Game Project: Unlocking Pandora

I’m in one of the most non-productive stages in my life right now, aka Empty Days. Non-productive, yeah but it sure beats the bad days and I’ll be having more of those in the coming weeks. Still, I am thankful for how things had turned out.

For starters, I nearly struck a silver Wira while driving around Kelana Jaya this morning but managed to stop in time. Never saw a partially bald man gone so white before. I left the T-junction quickly, with 5+ witness drivers meters away behind me even though we're all driving at 5km an hour.

It wasn't my fault but I'm not going to waste this blog entry describing in ridiculously detailed scene on how he should have noticed my blinky turn signal, especially since he was on the road the public used to turn left instead of going straight forward. I'm saving it to bored to death the traffic cops.

So instead of committing 3rd-degree murder, I decided to fill a little more of the day's void by building up a bit more of the game project I’m working on, ignoring the fact that I might have better things to do, like kill a cockroach or something.

To get a clearer definition just so you guys can see my pride on how cheap my project it, I’ve rounded up the usual background system and resource checks:

-RPG Maker 2003 (game engine)
-First Seed Material and etc (sprite graphics)
-Monta’s Monsters (monster graphics)
-Moutamsi Music and etc (music midi)
-A1 Free Sound Effects and etc (sound effects... duh...)
-And more etc, etc, etc since I haven’t bother to properly catalogue where I got these from.

Take note I'm writing a copy-and-paste from my old topic in GW gaming community but I'm going to make it as simple as a tourist brochure written in badly-printed Jawi. So if you don't understand, do ask me or, as the Travel and Adventure channel taught us, improvise your brain.

So without further ado... Quickening presents...

Game Systems:
-Menu System and Character Battle System (Action Time Battle).

-Map-based characters' actions such as field shooting and etc...


-Member switching in Character Battle System.


-Class Choosing (There are 3 variations; Offensive, Defensive and Support. As the story procresses, your members will have to choose one out of 2).

Story:
The main heroine is Keea Winston, a student of The Academy who's about to graduate as soon as she gets her thesis done. The magic class she had chosen, Soul Energy, is rare, difficult and mostly useless so she had to travel to a place called Stony Village and study its history and runes with permission from the local experts.

But Keea's presence disturbed a locked secret and her unique aura trapped the guardian spirit into her body. Without the guardian spirit, the imprisoned evil entities started to leak into the forests of the island, awaking all manner of savage and vicious beasts, threatening the population from unknown and long-forgotten nightmares.

Now possessing what is called Fighter Spirit, Keea infused the magical energy with her own and sought to rectify her mistake (and save her own life) by searching for two other guardian spirits in two other sealed chambers before the evil entities reached them.

Her actions though, went not without notice by numerous high profile personalities, such as the Society of Aqera, the Nobility of the neighbouring country Sun Valley, the Circle of Casters in The Academy and also the reclusive agents of the Dark Enchanters.

And even if Keea managed to survive through all that, there's the secret of the spirits themselves...

Characters:

Name: Keea Winston
Role: Female protagonist
Background: She's a final year student of a magic university and she only needs to do one last task to graduate so she could later return to the Academy as a junior lecturer. Yet often of late, she dreams of an unknown golden-haired woman playing a sad tune on a harp. She thinks that one backwater island, home to the ruins of Pearl Temple, holds the answer to this mystery.
Skills: Soul Energy


Name: Jake Langley
Role: Wise old nag
Background: Langley was Keea's first tutor in the craft arts and he remained one of her oldest and dearest friends. His true background, however, is shrouded in mystery, other than he has been travelling around the region for centuries as a freelance consultant and tough bargainer. So far, it is believed that Keea was his only apprentice, a favour to her long-dead father.
Skills: Elemental-infused Soul Energy


Name: Niq Hillshire
Role: Obligatory anti-hero
Background: Niq is the headsman of Stony Village, a growing community that was once filled with outcasts and refugees. He takes his role very seriously and was most protective of anything of value that came out of the Pearl Temple ruins. He is quiet, rebellious and unconventional but without him, Stony Village would have turned into a lawless thieves den instead of the peaceful yet sorely overlooked society it was.
Skills: Ice Flows and Ice Blade


Name: Anita of the Aqiaka Clan
Role: Annoying curious faerie
Background:

Enough said.
Skills: Planthood and Floral Wrath


Name: Montgomery Suayunu
Role: Wiseass
Background: Before he became a mercenary for hire, Monty was a soldier of the Aqeran Sniper Unit and before that, he was a boy raised in a military community on the notorious Aqeran-Sun Valley borders. Constant fighting and battle conflicts gave him a devil-may-care approach to all things that wants to kill him, including his friends. He and Niq are old buddies, despite the wide difference in their personalities.
Skills: Long Range and Metallic Bombs

And also 4 other members yet to be discovered. Oh my!

