I made a game!

About 6 months ago I changed my job.  I moved from teaching English into the field of engineering.  Now I don't actually know diddly jack shit about being an engineer or anything related to that field but I was lucky enough to get in based almost purely on the fact that I speak English and Japanese.

During my time at this company so far I've been learning a whole bunch of different things related to the type of engineering I'm in but there was one slow day where one of my coworkers approached me and reccomended that I try to teach myself a bit of Python.

Now I didn't know the first thing about coding (and I still kinda don't) but I got to work on teaching myself the basics of  Python 3.  After watching a bunch of tutorials on YouTube and following some guides online I got to doing the one thing I always wanted to do, which was making a game.  Of course, I'm trying to throw together a little project with barely any experience and in my work office so the only idea I could really muster for an environment like that was a silly text adventure.

So here I present to you, "Escape from Mr Stabby's Mansion", a silly game full of cheap deaths and badly written gore.  Please give it a download and maybe give me some feeback!  I'm going to carry on my adventure into programming and maybe try and produce something that's more than just text in a command prompt.  

https://www.dropbox.com/s/m7krr00gi8zqk9l/Mr%20Stabby%27s%20MansionV1.zip?dl=0

It's a fun hobby and if you were thinking about getting into it I'd recommend just throwing yourself at it full force.  It's daunting and there's A LOT to learn but even something stupid and simple like this is a lot of fun to throw together!

I will make a separate page for "Things wot I made" soon so this link doesn't get buried but for now feel free to download it off this page!

Only Half Fucks Given for E3

So E3 is going down as I type this very post and unfortunately the fucks I have to give about this evet are pretty minimal.

I'm sure I've talked about this somewhere on the blog before but up to a few years ago I used to get really excited for E3.  Back in my university days I'd pool friends together either in my tiny room or on Ventrilo/Mumble and we'd all watch the conferences and talk about the event as it happened.  Now I'm barely even paying attention, only having certain tidbits of information trickled to me via other peoples excitement on Facebook and I don't feel like I'm missing out on all that much.

I guess its because over the last few years the big conferences have really bored me to tears.  They showcase a few games, usually with pre rendered bullshit or some crappy staged "game play" footage where they have some guy sit in a corner and pretend to play a sequence while a short movie plays on the big screen.  After that there's a lot of waffle about features for a system which are being added, usually stuff that no one gives a toss about like that year it was all about Facebook or fucking sports and then it ends.

So while I'm not watching the event live or really even following it at all I'd be lying to you if I said I gave absolutely 0 fucks about  the event.  Despite the boring nature of the pressers the games that do get announced are usually pretty cool.  Already I've been intrigued by Monster Hunter World and Dragon Ball FightersZ and I'm sure once the event is done and I look up a list of announced games my excited will pique for something.

So while I won't be commenting on the event itself look out for a blog post on shit I'm looking forward to 

Not So Different After All

So I know I said I'd be uploading They Bleed Pixels but I find myself with more time today than I thought I did, so I'll be doing a normal post instead.

With the rise of the "dudebro" this stereotype has fallen off a little bit, but it's quite common for people who enjoy sports to dislike video games (with the exception of sports games of course).  But what's funny about the rabid Football or Baseball fan is that when you really think about it, a game nerd and a sports fan aren't really all that different.

Let's just take a couple of things about nerd crap and a couple of things about sport crap and compare the two.

Any search on the internet for any kind of popular nerdy thing may lead you to images of people performing cosplay.  Just in case there are people who don't know what this is, cosplay is where you dress up as your favourite character and then take pictures or go to a convention or something, I dunno exactly I don't do it.  Now I bet if you asked your typical sports fan they'd laugh in your face and call you something unpleasant, but what's funny is that they do exactly the same thing.  Where I'm from in the UK around Manchester, people are very much into their Football.  Quite often I would see people walking around wearing football T shirts which were replicas of a players shirt down to the name and number on the back.

A replica...of what your favourite player wears....sure sounds a lot like cosplay to me.  OK granted it's not as ridiculous as wearing some of the strange shit that anime or game characters wear but the basic concept is still the same, if you are the kind of sports fan who has worn a players shirt, then you are essentially guilty of cosplaying, so laughing at those Trekkies for those Klingon outfits seems a bit hypocritical.

The other thing I want to touch on is Dungeons and Dragons.  Now this IS looked down on even by people who don't like sports and I have friends who have laughed at me in various ways for enjoying it.  But those same friends who laugh at me for playing a bit of DnD also like to spend their time playing Fantasy Football.

From what I can understand, Fantasy Football is all about putting a dream team together and then based on their performance in real Football matches various stats regarding your team will change.  Sounds a lot like DnD to me, just replace adventurers with football players and worlds of magic and mystery with a football pitch and you're essentially doing the same thing.  While DnD nerds like to pretend to be elves, football fans like to pretend to be hotshot football managers and both things are fun in their own way to the right people

Either way, I don't have a problem with sports fans, even I have a couple of sporting events that I enjoy watching.  This was just a silly post to point out to some people that being a sports fanatic and a nerd of some description really aren't all that different, although being 23 I don't really know if kids who enjoy games still get bullied by kids who enjoy sports like I did.