Lightning Does Strike Twice

It’s been quite a while since I’ve touched the subject of Sanctuary – the world of the Diablo franchise (actually, it’s been a while I’ve written anything at all, but that’s a tale for another time). The latest was my 2010-submission to the Blizzard Writing Contest, under the title of “Purpose”. Still worth a read!

However, what I wanted to revisit is something even older – the post titled “the soul in search of answers”, from the ancient times of July, 2008 (yeah, that’s 3.5 years ago), where I sat down and tried to plot out various ideas and stuff coming in Diablo III. The reason for that, is that I spent the start of this year blazing through the “Book of Cain”, which fleshes out a ton of lore to prepare for the release of Diablo III.

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Name is still a placeholder. So, for now just “The VGNGGGwNN”. Not to be attempted to be pronounced. Ok, you may, but you might fail. Yeah. Alternatively “Primal Internet Fun”.

It started with the following link was thrown out at the internal Facebook-page for the Game students at ITU: http://videogamena.me/

As fate would have it, people started posting their favorite hilarious names. Lots of likes and – at least from my part – local giggles and burst-laughs was done. Then, it took a turn, when the idea of having a Game Jam was added, with making up a game based on what the generator spat out.

However, in the end, just when I tweeted the link, I figured a very simple – yet rather hilarious – game could be made from it. The rules are quite simple:

First, gather a few people that wants to play. Not too few, not too many (4-6 would probably be perfect).

The following is then needed:

• A device that can display the Video Game Name Generator.
• A block of paper and a writing device, per player.

A person activates the VGNG, and the resulting name is spoken to the crowd. Each player now has a maximum of 5 minutes to come up with the best game-idea, based purely on the name. The winner is judged by social voting amongst the players. Naturally, you’re not allowed to vote for your own game.

Looking forward to seeing if the idea actually holds. At the very least, I’m going to see what it’ll turn to!

… was just like any other tweet – I guess – but the difference is, that it made me realize that it has been ages and ages since I’ve actually written anything here, save perhaps an update or two. What better way to redeem myself than to elaborate on the tweet in question?

Awesome, yet bad idea: Get Sylar to playtest your game. No matter what, he’ll always know how it works.

See, the joke is – like many other jokes – requires some background knowledge, which at this point is two-fold: “Who/what the hell is Sylar?” and “Why would it be a bad idea?” The latter is probably the less important, but it still adds some depth to it all.

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As some people might have spotted from my various recent social media updates, I’ve gotten to start the new legendary quest for [Dragonwrath, Tarecgosa's Rest]. So far, I’ve obtained the first step of the staff, and it’s progressing nicely – summer and everything considered.

But, what I wanted to point the attention at, was the fact that I’ve also been writing a guide on the staff, which initially started out as a “minor article” for Wowhead, but – seeing as I was on the quest – I quickly got interested in adding tons and tons of extra details, lore and what not. In the end, along with the new guide system that Wowhead now provides, I extended it.

So, if you’re up for reading what I wrote about the lovely staff – which, in terms of words should make up for the general lack of posts here – I’d suggest you take a read at the below link:

The Stuff of Legends – An In-depth Guide to “Dragonwrath, Tarecgosa’s Rest”

Enjoy!

As my World of Warcraft guild just recently killed the heroic raid-boss Magmaw (which is basically just a giant worm made out of fire and magma), I decided to do a news-post on the guild-page that gave reference to the awesome Worms. Easy connection to make, for two primary reasons: He’s a giant worm, and an important part is a spell called Armageddon. So, heavily inspired by lyrics of the Worms: Armageddon theme song, I made the following.
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I figured it was finally time to post the newest revision of the Arnold drinking rules, as throughout tested not too long ago. The last – official – version can be found here, if you want to see what has changed since then. Should be quite a bit.

Be sure to check the bonus video-clip at the end of the post! I guarantee it’s worth it!

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Recently, I have (once again) taken a great liking in fiddling about in old DOS games. Why? Short version: because they’re awesome. Long version: because they’re very awesome. No, honestly, they are. There simply are certain things that aren’t as great now as they used to be. One of those things, is music.

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Some 90 days ago, I posted my previous post here. Some 90 days ago, I also started working seriously on my Bachelor’s project in Computer Science – which seemed to drain whatever leftover creativity and willingness to write anything in the creative end of the line.

Now, however, the project has been handed in, and I have exam next Tuesday, which will – no doubt – be rather exciting. The project itself is about game balance in board-games, which included me and my “partner in crime” made our own game from scratch, and making A.I.’s that could challenge each other in it, in order to prove said balance – a thing I really enjoyed.

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Now that the second iteration of Blizzard’s Creative Writing Contest has finally subdued, it’s time I revealed my piece. I didn’t win this time either, but that’s not stopping me. No reason to give up just because of that – I still think I’ve achieved something, and have evolved as a writer.

For those of you that doesn’t know, I decided to challenge myself in the world of Sanctuary – the Diablo universe, and it did indeed prove to be a great choice. It was a splendid challenge, and the result is – in my own personal opinion – quite great as well.

After the defeat of Diablo beneath Tristram, Etophir – a paladin of Westmarch – travels east to find out more about the order of paladins, that seemed to have been turned to fight his kingdom. As his journey out-folds, he’s given a whole new view on what corruption can really do.

So, why wait? Read it right here, in PDF-format.

As last time, I’d love to get some feedback, and hear what you think of it – it’s my only payment from writing it, after all. As a result of that, I also updated my Fanfiction subpage, to better reflect the new work.

Or simply “yeah, I kinda expected that”. I did actually plan to see if I could iron out the last few details of Thunderstruck during this previous week, and see how it all held together. Seems it looked okay for the most thing, but something was indeed rather off, and I couldn’t quite put a finger on what was causing the error.

For instance… in one of the simulations (lasting 10 minutes each), over 500 Flame Shocks was fired, along with only 50 Lightning Bolts. Everyone should know that something is phenomenally wrong there. On top of that, Flame Shock seemed to add up to over 200.000 DPS. Hardly realistic.

On the flip-side, the other casts seemed to work out pretty well, and had their total values match my earlier alpha-version pretty well. The difference from that was that it didn’t do an actual simulation, but did a single cast of each of the different spells, and weighted them after how many of each I had done in a previous long single-target turret-fight. Problem is that that method made it impossible to correctly figure out how much various parameters meant (like the Tier 10-4 bonus – which might also be the one causing a lot of problems in the current version).

Lastly, it seems 4.0.1 is going to hit live very soon, which will make this version outdated already, as all the new statistic-changes are going live, along with new spell-numbers, talents and all that.

So long story short, I will officially have been postponing Thunderstruck for a whole expansion-pack. Or, well, it was at least that long ago that I started working on it. It’s not going to be impossible either, that’s quite certain.