2018: The Good and The Bad and Beyond

2018 for me was quite a good year, a lot has happened then. Looking back in the last post I wrote in 2017, what I wrote doesn't really reflect my current opinion. I was quite ambitious at the time, I am now more laid back than I was back then - I don't think I will fly to the moon anytime soon and I'm fine with that.
Now let's get to the summary of this year, with the bad going first (just to get it out of the way).

Bad things about 2018

• Last year I wanted to get better at maths in 2018 and sadly that has not happened much, although I did do maths occasionally, I did not do it to the extent I wanted to last year - and there is a reason why: I did not really have a great plan, there was nothing I did that had a solid goal to work towards unlike my programming or even learning Japanese. With those I set myself small goals with things like learning Kanji and trying to do a couple of mini-experiments or creating small projects that could be completed in under 4 months. I did mention that I wanted to learn maths to improve my programming and I still do, but I now think that I should perhaps integrate it into my programming... somehow. I also did not improve on art as much as I would have liked although I did a lot of pixel art for Bounty Hunter II and my other games. I didn't really do much digital art or traditional art (except for the lame little doodles I would do in my lessons or, less commonly, at home).

• Due to my immense ambition last year, I started to feel the pressure of demotivation at school as I have to worry about an increasing amount of things like homework and coursework. Don't get me wrong, I still want to do the best I can but I feel like the ambition has died down since last year, to the point where I was starting to question the value of school again, like I did in 2016. I don't want to get too personal here with school but I was never really a 'school person'. Look, I can understand that a formal education is valuable to employers and it is required in some jobs like medicine or academia (maybe this might change in the future with apprenticeships). But the way the education system functions is pretty flawed in my very humble opinion and I hope to do a blog post on my opinions on education maybe at some point next year (although I am aware it may get some backlash). But I definitely learned that putting effort into something because you were pressured to do it or just because you may have been 'good' at it, can make you more likely to burn-out when the extra load comes in. Anyone who is in high school take note of this!

That's all the major negatives or beefs I've had with this year, on to the positives, and thankfully there's a lot more of that then the negatives.

Good things about 2018

• I fulfilled my promises of completing both Bounty Hunter II and Red Blue Adventures: Crash n' Brawl in the time frame I set in 2017. I feel quite proud of this accomplishment - it's like I can set myself goals and work towards them as hard as I can and at the end be rewarded with an extra project or two under my belt. Both were quite a blast to develop and I have learned a lot from both projects; BHII is especially something I'm proud of since the game was the first one I've finished that actually has a clear story to follow and actual characters with actual dialogue. Although the characters are not what you would get out of an RPG game like 'Final Fantasy' - it's still a game with some sort of story to tell other than 'Defeat this bad guy and save the world'. It's more like the first Half Life game where a story is being told but there are a lack of stand-out characters (except for Gordon Freeman and the G-Man). I'd love to make another story-oriented game like this in the future - or perhaps I might already be developing one!

• I started to learn a new language which was Japanese starting in May, this can more-than make up for the fact that I have not practiced maths that much. Especially since the language is radically different from English in almost every way like the syntax and characters. It also taught me a bit about Mandarin Chinese through Kanji and I honestly don't see these symbols as weird signs from the ancient gods anymore. In fact I was thinking if I get decent enough at Japanese, I could have a bit of a go at Chinese - I could call it the Bay-Jing challenge! Anyway, I'm glad I finally summoned up the courage to learn a new language like Japanese, it helped me become more enthusiastic about learning a foreign language.

• Not only did I finish 2 games, but I also made more games than I did last year and I managed to push out their source code for the world to see. I also learned a lot making each of these games, which can show how I could accomplish a lot in a year. I learned a bit of  3d modeling, I finished a game in C++, I had a go at implementing a 3d design in a 2d environment (with partially working collisions) and I learned about the A* algorithm which are pretty cool accomplishments within themselves. I started to also learn some JavaScript (in which I'm making another small game on). I like to think that, what played a role on this was that I adopted a more focused and structured mindset on what I do, and try to not be distracted by anything that is not related to my work. This did help me a bit in school too, so I am seeing this play a role outside of my games. I also enjoyed my life a little more, which nicely leads into the next point.

