Straight Bullyism Hits the Net! on 04.11.2012
By Stevie
Posted in Releases
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After over 3 years of work, I've FINALLY released Straight Bullyism around the net, particularly to Newgrounds (which recently sponsored Defend Your Trump). For the last few months it has only been on SB and SL while I worked out a few things. If it does well on NG, that would be amazing. If not, I'll hunt down Tom Fulp and skin him alive. Actually, I don't really care if it bombs on NG; there's a lot of good stuff coming into NG and not everybody is a fan of SB. A lot of people have said it's too "slow". Also, it's a multi-part game (which is really uncommon), so that hurts it's chances a lot too because it drives visitors away from NG, and it can be intrusive to force someone to a different site.

One thing I should mention is that there's still a huge bug in level 1 of SB, which causes the game to freeze and forces the player to refresh the page. It's one of those really weird bugs that - no matter what I do - I can't get it to show up even after playing the game 100 times, but then all of a sudden it shows up 5 times in a row. I've spent countless hours working on this bug and it is just unfixable. I think it might have something to do with a factor outside of Flash (like someone going on with Windows), but that would be really weird. Either way, sorry to anyone whose game freezes. I'm really dissapointed that this happens, but oh well... Hopefully it happens to less than 1% of players (which could still be thousands of people).

Now that I'm finally free from the endless work I've been putting into SB, I also have around 5 months off until university. Since I'm going to study computer science, I'm going to spend this time brushing up on a few new languages, mainly ActionScript 3.0 (for Flash games), JavaScript (for websites), and I'll hopefully get a start on Java and/or C++, which is what I'll most likely be studying in school. I'm also going to be making a couple of websites, seeing as making a site doesn't usually take more than a month and I can learn some stuff in the process. I should also make a small AS3 game in the next couple of months, assuming I end up learning the language. It shouldn't be that hard; I'm just really used to AS2.

SB/Server, Old Toons on 04.03.2012
By Stevie
Posted in Animation
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I finally got everything moved over from my old, unreliable Dreamhost server to my new InMotion Hosting server. Now, I'm safe to release Straight Bullyism without worrying about my sites crashing. I'm just going to wait a week or so to make sure that when I cancel my Dreamhost service everything continues working, and then I'll release SB to Newgrounds and as many other Flash sites as I can find. At that point, I'm hoping it gets front-paged on NG and wins a daily award too, which would really help it to get some inital attention that could end up snowballing. However, if it doesn't get popular I'm fine with that; I'm just incredibly relieved and happy to finally be done the game after over 3 years, and to be able to move onto other things.

Check out this SB wallpaper (1920x1080) that I just made (it also comes in 1920x1200), and I also got around to adding the SB site to my web design portfolio.

I recently watched some of my old cartoons on VHS and decided to upload them to Snubby Land, even though I lost the Flash files and the quality I got from converting from VHS is terrible, it's better than nothing. By the way, I only put them on VHS in the first place so that I could show them to my class at school in grade 8. Anyway, here's "A Bird-Brain & Friends Christmas" (an old, epic Christmas tale), "Black History Month" (an educational video which was a school assignment), and "The Outsiders Commercial" (not a cartoon, just a school assignment).

Server Switch, CM12 on 03.21.2012
By Stevie
Posted in Art
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I'm going to switch servers now, so there's a chance you'll see a bunch of error messages at the top of the page (because I have to switch all of my PHP code to a newer version). I'll get them fixed ASAP. Like I said, I'm switching because the Dreamhost server wasn't at all reliable. I'm with InMotion Hosting now, which has the highest rated dedicated servers on the net! That means that I don't have to worry about Straight Bullyism overloading my server if it gets popular.

I finally finished the 12th installment of the Coozy McMillan Webcomic, "Shadows of Darkness". Check it out, and also there's some videos of the drawing process below. These comics take me so long to do; I usually spend a day or two on each frame. I might get a Cintq soon, so that should help quicken the process. Especially with sketching, because right now I sketch everything on a tablet, which isn't as good as on a piece of paper or Cintq.

SB Info, Walkthrough, Server on 02.25.2012
By Stevie
Posted in Projects
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I finally got around to writing all the info articles for Straight Bullyism. I also redid the SL about page. The pages I just added to SB are:

• Stevie Critoph
• General Strategy
• Level 3 Info
• Video Walkthrough
• The Making of SB
• Game Statistics
• Bugs and Mistakes
• Instructions

Now that SB is done, I was able to get all the finalized statistics for the game. These may help put in perspective why it took 3 years to make. Below are some of the main stats, or see all of them here.

