Tag: video games

The way I learned programming in middle school was by making games in Flash. I built a bunch of different games and shared them with my friends and classmates. There was even one game that got some fame on the local Internet and saw hundreds of players.

But when programming became my job, all the fun and games disappeared out of it. Instead of making games, I only coded for work. I just played games, made by other people – to distract myself from the horrors of reality.

But the love for making games still stayed somewhere inside me. The dream. Of making my own game that becomes big. And the feeling you get when others get joy out of your creations.

So after a couple of decades of only boring business programming, I’ve now gotten back to game development as a hobby. I’ve been at it for a while. And…

I finally released the first real video game I made. Here it is:
Quintillion Quest

I was inspired to build it after playing Orb of Creation like 4 years ago. That game was such an amazing dopamine generator that I wanted to recreate it with my own personal style. It sure took a while to get to this point where I am now done with it and people are playing it.

My favorite games to play are those that have a steep learning curve, complicated mechanics, lots of strategy and thinking, like Path of Exile, Magic the Gathering, etc. So of course I made my own game’s learning curve also maybe a bit too high.

Lots of people who have played it have not gotten through the initial challenges, and I’ve had to give out hints, and am a bit regretting at the moment that I made the start of the game so hard. But I also like to think that the initial difficulty acts as a quick filter to drop out people who wouldn’t like the game anyway – because as the game continues, you still really have to min max your decisions and actions, until finally in the end it gets easier.

People who have gotten through the initial learning curve have at least in general liked my game, told me it is addicting and fun. That’s what I was going for and it really makes me happy. One of my acquaintances even completed nearly all the achievements in the game – I feel quite honored that my handiwork enabled others to get loads of dopamine. As those dopamine highs are what I live for myself.

At some point during the whole process, I got a lot of stickers printed out with the game’s logo on it. I handed a bunch of those stickers out, and stuck a bunch of them to random sticker display locations all over the town.

It reminded me – I used to do the same for this blog, like 20 years ago – stick a bunch of stickers with furamo.com on it all over. Some people who used to frequent this blog back then actually found it from those stickers. I think nowadays the whole sticker business is much more popular, so if I stick mine next to 30 others, it kinda gets lost in the noise. And it won’t bring that many new people in anymore.

But I still like them. The stickers. I have a few hundred of them left for the game. Wanna help me out stick them to things? If so, ask me to give you some when you see me, I always carry a few in my wallet.

Yesterday I went to this huge video games event, with hundreds or even thousands of people attending – to demo the game I am making.

The event organizers provided me with a table, 2 chairs and a PC and the rest was up to me.

I brought a friend along to manage the desk with me.

I met a dozen other friends and acquaintances at the event.

Most of the time someone was playing my game at our table and people seemed to like it.

I gained a few wishlists on Steam.

Just like in my game the player’s resources are “physical energy”, “social energy”, “mental energy”, etc, and they run out at the end of the day:
Those resources of my own also ran out after 10 hours of socializing there.

But it was fun.

I guess.

Maybe.

(I decided that I would write a blog post about the event but I was not inspired at all to make the post more literature-like)

My comfort zone has recently shrunk to only the size of my apartment and the bar where the pub quiz takes place. So I thought I would expand it a bit and go to a different pub quiz that takes place at a different bar.

The different quiz in question is quite new. It has only been held once so far, and the previous time it had a whole round dedicated to video games and other games. So I was excited for today. Hoping that topics relevant to my interests would reduce my discomfort from being in a new location.

But just now, only a couple of hours before its start, the organizer casually mentioned that he had removed the games round from the quiz.

I mean, I get it. You get lots of random people show up at your quiz and they might be weirded out by a whole round about games, especially if they are some of those people who think games are a huge waste of time and life. So you would want to cater to a more wide audience by only including topics that everyone can appreciate, like medieval thrusting weapons.

But at the same time, leaving out that round is similar to the time when I stopped bleaching my hair and permanently removed my lip piercings. Sure, it will make you more socially acceptable, but it will also destroy your precious bits of individuality, personality. Make you bland. A sheep. One of the masses. Unremarkable.

I went to a friend’s birthday party yesterday. He lives in the Russian district of the city, close to where I used to live in high school, so it was kinda nostalgic to walk around there.

He has a small, super friendly dog. The dog was really interested in my beer and constantly tried to sniff it and lick it. Later, someone actually gave the dog a drop of beer and after that it lost its interest in mine. I guess he didn’t like the taste, just the smell.