• I started to really assess the value of things like social media or other things that may distract me. This was something that really affected me last year, I often went on things like twitter ,especially during summer of 2017, and I used discord (although I don't count it as social media) a lot during October of the same year. Later on I started to subtly develop feelings of anxiety and general feelings of unproductiveness. I didn't really contemplate these feelings until early 2018 where someone by the name of Cal Newport pointed out that spending lots of time on things like social media can really make you feel a sense of depression when you see someone showing off how cool their life is or how it can pull away from your work when you idly check if you have received any messages. I have adopted the name of this which is "check stimming" and it has been something I've been doing for probably longer than I'm aware of (since 2011 probably) when I would check my inbox for something cool.
  These things have been in the back of my mind for a while. As a result of this realization in late April 2018, and after a lot of consideration and archiving I decided to let my twitter account fly away. I had lots of doubts, indeed I may have lost some potential friends, I may have destroyed one potential area of advertisement for my games and blog, but I was using it less and less as time went on. I questioned the value of twitter, and I honestly don't regret deactivating it. No longer do I have the temptations to check my messages or the tweets of people I'm following, (not that I cared too much about them anyways). I'm considering doing the same for DeviantArt, but I feel like it's a bit too much of a bold move to quit it cold turkey. I can post art and I use it as a way of traffic to my blog. But if my blog has enough traffic, then I'll probably make the move to pull the plug on DeviantArt and de-activate it. I'm not considering quitting Discord anytime soon because it offers a more personalized way of communicating with people rather than Twitter or Facebook. I'm not quitting YouTube either since it allows me to upload trailers and possibly in-depth videos about my games or anything that I think deserves a video - though I would link them via my blogs or website rather than directly promoting them on YouTube itself, although if there is a less centralized alternative, I'd happily jump ship. Maybe in the future I could also blog about digital minimalism too. I've also created something that I would like to use in lieu of any/most social media in the future which I'll show in the next section.

• I've made my own website and hosted it, I want this to be the place that I check the most things and update. I see it as a way to amalgamate things like my projects, my source code, art and my blogs so I can have a convenient platform to share my kind of content on. It was also a great way for me to teach myself HTML and CSS (which are quite easy to learn but hard to master) and web-design in general.

Beyond 2018 and into 2019

• I would like to improve my Japanese skills further and have a more solidified approach to learning it, as in I have one method that is the most efficient I'd have for the present and stick to that. I'd like to know almost every Kanji that appears on Japanese newspapers or media by maybe mid-2019. I plan to put my main focus on sentince-mining since I've been adding sentence flashcards to Anki so I could learn about grammar rules on there. I really hope it will help, I hope it will.

• In terms of maths, I would like to create a better approach to it, perhaps in the form of making a game that contains some form of mathematics (i.e. a game that uses SAT collisions or something like what Sebastian Lague makes). I'm not too sure about art goals but I would like to post at least a few digital or traditional artworks next year, for the most part my art goals have pretty much been on hold this year in exchange for things like making my games which I don't mind too much. But don't worry I'll still keep drawing and won't stop any time soon. I don't count on too much of these things being improved but it would be a bonus to see them improved.

• In terms of making games, I would like to see around 4 or more games being finished next year, because I want to keep improving, pushing myself beyond my limits and creating new projects. One of them includes a project that has stemmed from 'Magnum Foundation' which is a successor to one of the games I have released so far, which I plan to release late in the year. I would also like to reveal the other project which is more ambitious and again is a successor. I also plan on pursuing projects that are not games, like websites or perhaps small little simulations and miscellaneous things (like something on Node.Js or a calculatior) but games are usually the easiest area to come up with ideas for.

• I would like to also get a real job, to get experience of the real world - whenever it's a minimum wage job like working in the Krusty Krab (RIP Stephen Hillenburg) or some weird retail store. I've never had a real job before so I think working at any kind of job I can get my hands on would be a good idea for me to gain some experience of the working world. I could also make a bit of money as well!

• Since I have a website up and running, I would like to improve on its looks and make it look more like a website that one may look up rather than something from 20 years ago. I would like to make it have an art section. I would like to just generally make it a more usable place for me to easily post content and I could possibly give it some traffic.

• I would also like to travel a bit more, yesterday I went on a hike to somewhere outside of London and let me be honest, I have no regrets. It was quite fun socializing with the two people I went with (who were not part of my family) and appreciating the countryside more. In March I'm going to Italy (Venice) on a photography trip so that's something for me to look forward to. As well as that I'd like to go on more hikes/visits outside of London whenever it is by myself or with the two people I went with. I'm strongly considering to go to the land of the rising sun A.K.A Japan in possibly the summer holidays. My dad (who is aware I'm learning Japanese) suggested to me the idea and insists that we do something towards it. I'm quite euphoric of these things. It's nice to go out and travel outside of that little well called "London", sure London is convenient and comfortable (for me at least), but I will get a better appreciation of other cultures and places if I go there. These travels would be far more rewarding than the instant gratification and novel stimuli of social media. Which can lead me into my final point before I end this blog and go outside to wait for the final minutes of 2018.