• Levels: 3
• Missions: 15 (17 including 2-parters)
• Cutscenes: 28 (12:19 total runtime)
• Enemies: 9 (3 bosses)
• Special Attacks: 9
• Items: 7
• Characters: 34 (seen)
• Voice Actors: 8
• Fight Sprites: 80 (22 for player, 58 for enemies)
• Instances of Enemies: 390 (L1: 83, L2: 99, L3: 208)
• Speech Bubbles: 302 (L1: 78, L2: 80, L3: 144)
• Sound Files: 235 (9 music loops)

And here's the video walkthrough for the game:





There are only 2 things left to do before releasing SB around the net (right now it's only on SB and SL): make at least one desktop wallpaper, and switch from Dreamhost to a better dedicated server host. It turns out that Dreamhost is really unreliable for anyone that uses its dedicated servers, and it's pretty much a rip-off. It's only a good host if you have a small site without much traffic. So, I have to go through the painstaking and risky process of switching hosts and domain registration, hopefully to a much more reliable host (with no downtime), so that nobody will ever have issues loading my websites. I would hate for SB to get really popular and then have my sites crash (which happens occasionally already).

Defend Your Trump, Fan Art, School on 02.08.2012
By Stevie
Posted in Releases
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Ansel and I have FINALLY finished Defend Your Trump, which we started over 3 years ago. We were lucky enough to get sponsored by Newgrounds, which meant that we were featured in the main slot on the NG front page for 2 days (it would have been longer if we finished earlier)! And since NG just completely redesigned their site, we were actually the last game to ever get featured on the old site. People will remember the old NG with DYT featured!

The main hurdle while working on DYT was bugs. I ran into a few crippling bugs that cost me many days of frustration. One was after the player gets stunned, you get stuck and can't play anymore. That was the hardest one; I stayed up all night and slept all day for almost 2 weeks trying to fix it. I almost decided to reprogram a bunch of stuff from scratch, but was worried it would end up the way it already was. Eventually, I did some serious reorganizing and optimizing, and it finally worked (but I still don't know what was causing the problem). The second most annoying bug was the bosses getting stuck after you attack them (instead of choosing another attack, they just sit there). That bug (along with the first one) existed for a long time before I was eventually able to fix it. Finally, when I tried to implement the NG API (for achievements and ads), I ran into a bunch of weird issues. One was Flash completely ignoring large blocks of code, which I ended up fixing by simply saving the file to a different directory (thanks, Mike). Also, all the music went from perfect to absolutely fucked once I added in the NG API, and I had to butcher everything in order to get the music fading/playing at the right spots (but I had to sacrifice the music for "Classic Mode"). I still can't believe I fixed all those bastards. It wasn't as bad as some of the stuff I dealt with for Straight Bullyism, but it almost was.

I also made a small website for DYT, check it out at DefendYourTrump.com (once I lost the domain for TWHG, I vowed never to let it happen again). I added it to my web design portfolio, along with the Reincarnation site that I did for Chris G's awesome game series. I'll also add the SB website to my porfolio once I get around to finishing the info pages, walkthrough and wallpaper. Those should hopefully be done by the end of the month, and then I can also switch to a new web host and dedicated server and then release SB to NG and such.



I added 2 old comics to the art page, here's one below (click to enlarge). Here's the other.



I received 2 new fan art games; one 3D version of TWHG and one non-3D fan-tribute (he called it "The Square Game" because I told him not to use the name if he was making profit). I now have 8 different TWHG fan art pieces, 5 of which are 3D!

I FINALLY graduated from high school (I'm almost 21 now), after dropping out to make Straight Bullyism. I don't have my grades yet, but I definitely passed (I know for sure I got 74% in Calculus). Since I've been unable to walk (due to injured feet), I got the last few months of school off, and my exams and most of my assignments were voided. That helped a bit, but it was frustrating not knowing if I was going to fail or not up until the last moment. My feet are getting a lot better; I can now walk small distances. I hope to be able to walk indefinitely in a month or two. I won't be able to skateboard anymore (damn!), and it'll probably be a while before I can run. But compared to the way I've been for the last few months (and the months before that where I was barely walking), this is AWESOME.