Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Well school is starting this thursday.

It will be my final semester of college. Soon I will have to work. I haven't done much lately except play Advance Wars Dual Strike and Advance Wars Days of Ruin, both for the Nintendo DS. This is the end of my winter vacation and my final one. I probably won't post much videos or entries to this blog anytime soon. Until the Lego Prince of Persia and Lego Kingdoms sets come out, I won't be purchasing any Lego either.

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Worked on increasing smoothness of animation.

The result of today's labor.



The weapon thrust looks funny, I guess the arm has to move as well. And my microsd card was corrupted which was used to transfer the photos from the cell phone to my pc. Fortunately nothing vital was lost. I have transferred a 1000 pictures without incident before.

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Made two more videos.

The first one was a short test on how minifigs marching would look like. Cropped to fit widescreen and remove excess junk. It is HD compatible.


And then I decided to make another one. This one has a short battle between Crown Knights and Trolls.



The camera is more still this time because I used lego pieces to hold the cellphone and attach to the set. The camera only moved a little near the end. Now that I have managed to reduce camera shakiness, and figured out how to crop images easily and create widescreen videos. The next part I will improve is increasing the amount of frames per second in brickfilms for smoother animation.

Monday, January 11, 2010

Well I made a short brickfilm.

Starring a Pirate and a Manta Warrior. Made it yesterday afternoon and spent some time cropping the pictures to make two versions of the video.

Cropped version


Uncut version


Tell me which one you like better.

Short but longer than my previous ones. And I have a small set for the two interacting minifigs.

Of course I intend on making more in increasing complexity and length over time.

Comments, criticisms, and suggestions are welcome. I built a holder out of bricks to keep the camera steady, so the camera isn't be that shaky.

Saturday, January 9, 2010

Progress.

Not much happened today. I made a tiny lego terrain for an upcoming stop motion video. I doubt its going to be much longer than the ones I have previously made, but at least there is some ground for the minifigs to walk on. Going to star some Pirates and Manta Warriors.Yesterday I added a table of contents to my website, using bookmarks to enable visitors to quickly view the videos they want to see without all that scrolling and a go to top link at each video so they can quickly go to the main menu. Although I plan on adding more pages with more categories as I upload more videos on youtube. I hope to create another stop motion video tomorrow. That will be all for today.

Friday, January 8, 2010

Had remaining 2 wisdom teeth removed today.

I don't feel any pain, so I don't need the painkillers right? The cutting didn't hurt at all for the impacted tooth. But the yanking was terrible. Because the bottom one was impacted, it took a while for her to get it out. And she said the roots are still there and will be healed over by the gums. And nothing bad should happen, but if they get infected they will come out. I am unsure how that works. She took like 10 yanks to get the bottom one out. And I thought that felt bad. The top one was much more painful. Thankfully she got it out by the third yank.

Now my tongue and lips feel numb. I think she might have operated too quickly? My mouth feels much more numb now than during the wisdom tooth extraction. For some reason I though the cutting of the gum would be the worst part. It turned out to be the least painful part and took the shortest. But after the yanking, no more pain. Just a numb mouth and blood pooling in my mouth. I dislike the taste of swallowing blood.

The one I had removed last month was much less painful. I guess because it had grown so far out. Overall, the experience wasn't as bad as I thought it to be. I guess I was just worrying excessively. And I think I swallowed some of that gum anesthetic early on. Maybe that caused the increased amount of pain?

Thursday, January 7, 2010

I fear for tomorrow.

Well my order arrived today with the 5 Manta Warriors, 2 Pirates Battle Packs, and Kraken Attackin'.

I spent most of the day playing Torchlight unfortunately. I also saw recent episodes of Heroes and Modern Family. Great shows. Tomorrow I get my wisdom tooth extracted. One of them is impacted so it requires surgery. Everyone tells me to don't worry about it, but I can't stop worrying about it. Hopefully it won't be that bad.

I made some slideshows with music by Pal Zoltan Illes
Album Link
Creative Common License

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Evil Genius is a great game.