• I plan to re-hash the way I look at technology, by using it to deeply cultivate the things I truly love, to interact with communities, learn new things and stray away from shallow activities like check-stimming and use it instead to connect with the world at large. The true value of when I meet people on the internet is meeting them in real life and establishing a deeper relationship that is harder to replicate by merely technical means like going out or enjoying a movie. I don't hate technology, on the contrary in fact, but misuse of it like anything else can lead into disaster and as a result, a less pleasant life. In other words, technology should be used as a tool to be controlled to enhance our lives rather than letting them control us (although I'm less sure about AI that uses enhanced machine learning algorithms).

Conclusion

This year has been quite a blast, I learned a lot and thought about things that were subtly popping up in my head throughout the years. It was to a large extent, better than 2017 in my opinion. I feel like I'm taking my life in a more healthy and productive direction, and I would like to continue this in 2019. I am hopeful it will be a good year and hopefully I'll have more wisdom and knowledge than I do now.

By the way, did you know next year is also the final year of the 2010s and when the last of the 90s (let alone anyone born before 2000) babies will be in their 20s. Happy birthday in advance, to anyone born on the 1st January 1999!

With that being said, I hope you all have a lovely happy new year!

That's all from me!

Project To-Ki-YO #2: Immersion and Kanji practice

Hello there... or should I say,
こにちは皆さん、元気ですか？
(Hello everyone, how are you doing?)

What I have been doing

A lot has happened over the past few months, I've tried quite a lot of ideas and methods to learning Japanese. I've installed an app called "Anki" to help me with Remembering the Kanji (RTK) and I've got to say: it's pretty effective for making me remember. I have also tried to immerse in numerous media, mainly NHK news (the BBC or CNN of Japan if I'm not mistaken), NHK's easy Japanese which I've done more recently. Surprisingly anime and video games played a very minimal part into this immersion process, for reasons I'll detail later.

Remembering the Kanji

Since last time I blogged about this, I finished going through every singe Kanji and then installed an SRS (spaced repetition software) software called "Anki" which was far more efficient. The way Anki functions is that it is a digital flashcard application where you recall the flashcard's awnser. I think I should have started using Anki earlier because I had to endure a load of August trying to come up with the stories for all the 2000 Kanji again as well as having to write stories for 1000 more (which I did not go through on my way back home), all of which I could have started much earlier. You honestly did not want to be there when I was writing the stories, I spent long hours trying to work on ~100 of them a day on top of the labuor-intensive process of drawing & animating the sprites for my latest game Bounty Hunter II as well as having younger siblings barging in to my room and making an absolute mess out of it. I have a few of these stories presented here in these pictures.

Around September 14th was when I finished writing most of the stories for the Kanji and I could finally focus on trying to consolidate them in my brain.

Once it came to the consolidation process, things were only a little easier since I've had to memorize the stories I've created (some of which I had forgotten after I created them) and draw them out accordingly. Some of these stories I've also had to polish too. I reduced the cards that I reviewed to 25 per day.

The way I use Anki is that I tend to often press "Again" for the ones I do not know and try to recall them via drawing them on paint with my graphics tablet (A Wacom Intuos), once I'm more certain with them I press "Hard" which takes the card off temporarily. This is quite a good strategy since I can focus on the harder cards and later on be able to actively recall the cards that I pressed "hard" on so I can eventually press "good" which takes them off permanently for the day.

Around November or this month I reduced the new cards to 8 per day, so I can give myself less of a workload as well as allowing me to still have energy to memorize older cards I have done in order to consolidate them well. This would straighten the forgetting curve and allow for a larger amount of retention.


















Immersion - Do's and Don'ts

I've tried many things like video games and anime, I don't think these are particularly good places to start since I've had difficulty understanding what they mean. Especially with video games, because if it is something like a game that is more action-oriented I have found myself skipping long dialogue so I can focus on the more core aspect of the gameplay. Visual novels can be an exception to this as the plot is pretty much the gameplay, although I haven't tried much of them - this will be something I'll try out in the near future.

In terms of anime although I have watched only Jojo's bizzare adventure: Stardust crusaders, Beyond the Boundary and Delightful Moomin Family. The reason why the amount of anime I watched was so low was that it does a very poor job of helping me understand the syntax of the language, everything feels a lot more complicated - sure it could help me pick up a word or two, but it did not give me a way to attain things like conjunction and or what is what in a sentence. I had the first two in Japanese subtitles so I could follow in with the Japanese, however when it came to understanding the language I often found myself pausing and rewinding so I can understand the sentence or use something like google translate to get a feel of what the characters were saying.

Although I did make some sentence cards out of them with Anki, the sentences still felt far too complicated for me to comprehend. The dialogue was slightly easier to follow in the Moomin anime since it is probably meant for a younger audience than most anime is (and I did not even have Japanese subtitles for that anime) but I still found myself constantly pausing the anime to transcribe what I've heard. I don't know about you but I'd rather listen to the anime and watch it throughout so I can actually understand the story rather than stopping and switch tasking.

Okay, so if anime/manga or video games are not a good place to start, then what is?
My answer would be learning simple sentences out of something like Tae Kim's grammar guide or listening to something like NHK Easy Japanese or news. The former I will discuss in the next section.
Easy Japanese gives very simple sentences and conversations and the people in the program go through all the particles (things like は, の and を), verbs and sentences, thus easing you into the Japanese learning process and giving some insight into speaking Japanese. News podcasts are also something I can just easily listen to passively, whilst I'm doing something else or doing nothing without extra stimuli like images.

I'm not saying that I'm against playing video games or watching a show to learn a new language - what I'm trying to say is that they are not a good way to starting out with learning a language due to their unstructured nature in terms of language learning. It's better to start with something more simple.

Sentence memorizing

I mentioned about Tae Kim's grammar guide not too long ago, let me explain to you why I think it's effective to starting out. It is because it is a grammar guide and you would expect simple sentences to appear out of a grammar guide. This makes it easier to learn sentences without any complications, plus they give you the Kanji with its readings, wait- I'll talk about readings because that is what I struggled on at first and why it is a waste of time to memorize every single one.

There usually are two basic readings Onyomi and Kunyomi, the former is from Chinese readings used in joined up Kanji whilst the latter is from Japanese readings which are in single Kanji. That seems simple enough, but I'm not done there - since there are also exceptions like Kanji for names, multiple Onyomi/Kunyomi readings and using them in different contexts so it is not always a matter of just Onyomi vs Kunyomi. I learned that I was just better off just memorizing them as they are in one big bulk i.e. 図書館 (Library) which is としょかん in Hiragana.

Anyway, with the sentences, my goal with the sentences is not to necessary understand them but to learn new words without having to look up the readings. It's worked rather well for me as I can recall a number of words I've learned whilst having say the sentences out loud.


Conclusion & future goals for Japanese

I have done quite a lot over the past few months since the last post, the main focus has been on trying to look at basic sentences, basic passive immersion and learning Kanji. I will continue on that for a bit longer until I reach a more intermediate fluency.

In the future I plan to try and learn more about the tenses and syntax of the language and shift the focus away from memorizing Kanji. I could even try to play a video game or watch something in Japanese.

That's all from me!
さよなら！

Magnum Foundation: The foundation of a plan

Hello there!
Since exams are over, I will discuss what has been happening on the game development end. I've been working on two projects in little chunks at a time. One of them is a small JavaScript game which I plan to release (hopefully) in February of next year; the other one is a far bigger project which I have been working on since April, shortly after Red-Blue Adventures was released. This project has the codename - Magnum Foundation.

The (very tentative) plan

I intended to have this project's development started right after Bounty Hunter II, but I thought it would be a better idea to work on it whilst Bounty Hunter II was being developed. With hindsight, I feel like I may have been putting too much on my plate as BHII was mentally taxing enough (as well as a cancelled project I worked on at the time as well). Development also was not too smooth as I would encounter quite a lot of road blocks due to me overestimating my skills. However, I think I was better off doing this than having to experience all these roadblocks at a later point. Plus most of the basic gameplay features are there in a very infant state.

Anyhow, about the plan of this project: I plan to have this project create the foundation for 2 new games (hence the name 'Magnum Foundation'), one which I'm estimating a Q4 2019 release (December to nicely conclude the year as well as the 2010s) and another which I'm estimating a release in Q4 2020. I do plan both games to be sequels to previous games I have made.

Level editor

This project also contains a custom-built level editor which I try to make easier to use than something like Bounty Hunter II's fiddly one. The design of this editor looks more intuitive, as it has a save button, a brush, eraser and a object selector. The least functional of all these features is the eraser since it's quite a time consuming process to add in a way to erase tiles on a certain layer or even switch layers.
Although I do hope to fix these problems at some point in the future, I still think this level editor is functional. The best thing by far about the level editor neatly ties in to the next section.