We played board games and video games, hours passed. I got way too drunk and lost control over what I was saying, telling some pretty cringe stories. At some point, me and another dude at the party left for another event – a night time gaming convention nearby.

The gaming convention was fun as hell. There was so much stuff to do and see there. I was really drawn to the stand that sold anime merchandise – a highlight for me that they had was a hand painted picture of Marin Kitagawa.

People always tell me when they visit my place that my walls are so empty – that I should put some pictures up. I thought about buying the waifu picture at the stand for decorating my home, but ended up not getting it.

They also had a bunch of figurines for sale – the most interesting ones being those of Rem, who is particularly relevant at the moment since the show she is from is currently airing another season. And she’s also a character in the mobile game I play daily.

The only souvenir I got in the end from that stand was a Bocchi keychain.

The event had many arcade machines, pc-s and consoles around for playing. Me and a friend played a few games of Dr Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine, which has been my favorite game ever since I played it for the first time in 2004, on my Nokia N-Gage with an emulator.

While playing that game there, I started at difficulty 5 and my friend at difficulty 1. I was too drunk for the speed and concentration it required and lost. So I kept reducing the difficulty each game, and finally won when we were playing on the same level. Later we came back to that machine, I was more sober, kept increasing the difficulty and managed to win up to difficulty 4. It was quite an experience, playing my favorite game for the first time on an arcade-like machine.

The event also had a cosplay competition. There were various cosplays from Genshin Impact and some other IP-s I don’t care about. And the highlight for me – a cosplay of OMGkawaiiAngel from Needy Streamer Overload. I loved that game – its protag is a girl with severe mental illness and personality disorders and drug addiction and you gotta manage her mental state to get through the game. All of which is relatable to me.

That cosplay was well executed. When the cosplayer stumbled on stage, it actually seemed in character, which was cute. I voted for her in the competition. But I wasn’t there when the competition results were announced so I still don’t know who won it.

Around the time I was in university I used to hang around with people every single day. I had energy to go to multiple social events in one night. Nowadays I meet people like once a month at best. But the amount of stuff experienced yesterday almost made me feel young again.

So. Have any suggestions what picture I should put up on my living room wall instead? Leave a comment if you do.

I have been studying Japanese for a few years now. Haven’t had too much progress. The rate of acquiring new kanji 漢字 and vocabulary is low, but the progress is steady and I’m slowly learning more. Meanwhile, I have a friend who got really good at Chinese, even got his master’s degree at it. I’m impressed he got so well into this totally different culture and language. So last week, to renew our bonds, we had a Chinese night out with him and another friend.

We had some food and beer at a Chinese restaurant that he is working for. Surprisingly, another of my old acquaintances was working there as a waitress. It kinda made me feel sad and nostalgic, that I’ve hung around with like a 1000 different people in the past, and now I don’t even remember their names anymore.

My half Chinese friend told us some stuff about Chinese culture – explained that the way you know someone is a real Chinese person is that they are spitting, farting and burping loudly in public. He added jokingly that this was exactly why he got into Chinese culture – because he felt that you should be able to do these things freely.

To finish off the meal, we had some shots of Chinese rice vodka. The guys warned me it would be horrible but I thought it was nothing too bad, so we continued the evening by going to a bar in town that actually specialized in that Chinese rice liquor and got some more shots of it there. I initially thought it was weird we have enough money in our small town that a bar as specific as that can function, but the place was actually extremely nice so I ended up getting why it can stay in business.

Finally we went to my place, it was sort of my house warming event for them since I moved a few months back. On the way, the half Chinese guy farted loudly, which confirmed that he is a real half Chinese person.

My whole life revolves around video games, so of course when we arrived here I instantly whipped out some controllers and put on Puyo Puyo Tetris. That game is a sort of a tradition for me, every time someone comes over I gotta play it with them. I win every time and feel ashamed that I put them through that, but traditions must be continued.

I felt like the half Chinese guy was not all that impressed with my videogameyness, but the other guy kinda saw the appeal in it. Overall it made me rethink my life for a moment – should my whole identity consist only of games or should I rather do something else with my time? But that thought faded soon.

I think that the best format to write blog posts is to end it with a surprise, a punch line. Otherwise it ends up feeling like the ending is abrupt, the post unfinished. But I didn’t manage it this time. So therefore, to make this more of an educational article than an entertaining one, I’ll give you, the reader, some more insight into Chinese culture – here is an illustrative picture of the booze mentioned before: