Hay guys, it’s been a while since I wrote a blog!
Last few weeks I’ve been slowly publishing Bullet Heaven 2 – getting it up on sites and fixing any problems that pop up. Kongregate and Newgrounds are sorted, next is Armor Games I guess, and after that I can work on the Steam features which hopefully won’t take too long. I’d like to have everything Bullet Heaven 2 related finished by Christmas, and there’s some chance of that happening. The main complaint people have about the game is that it’s not really designed for casuals – there’s no permanent upgrades, the game won’t really run on old hardware, and the controls are sometimes messed up by browsers. Hopefully these issues will mostly disappear on Steam, but we shall see. But either way, I’ll be happy to finish the game and start putting more time into other things. I think that might even be a bigger reward for me than the game actually being a success, but of course I would like that too.
Besides that, I’ve been drawing sketches for EBF5, reading The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker, looking for co-op games to play with Ronja (Broforce was pretty good!), collecting Amiibos and other figures, going out a bit more than usual (probably more than I want to), and slowly getting ready to move out of my parent’s house! That last thing I keep putting off because it’s just such a low priority for me, compared to everything else I could be working on. I’m really comfortable here and have got lots of efficient processes set up!
I’ve been seeing a financial planner to get advice on pensions and investments. Since I’m self employed I have to think about that unfortunately. But I think for the most part it’s sorted now, I’m somewhat clued up on personal finance, especially compared to a year ago. If you’re a young adult and will need to start managing money soon, I recommend the books Your Money or Your Life by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin, and I Will Teach You To Be Rich by Ramit Sethi. Reddit recommended them and they’re a good introduction to responsible money habits, like saving, not being in debt, and general financial efficiency.
I’ve been training Ronja to become a pro artist, pressuring her to make accounts on DeviantArt and Newgrounds etc, and to draw more. And she’s making progress, which is cool. She’s studying animation, so her degree isn’t going to be very useful unless she has an awesome portfolio and fanbase.
Anyway, that’s all I got for now. Here’s some figures I got recently. See ya later.
off topic- but i had a suggestion for EBF5. i think it would be great to add mini games like you did in EBF3. specifically one modeled after the “cat cafe” game on mobile, and one reminiscent of Battle royal.
maybe these minigames could have equip rewards at the end- or could be part of quests to get so and so high score and return to the npc when you’ve reach it, and they’d give you more of a prize than just playing the mini game would.
eh jsut an idea
Steven Pinker is awesome! Have you seen his talk based on The Stuff of Thought? It’s a very good talk, although the first part is a little more abstract. The book is very dense, I’m trying to work my way through it right now.
I didn’t finish The Stuff of Thought. I thought it was very interesting but just too slow and difficult to read through to the end. I managed more than half of it, and maybe I’ll return to it someday.
The talk is really good, you can find it on youtube. It’s a lot more accessible and focuses on the interesting parts more. It only covers three sections – time, swearing, and veiled speech.
Congrats on all your progress and best of luck with the rest of the things you need to do! :yay:
Is that the cardboard robot from Yotsuba&! ???
Yup!
RE: Life
Good to hear things are going well! Personally a Dave Ramsey guy myself but hey, I’ve heard good things about those guys, good luck!
RE: BH2 Performance and “Old Hardware”
It actually occurred to me I never tested BH2 on my old crummy laptop from 2010, whoops! Well I decided to give it a go to see If I can help isolate your problem.
Specs
Processor: i3
Graphics: Integrated (Intel)
Ram: 4 GB
OS: Win7
Controls: Mouse
Now my notes!
I only tested this on Stage 1-1 with varying settings from the options menu
Default Settings: Was mostly smooth, however took some nosedives at seemingly random intervals.
Then Turned off Background particles: No noticeable effect, except I started to notice it was mainly due to spawns of enemies or explosions (The castle cat “Bombs” seemed to cause it almost all the time). Began to notice slight slowdowns when enemies “whooshed” (for lack of a better word) into their assigned position
Turned it back on and then turned off Bullet/Foe Flickering: That seemed to solve it on my machine, If there were any hiccups I didn’t notice it. Some minor slowdown on the “whooshing” still but other than that, ran smooth as butter.
Anyway hope that helps!
Kongregate version by the way, Chrome Browser
Yeah, I’m not really sure what causes the performance problems. It seems to be more complicated than just the CPU and GPU specs of the machine. My mum’s laptop from 2008 can run the game fine. But my girlfriend’s laptop from 2012 which has better specs has some problems with it. Well at least the game is still playable. The real problem is when people can’t run it at all because their hardware is outright not supported, Sucks for them. ): But luckily those people seem to be a tiny minority.
Did Ronja do the animations for an EBF (or will she do them for EBFV)?
She hasn’t done any work for me yet, but maybe someday.
glad to hear everything is going smoothly :yay: i wish the both of you and ronja the very best :smirk: looking forward to bullet heaven on steam and loving the recent sketches of art for EBF5 i would also like to ask is i would be able to use an image of your sketches of artwork for my interactive media course and we are now learning about gaming art styles which concept art is a big part of so i would like to use some of your in my work as examples of course all of the images i uses i will have links showing to the site i got them from but if you dont want me to then fair enough thank you for all great games and many hours of enjoyment you have given me :yay:
Yeah, that’s fine. Use whatever you like.
I think for ebf5 you should add enemies made from food it would look cool and ironic that the food is eating you :tongue:
Also when do you think ebf5 will be finished? cuz im half way through ebf4 because I finally fixed my computer and Im very slow in games like this. :bacon: