Lummox JR's BYOND blog

Scream of the Stickster Volume II: The Crayon Massacre is currently up and running for the day. This is your chance to be in the very first batch of medal winners for the game!

You can read more about the available medals here, or in the in-game help. And BYOND Members, remember you still have the option of creating a custom character by hitting Alt+C during the game.

Have fun!

I have a confession to make. A while back my wife and I were flipping channels and we stopped on this weird-looking cartoon. We were trying to figure out what it was; obviously it was an anime of some sort but it was funny trying to figure out what the heck was going on. After about ten minutes we actually got kind of interested in the story, so I looked it up to see what it was and when it would be on again. It turned out to be Dragon Ball Z.

Well, my feelings about anime aside, I was sufficiently piqued to take a second look at the show, so when it was on again we decided to watch the next episode. The intriguing thing about this series, I soon realized, is that like any good soap opera it draws you into a complex web of story arcs. Except it was like the good parts of the soap opera, like back when Days of Our Lives was cool and Sami was barely a character. Most readers won't remember back in the '80s when the main characters of Days were trying to transport a glowing jewel to safety in cold storage lest it blow up the entire town. It dawned on me while watching that DBZ has this same kind of energy, the same quirky but intense plot that you can't help but get invested in. So that second episode turned into a third, and fourth, and pretty soon we were watching episodes online to get the feel for the whole series.

I have to be honest; after getting sucked into the story, the big eyes and the weird mouths and the frame rate hardly matter to me anymore. They almost kind of add a touch of comic relief.

After becoming an addict of the series, I finally decided it was time to get involved in some of the BYOND games built around it to see what they're all about. I fired up an alternate key and hopped into a few of the games. It was actually a pleasant surprise to see how much attention to detail had been paid to putting some of them together, and I found myself enjoying the subtle references to little things from the series, even running gags and in-jokes. I love a good running gag.

But all that said, I feel like we can do better. Now that SotS II is nearing completion, I feel like I can take on a new project. I was thinking of starting up a Roguelike, but it occurred to me that the elements of a Roguelike could be made to fit very nicely within a universe like the one from the series.

Fortunately I won't need to start totally from scratch, since my time is limited after all. I have access to the complete source code and icons from three major BYOND DBZ games, as well as a Naruto game that has a few elements that could be easily massaged to fit the concept. I feel quite confident that I can splice together significant chunks of these games as pieces of a much better, more comprehensive game, and add even more references to locales in the series, more inside jokes, and more variety in the type of character you can play and how you interact with the world. Best of all, I'll be able to do real cleanup on some of the code involved and make it really bulletproof and optimized for speed. In a way it's the perfect project for me.

Anyway, I don't want to give away too many details yet, but I think you can expect to see the game in early testing by the end of the month. Just don't give me too much grief about being a hypocrite for changing my mind about anime, okay?

After some more decisions and more ideas, I've finally got ten medals implemented in Scream of the Stickster Volume II. This number may grow as I think of more or implement some of my earlier ideas.

Each medal was made as follows: Using a torn paper image I had created earlier, I shrank the image to 64×64 in Photoshop Elements and added a layer of light black-on-white noise. I gave the noise layer some motion blur to simulate paper grain, grouped it to the torn paper layer, and set the noise layer's blend format to Multiply.

Then I added an image of a crayon, pen, or pencil I had created in Inkscape and exported to .png. This image had to be scaled down. In the case of the crayons, I needed four different images so I could modify their colors properly. I would then combine the layers and duplicate the new single layer into the medal image. In the medal image, I would move the layer into position, group it with the paper layer, and set its blend style to Multiply.

For the drawings, I created a blank canvas, usually about 256×400, and used a tablet to draw the stick figures. Mostly I used an 8-pixel brush, but sometimes I used a 5 or 3 for subtler effects. The important layers like the stick figures I ran through the Minimum filter with a 2-pixel radius so they'd stand out more. Then I combined the layers and reduced the image size to 32×50, pasted it into the medal image, then moved that layer into position and changed its layer style to Multiply. The Cleanup Crew medal required a couple of additional steps so I could properly show the ropes looped around the crayon.