POUCH 2.0

If you do not remember from my previous blog posts what this stands for, it stands for "Prownie's Amazingly Ultimate Cutscene Handler" (pretentions I know). I remade it with what I learned from Bounty Hunter II's cutscene handler and another open source game called "Pokémon Unity" which has a really cool looking cutscene editor which helped me make this one. It is far easier to dabble around with than Bounty Hunter II's editor as you can just move the cutscene elements around by clicking arrows rather than having to do complicated procedures and dealing with messy UI which I could not blame anyone but myself for adding in. Here is a visual explanation of what I'm talking about (along with the level editor):

I have also implemented a number of new features to POUCH like checking certain event flags (which are basically numbers) and checking items, enhanced the dialogue system to include pictures of characters. These features are essential if you want to work on a story-oriented game since things change around the player depending on what they do.

I have also created Utility events which can be activated by POUCH which I will discuss in the next section.

Utility events

These events are basically events that seem far too complicated to create in POUCH, examples can include a shop or a way to check if enemies are defeated. These are triggered by POUCH which pauses its execution to poll this event. For example if you activate a shop the cutscene will pause and bring up the shop menu.

The build I fully implemented the shop was on the 2nd Year anniversary of 'Evermoral'

 You can use the arrow keys to navigate through the menu and buy the items you want. I might talk about inventories at some point in the future (although I don't know if it will persist in the final game).

Conclusion

I do expect to talk more about this project in the future and I do plan to reveal one of the projects, in maybe March 2019 and the other one later in the year. Admittedly, I'm not sure if half of the features in Magnum foundation will make it into either one of these projects but that's the nature of creativity and knowledge work. Despite the fact that I've recently released Bounty Hunter II, I still get worried that development of these projects may wain down or get cancelled completely since these are more ambitious than most projects I embark on. But still, completing Bounty Hunter has somewhat given me confidence that I am capable of finishing such things and I may be more intermediate with the processes of creating such projects. It's also not just the workload of finishing these projects that worries me, there is also the need of balancing things like a day-job (something I honestly want to get for the experience and a bit of cash too) and also living a life, because I don't want to just spend all my time developing games and looking like some shut-in, I would also love to travel.

However, I am hopeful that I will balance all these activities, after all Einstein managed to publish a bountiful amount of thesis's whilst working as a patent clerk. This may sound cliché, but if he can do it, I could do it. 

That's all from me!

p.s.
On an entirely unrelated note, since early 2018, I've been following a blogger by the name of Cal Newport who is a Computer Science professor at Georgetown University who writes blogs about topics that are full of things that bash on conventional wisdom like. He is infamous for having no social media, yet living a happy and successful life. He is publishing a book called "digital minimalism" which centres around using less technology which I defiantly suggest you check out. Or you can read a decades worth of his blogs which will may motivate you as much as it did me. http://calnewport.com/blog/2018/12/04/my-new-book-digital-minimalism/

New website!

Hello there!

I've been teaching myself HTML & CSS (and a little bit of JavaScript) recently and it has given me some motivation to create a website.
If you want to see it go here.

How did I host a website?

The reason that I've made a website now rather than earlier was that I would need to pay for a website hosting service to get my website up and running which has been the main blockage to me creating a website. But thankfully, I found out you can host a website for free on GitHub, so I used that to host my website. Maybe I might pay for a website hosting service if I get some sort of monetary income.

Why I did not use Wordpress, Squarespace or Weebly?

I thought that these sites (as useful as they can be for making websites in a short time), wouldn't allow me to make something purely from scratch. Being th technical person I am, I like to make something from the ground up to learn about all the things people take for granted i.e. scrolling bar and linking to other web pages. Although it would be much easier to have some nicer looking designs with something like wordpress, I don't mind the fact that my website looks like something from 20 years ago, I'll make it look prettier when I get to better grips with CSS and HTML.

Upcoming features

Although at this point in time, I'm quite busy with other things (which are not related to game development) so I don't feel like I'm in the right place to add more features. I plan to add in:

• More description to the "About" section.
• An art gallery (as an alternative to DeviantArt).
• Easter eggs.
• A custom blog.

In terms of the last one, I can't really imagine in my head how to do such a thing without blogger (what I am using as of writing this), but I would like to do it at some point. The first 3 are easier to implement in so I'll probably focus on those after I become less busy.

That's all from me!