey everyone! I hope you like walls of text!

I'm looking to introduce myself, share my interests and talk about my projects, so this is gonna be a 'here's me and this is what I do' sort of blog. Self-expositional might be a better term xD. If you don't care much for that and just want to hear about my design work feel free to scroll past the next few paragraphs, because this gets pretty long.

Some basic things about myself for those interested: I'm 20, male, and I live in California, USA. I'm actually an immigrant from another country, but I don't feel like mentioning where I'm from because my birth country is in a lot of turmoil and at the moment I don't really feel like having that discussion. I've been in California most of my life and I can't deny that I know the culture here a lot better than my birth country. I'm in community college, which for those unfamiliar is a kind of preparatory college where people go typically either to gain some more knowledge/experience/credit before they go off to a university, to get an associate's (two-year) degree or to just improve their skillset by taking classes. I've heard bad things about some other community colleges, but mine is actually pretty nice and has a really good environment so I'm pretty happy to be here. I'm trying to transfer out but my main problem is that I don't have a set idea for what major. I've been feeling a lot of pressures to go down all kinds of paths and each one seems like a commitment that I'm not entirely comfortable with. Whatever I go with I know I'll need some kind of artistic expression in my life, professional or otherwise. I honestly don't expect to accurately predict what I'll be doing in the future, I'm just trying to do the best I can to learn skills I need and all that.

Like most people on here I like me some games, I've always been a fan of strategy games. Anything rts, tactics, or the larger scale turn-based games floats my boat. I've been into Starcraft Broodwar for a while, its basically become my go-to for when I feel like playing online, gotta admit its been getting a little stale after a while. I actually made a custom map based off of a diplomacy-style map I found, and the result almost plays like a whole new game (albeit similar to the original). The gameplay is tactical/strategy based with 7 factions that each have their own playstyle

, that goes beyond the typical find the most cost effective unit and spam it playstyle that happens in a lot of diplo maps. Its quite fun. Its themed off of Warhammer 40k (which I'm not a huge fan of but the themeing works pretty well) I think I might do a blog post in the future featuring that properly, with screenshots and nice separated sections describing all the features. If that sounds interesting to you guys let me know :).

Other games I like:

-Warcraft 2 from back in the day. Funny enough, this is like the game of my childhood. Played it for the first time back when I was 4. And I guess I better mention Heroes (of might and magic) 2/3 and age of empires 2. Its funny because when other kids were playing mario/sonic/megaman I was mucking about with these things. Pretty damn good games for their time though.

-Command and Conquer: tiberium dawn/red alert. Now normally I wouldn't mention these because they're pretty old as well as lacking in some respects, but recently a third party mod came out (a total conversion of CnC2:Tiberium Sun to be exact) that adds so much more. I was so happy when I found this because when I first played these games I always felt like they didn't deliver on as much as they could, and all the subsequent CnC games never got it quite right again. But damn does this mod hit the sweet spot. Its basically TD and RA combined, and yes you can get Allies, NOD, GDI and Soviets in the same match. And you've got some extra features thrown in on top of that that weren't in the original games (but there are a couple things that the mod couldn't recreate either). I used to play multiplayer but I quit the game after getting frustrated by a few mechanics, namely if you know how to micromanage certain units the right way you could just spam them and win the game which is how all the highly-skilled players play. Thats just not quite what I want out of it. Still don't regret the time I spent playing though. Take a look here: http://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dawn-of-the-tiberium-age

-Geneforge/Avernum: Did I mention I like rpgs? Because this is the reason why. Turn-based tactics with tons of interesting mechanics and fairly good story (although the writing and story integration in general has a lot of room for improvement). It delivers well. I haven't played much of the older kinds of rpgs that inspired these games (ultima, final fantasy, baldurs gate etc.) and I'm a bit wary of modern rpgs (KOTOR and Jade Empire were great). But these games, I guess the best way to describe their appeal is to say that they're really good at making the most use out of the limited resources they were created with. I think you'd be surprised at the places they'll take you. Oh and each one contains a good novel or so worth of dialogue. And I like reading, but I've found thats a subjective thing. Definitely an influence on my own ideas of game design. Check them out: http://www.spiderwebsoftware.com/

-Aquaria: Can you tell I'm not the most mainstream gamer yet xD? Well actually its cus I was stuck with a low-end laptop for a good few years as my only gaming medium so I had to make do with what I could. But hey whats the point of talking about games everyone already knows about? Anyway this got a good deal of publicity when it came out in the indie scene so if you've been keeping up with that at all you probably know what this is. For those that don't, its like metroid but underwater. Huge world to explore, the environment and creatures have a lot of variation, quite a bit of arcade combat, and all the art (graphics music story) is fantastic. Have a look: http://www.bit-blot.com/aquaria/