At this point the only thing really standing between me and a new session of the game that uses these medals is the lack of a sound effect. I want a nice fanfare or happy/triumphant sound when awarding a medal, and this has been surprisingly impossible--not difficult, impossible--to find on Freesound. To that end, I'm looking for any help I can find getting hold of such an effect--royalty-free of course.

These are the medals available in the game now:

Since implementing the medal system I have begun work on some medals for Scream of the Stickster Volume II: The Crayon Massacre. I could definitely use more good ideas, so here's a list of what I have in mind so far, some of which I've implemented at least partly. Unless otherwise noted, an enemy refers to a player on another team, a valid target in Stick Tag or Free-For-All, a "free game" player (one with a negative score from attacking players unprovoked), or the Stickster.

None Shall Pass: Kill an enemy by shooting up or down a ladder.

Draw Hard: Kill/stun 3 enemies at once (secondary explosions count).

Master Scavenger: Complete a scavenger hunt in under 5 minutes.

Cleanup Crew: Complete a team scavenger hunt in under 3 minutes. (Awarded to entire team.)

Flag Raider: Contribute 10 points to your team in a CTF match.

Color Guard: Return 3 of your own team's flags to base during a CTF match.

Dot Sniper: Ambush 5 enemies in a row while invisible.

Defender of the Ream: Kill the Stickster once (on average) per minute of play.

Team Captain: Earn MVP on a team of 5+ players.

All-Star: Earn MVP on teams of 5+ players in every type of team game.

The workability of some of these, particularly the All-Star medal, seems a little dubious so I haven't gotten to that yet. Keeping track of whether a team game has had enough players throughout to earn the Team Captain medal also is problematic at this time.

I have, however, implemented some of these already. I'm working on the artwork; so far my plan is to work up a graphic for each one in Inkscape and fit it to some kind of common background. Better ideas for any of the above, including improved names, are heartily welcomed.

This is my early concept art for the Defender of the Ream medal:

Where we last left our heroes, the chimney cap had been covered with mesh so the squirrel could not return. That was Tuesday.

On Thursday, the squirrel tried once again to chew through the duct tape in the living room, which was now covered with an 8" stove pipe cap. Apparently it was in the chimney, tucked away in a hidey-hole, when Critter Control covered the chimney on Tuesday, and after two days it decided it was time to try the living room again.

Unwilling to call the guys back out without at least trying ourselves to let the varmint out, I opened the cleanout door at the bottom of the chimney and waited. Friday evening, the squirrel started chewing yet again. That meant it was time to call Critter Control back, only because of the time there was no way they could get there until Saturday. Either that, or on Monday and the squirrel might have to be fished out dead. I opted for Saturday.

On Saturday the guy from Critter Control came back, and he looked into the hole and around inside the chimney. We discovered two things: The squirrel had a little place he could stay tucked away and safe that was not in the living room pipe, and the bottom of the chimney was apparently caved in when said pipe was installed so that the cleanout door was all but useless--the squirrel could not in fact get out that way. Therefore the only option was a trap. Since the trap was a little too big to fit the hole, he installed some mesh to house the trap, covered it up with some duct tape and a towel to make the trap nice and dark except at the end where there were some nuts, and told us how we could release the squirrel once the trap sprung.

A couple of hours later the trap snapped, and we had a squirrel in our living room. It was pretty big, too. Cat reaction: surprise, but less freaking out than I would have expected. We took the trap outside and my wife, who has had more experience dealing with live traps, let the squirrel out. It was finally free, and more importantly so were we.

Today Critter Control came back to pick up the trap and remove the wire contraption that had housed it, and put a 6" stove pipe cap I had purchased onto the pipe by crimping the pipe and using a mallet to jam the cap into place.

The squirrel situation is finally, officially, resolved. This time I'll call it a draw.

And so, having re-disposed of the monster, exit our hero stage left.