Zagreus' site

I don't recognize this place at all anymore...

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 17:00:12 +0000

So, uhh... I was cleaning up my gmail inbox when I noticed I received notifications that my BYOND membership was expiring. I'm not active here anymore, but I think it's a good system to encourage younger folks to get into this sort of stuff (the development side of things), so I went ahead and resubbed for 2 years plus tossed in a bit extra...

Then I was going to go to my community page to post about it... but couldn't seem to find it. Looks like community pages got taken down?

What else has changed lately?

10 years

Sun, 15 May 2011 12:34:52 +0000

This Wednesday will mark 10 years since I joined BYOND. I initially joined because some random Dragon Ball Z game was listed on mudconnect.com. I don't even remember the name of it. Think it was ran by some guy named Ebonshadow or something like that. I never did play it, as after I realized what BYOND was I got more into the development side of things than playing.

I met a bunch of cool people along the way. Including BobJr and Vermolius who I both consider good friends now. BobJr hit his 10 year mark last week as well. He has way more published content than me.

I started a lot of projects, didn't really finish any. Everything I started came from a "wouldn't it be cool if someone did this?" or "I wonder if this is possible?" type of thing, which lead to me figuring out how to accomplish something, but then once I did I kind of quit and never went beyond that point.

I started with ZBT like almost everyone else back then. I think I was using sprite rips from Secret of Mana and Phantasy Star III or something. Then I decided to make a turn-based random encounter RPG with a battle system that borrowed elements from Xenogears. But after I finished the combat system I didn't really feel like finishing much else. From there I dabbled in cross-server communication (which wasn't really used anywhere else at the time) and remote management. I lent my skills to Dreq for RancerZero and worked with him for awhile, then started working on a graphical adaptation of Silver Crescent, a MUD I worked for in my teen years. From there I joined BobJr to form Archeus Entertainment Group, which was the group name used for a number of projects which never really took off.

So here I am 10 years later. I kind of want to actually release something to celebrate, but with a full time job and a girlfriend, there isn't really much time.

My Gaming Blog

Sun, 13 Mar 2011 11:46:25 +0000

I started a WordPress blog about 4 months ago. Figured it wouldn't hurt to plug it here since it's not really BYOND related so shouldn't take anything away from the community.

It's called "Clylla Game & Guild Portal" and can be found at http://clylla.com. Initially it was just something I did as a "Hey, wouldn't this be cool." kinda thing. Then I lost momentum and dropped it for awhile, but now I've totally recommitted myself to it and have spent the past 2 weeks working pretty heavily to get it set up and organized in a way that will ensure that it won't lose momentum again.

About the name, well, random name is random. I used some sort of random name generator 15 years ago to get a name for a kingdom in a fantasy world I was building (MUD), and that popped up. I've been using it ever since. Doesn't really mean anything and is kind of confusing, I know. The domain started as personal file storage so I never put much thought into it. But after I had the domain for 7+ years I decided to actually put the blog up so it inherited the name. As for the whole Game & Guild Portal thing, well, I envision it to be a place where a lot of people who play online games come to communicate with their guilds on the forums. Although right now we only have one guild.

So overall the name is kinda fail, but it's just a little hobby, writing 4 articles a week, not something I expect to grow super big or anything. Check it out if you want to read about new games, or old games with new updates, or just old games that me and my friends think are cool. There will be a minimum of 2 new posts every Tuesday and Thursday, I promise, even if I have to stay up till midnight to get them out. :-P

Kids interested in BYOND

Sun, 26 Dec 2010 17:40:45 +0000

I had some guests over for dinner the other night and they brought their two sons, one 6, the other 10. I was talking to the 10 year old about games, specifically Atmosphir and Roblox, and out of the blue he asked me if I had ever heard of BYOND.

I was pretty surprised. Turns out he was searching for a Pokemon game or something and stumbled across it. He has a lot of interest in game design and I was excited to hear that he had discovered BYOND. We started talking about DM and I was explaining how much more powerful something like this was compared to drag and drop level designing stuff like Atmosphir, yet also a lot more difficult. When I started to explain object oriented programming to him I think I scared him away a little, as he eventually just said that he wants to try something easier first before getting into the more difficult stuff.

It was still very amusing and made me smile though. :-)

Documentation is annoying...

Sun, 26 Dec 2010 17:30:36 +0000

...but necessary. I am going to spend this week working on refining the documentation for my game project. I recently had someone make an offer to do the interface work for me, and without any detailed documentation, I'm not really capable of converting this into a team project. I kinda neglected it because I never really expected to be working with others. Oh well. :-P

What should I watch after 'Skip Beat!'?

Tue, 21 Dec 2010 05:36:59 +0000

I finished the last two episodes. It didn't really leave me satisfied but it was still pretty good.

I need more short series (under 30 episodes) to watch on Crunchyroll, Hulu, or Netflix. Not willing to watch anything from any other sources. Ongoing series are fine too as long as there aren't hundreds of episodes to catch up on.

Any suggestions?

Skip Beat! is cool

Mon, 20 Dec 2010 07:03:16 +0000

Sorry, no development discussion here. I just wanted to say that I've spent the last 4 hours watching Skip Beat! on crunchyroll and I really like it.

That is all.

Well, not quite. I also have a 24-hour guest pass for crunchyroll. It doesn't require full account signup (no billing info needed). Anyone want it?

My interface is horrid and my writing stinks

Sun, 19 Dec 2010 12:10:29 +0000

http://devblog.clylla.com/post/2372585299/ i-call-the-first-one-why-i-need-an-interface

But at least it is functional. It can always be polished up later.

Tumblr's RSS import feature makes me sad

Thu, 16 Dec 2010 20:59:41 +0000

So a couple days ago I made a test post here. It imported fine (although about 16 hours late).

Yesterday I wrote a long and detailed post explaining how I plan to support both game-specific accounts and BYOND keys in my game... and it only imported one and a half paragraphs.

Yeah, I'm just going to write on my Tumblr blog instead in the future. :-(

"Featured Game" standards

Thu, 16 Dec 2010 12:15:32 +0000

I'm not really sure what goes into getting a game listed as a "Featured Game" on the left sidebar on this website, but do you really think it is OK to have a game listed that contains screenshots of players using obscenities in chat?

I don't want to name any names or single anyone out, but I think some sort of moderation is needed. Those games get a lot more visibility than non-featured games. They kind of represent the public face of BYOND. Say I hosted a game that allowed guests, but encouraged users to visit byond.com to get their key and get some perks. If they happened to look at the Featured Game screenshots during their visit and saw what I saw yesterday, I'd be rather embarrassed and wouldn't really want to associate my game with a site that features such vulgarity.