-Knytt (Stories): So there's been an explosion of all these platformer games lately. I have to admit there was a time when I thought platforming art games were the coolest thing. But there's so many now and many of them are so… evocative of a stale piece of german bread toast that I put in and forgot about, and now I have to go to work so I might as well eat it even though its gray and crunchy (my family has a thing for german wheat bread which is why I don't just toast white bread like a normal person). Except games aren't food so yeah.. you know a lot of these games seem like people are trying to express something with a game but seem to get stuck with this idea that a platformer is automatically an evocative and involving game mechanic. Regardless of content (I like me a good tangent). Thats not what Knytt is like, except for when it is. You see, Knytt (Stories, because there are other Knytt games that I haven't played) is heavily customizable in that you can make your own levels using the preset mechanics as a base, and using either tilesets that are provided or your own custom graphics to design the environments for the level. And you can have your own dialogue and all that. And whenever I play an independently made platformer I subject it to the Knytt test: would this experience be better presented in Knytt? Because I think theres a sort of freedom to be found when you don't have to design your own engine and are just given set tools to work with. A lot of these levels have the kind of design that you can tell someone took a good deal effort to think through, and often are presented pretty well. There are a lot of very vivid, atmospheric, and vast environments, with a lot of attention to detail. Theres a huge level archive, my favorite one is hypnagogia where you explore a huge mindscrew of a dreamworld. Much better than retro-simplistic pixel platformer with a message #9187 IMO. Also found it to be sort of therapeutic (when I found it I was in a bit of a strenuous period). Heres the site: http://nifflas.ni2.se/?page=Knytt+Stories

So those are the big ones for me, I've played many good games but those really stood out to me. Didn't think I'd have that much to say actually but there you go. I spent a lot of time talking about gaming interests and I want to talk about ideas and music and other cool stuff (I found such a cool webcomic the other day I actually put off writing this blog to read it xD) but I'll save that for the next blog. But I still want to mention my work.

MY WORK: When I say work I'm talking about artistic endeavors. I'm still learning and I wouldn't claim proficiency in any one area, but I also think I know my shit well enough.

First off, I've always been a huge fan of game design and coming up with game ideas has been one of my favorite pass-times. I'm trying to transition to taking a more professional attitude for how I do these things, and I've yet to really complete any of my ideas but im sure thats not something new to hear for you guys haha. So far I've only used gamemaker, and I've found it to be an awesome tool. I want to branch out into other methods, in fact one of the reasons I was motivated to join this site was to talk to people about the various virtues of different methods of game creation. I'm sticking with gamemaker for the time being though.

Now I have a whole lot of ideas for games I've thought of, but what I want to aim for is to get a major project up and running. What kind of game would I make as a major project? There are two factors to consider here: mechanics and theming.

Mechanically, I'm interested in delivering a kind of strategic and tactical experience, as well as a good deal of exploration, and resource management should be mentioned as well since I find it goes good with the above mechanics. This kind of play is centered on characters controlled by the player, and right now I'm equally compelled between two paths, a more narrow and focused design (like an rpg) with a central player character or small group along with supporting characters coming in and out of player control regularly. The goal is a more personal experience coming out of dynamic interactions with the environment and results from the player's choice of action resonating with that environment. The other path is one with a broader focus on a large amount of characters with some being more significant than others (as in a strategy game like HOMM). The game would have more focus on a collaborative effort between the characters in the players control, but the environment is less directly accessible. It would still feature story heavily, in fact one of the biggest drawing points is that the story would be told from many different perspectives. This might result in a more grand or epic feel but at the cost of the more personal sense of being in the environment that comes with the other choice. Basically my approach is to work on aspects that would be useful to both, and finally decide based on which one I think I could do better. In either one I definitely want to present the player with this big, expansive experience that I put together piece by piece.

Theming. I use that term to refer to the whole story/lore aspect of the whole thing, basically what I tell someone when they ask "hey Awakezok, what's your game about?". Well I could honestly write for so many more pages about the themes I've come up with. And I won't (not yet) because themes are what drive me towards a concept, they're what helps cement an idea in my mind as something I really want to make. With stories I really want to take my time and explore the possibilities, because sometimes I'll find something that I really need to express. For this project in particular I have a kind of cyberpunk-fantasy themed world thought up and that seems promising in that it has a lot of room for depth while still remaining colorful and vivid. However im not sure how far I'll be going with this theme or even this project idea in light of new developments, and it is possible that I might just use the theme for something else and let another one take over. Well you know, time will tell.

Here's how I'm approaching design work at the moment. Looking at a few factors that I'll need to have in order to make my game, I'll try to work as best I can on developing these factors, in the form of a smaller project. What this means in terms of what I currently have: one thing I know I want to have in the whole strategic rpg project is isometric perspective. I've worked out a terrain system with elevations (if youve played X-COM its largely based off of that, I even used the same grid size), I've tried to code my own pathfinding algorithm (like A*, but with an isometric grid and an amateur coder, I've yet to make it work properly), and I've been working on a whole bunch of sprites for that perspective with the proper dimensions. Now I'm also considering what kind of combat system to use, and I had the idea of trying one that works like a turn-based system, except that you issue your orders to all units at once and then they switch to a real-time mode to act them out, at the same time as the enemy units do too. I don't know how well this would work in an rpg, but I've always thought this system would be cool in a wargame, so I'm making a simple wargame to test this out. I'll feature my progress in a future blogpost. Basically I'm avoiding chaining myself to one idea and working on it all the way through before switching to the next as (I imagine) one does at a typical design job. Sure it might be inefficient in terms of completing that one project, but I'm here for the experience not the result. And of course I'm not above attempting to tighten up my process, I know that in part the reason I do this is because I'm lazy. Shit its right there on the site banner 'driven by laziness' XD well there you go guys.

I wanted to mention sprites so I'll do that briefly. Another thing I do is pixel art sprites (my avatar would be an example, though usually I just draw little figures or trees or something). I've been using gamemaker's sprite editor for that and so far I've gotten fairly decent results. However I want to ask anyone else who does pixel (not vector) sprites around here if they use any other program and how its been working out for them.

Well this took a good few hours but it feels good to be done haha, hope you had an interesting read.