Not going to post a review for Evil Genius if that's what you expected. But its a nice simulation game where you manage your base and minions. I would say it has elements of The Sims since you have to make sure you refresh your minion stats. And its created by the company (which is not defunct) who created Dungeon Keeper and Dungeon Keeper 2.

Well I created a youtube video to help new and older players to gain easy money early on in the game. I guess its an exploit and cheating, but its pretty much the same as any other game where you grind at the beginning to make the rest of the game easier.



In the event anyone is reading this, I wouldn't mind some criticisms and comments.

For the text parts, I tried doing captions, but find that the font doesn't match well with the gameplay at some parts. So I made them into titles instead. Would you say they are too fast, too slow, or just right? I set them at 2 seconds each(although its possibly that I forgot to set one or more to 2 seconds), some longer ones at 3 seconds. I left one caption in since it wasn't really that important. It was originally much longer, so I edited out some unnecessary parts.

For the gameplay parts, I copied other people's styles where you start with the beginning part then skip to end. I figure people don't want to watch me dragging all those objects on the screen. Using windows 7 movie maker so I couldn't find a 2x speed effect, I would have used that if that was there.

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Short blog today.

I spent most of the day playing Torchlight.



I also decided to order 5 Manta Warriors last night. They sold out of Army Men on Patrol, so instead I decided to get 2 Pirates Battle Packs since they are currently on sale at Legoshop, and a Kraken Attackin'.

They sent me a tracking order with the email that my order has been shipped today. But UPS gives me a "UPS could not locate the shipment details for your request. Please verify your information and try again later." error. Well I hope the shipment arrives before (or after) this friday since I have to get my wisdom teeth extracted on friday. It would suck for the package to arrive on friday when I am not home. Then some scrupulous person decides to claim my package as their own.

Monday, January 4, 2010

I am conflicted. So many awesome Lego sets to choose from.

So its 2010 and Lego has more sets being released. What interests me most right now are the Atlantis and Toy Story themes. Well for to be fair I am only interested in a few sets for the minifigs. The Atlantis theme has a Squid/Octopus Man. But the set Gateway of the Squid is 40 dollars, I can't pay that much just to get 1 minifig. There is also the Shark Man. It comes in a 15 dollar set Wreck Raider, so I guess I could pick one up for the Shark Man. But probably not. Then there is the Manta Warrior which is 3.50. Definitely affordable. But the question is how many do I get? Just one for the coolness factor? Or maybe I want a few, so I can have to have minor cameos in coastal dioramas such as manta warriors terrorizing a fisherman. Or even dozens to make a small army.

Also for the Toy Story theme, I am quite interested in the Army Men on Patrol set. It comes with 4 toy soldiers from the movie Toy Story and a small jeep. The jeep is a bonus for me.

At the back of my head I think about how every dollar I spend on non-castle sets means that's money I can't spend on the upcoming 2010 Lego Kingdoms sets. If I was rich I guess I wouldn't have this dilemma. I think I might end up making this a Lego centric blog. I can't get Lego off of my mind. At least not with all these cool sets being released this year. I think that's enough for today.

Sunday, January 3, 2010

Linked to Youtube

I never did write that introduction post that I promised. Oh well.

But now I have linked this blog to my youtube page. Well at least I think I did, not sure if it did anything. In any case, I listed it as my website. I will probably post videos of me playing games on my laptop recorded by fraps of course. And Lego Stop motion videos if I get the time to do so. And I can post thoughts and feelings on this blog.

I have recently discovered the joy of Plants vs Zombies. Its a great fun game. The official link for people who are interested. http://www.popcap.com/games/pvz/ It's for the pc and is a type of tower defense game. I believe there is both a windows and mac version. You plants various flowers to defend your house (more like your brain) from the invading zombies. You encounter different zombies as you progress through the game, and you collect more seeds to expand your flower pallet. There are lots of minigames and extras to boost its re-playability factor. The game will keep you occupied for quite some time.

My first gameplay video of Plants vs Zombies. There may be more to come of the same game, or other games. Enjoy.