Some of the main NPCs (Non-Playable Characters):
Mr. Usana: "Knowledge is the most dangerous kind of weapon to give to your foes."
Baba Yaga the Witch: "History never ends. It always comes back either to haunt us or repeat itself."
Princess Regent: "Bribery is the lowest form of begging."
Lord Protector of Aqera: "My duty before my life unless my heart tells me otherwise."
Lord Sagecrest: "My kid is too pretty to date your hero."
Lady Emerson: "Let's face it. The best kinds of trouble are always inherited."
Rilselq: "Dreaming is natural. Not everybody does it but everybody should."
Bernadette: "Sometimes, you gotta come back full circle to start all over again."

Screenshots:







Larger 640*480 pixel Pictures:
http://img126.imageshack.us/img126/9200/unlockingpandora011kd0.png
http://img49.imageshack.us/img49/9476/icedragons01ea3.png
http://img340.imageshack.us/img340/8431/temple01road20fixdf4.png

Progress at the Moment: 5% Done
Mood to Work:

So yes, this is a summarised version of the game project I'm working on. I intend for it to be a free-to-download because it's obviously made from an overused game engine (I just need to weak some custom coding) and from a free graphics site. It'll be vulgar of me to sell this since I got so much of it for free. And I'm only vulgar to people I want to cheat money from.

If there's anything I like to waste time other than playing expensive games, it's building cheap ones. Expect this to come sometime exactly one year from now (hey, quality control-lah!).

In the meantime, I got to see to a car that had a surprise attack from a silver Wira and check if the breaks and tyres are still passably safe to, I don't know, maybe to run into another near-crash again.

Malaysian Teenagers Going Down in the Street

They’re gonna clean up your looks,
With all the lies and the books
To make a citizen out of you.
Because they sleep with a gun
And keep an eye on your son
So they can watch all the things you do.

Although this is one of my favorite songs (or maybe because of it), I rather not speculate what the things that was going through the head of that song’s writer. I have trouble going through the things in my own head already. But it is a nice song and it helps for someone like me to zone out without getting to the drugs. Cheers to My Chemical Romance.

But hey, the subject of the song fits. Teenagers are scary, whether the adults want to admit it or not. But they won’t admit it because obviously as mature adults, each holds a sense of vanity that they might be somebody’s role model someday, whether the teens want to or not, and it’s low-class-lah to walk around blurting, “Oh yeah, teenagers. Nasty, filthy animals.”

Nasty and filthy. Like the streets of KL where they’ve taken to loitering. And according to the Star newspaper reports, they might even be filthy rich. But don’t too easily brand these as spawns of the ignorant, fat-wallet’d parents. Money comes from a grapevine of multi-layers exchanges, considering the reports of theft and the occasional tai kor or ‘big brother’ as whacamacallit.

Starting with the theft and the intimidation, of course the local restaurant owners along those streets would say it, either exaggeration or plain truth. Remember the rule of real estate? Location, location, location and it is devaluing power of location to have punk-haired teenagers smoking right outside their non-smoking sections.

Sure you can have the local Rakan Tetangga patrols (it’s something like a group of caffeine-empowered neighbourhood watchmen) making rounds. But for the sake of smart-ass mentality, nightwatch patrolling is like running through a flock of pigeons outside a Sri Paandi restaurant. The watchmen can walk through those streets many times over but the teenagers just flutter back to the streets the minute those backs are turned.

And these teenagers are a klik. They have cellphones, with service lines rates cheaper than rap stars’ name, so it’s no difficulty to coo-coo a warning when the fellows-in-uniform turn the corner. And those same said cellphones is used to herd in the money-hungry teenagers when the ‘big brother’ comes to their streets (as if the street belonged to them already).

One can only speculate what the tai kor wants in a street full of teenagers, more so since some of these teenagers hang out near parking lots. If you need another reason to bring a big, heavy umbrella after parking your car, open-air, on a Malaysian sunny day, this takes the cake as they might take your everything-else. Like I mentioned, there are other ways to finance those punk hairdos and designer bags than negligent parents. Rich or poor parents doesn’t matter; it’s the negligence.

This situation is worrying. Screw aside the ‘children are our future’, and ‘keep the city image clean’ slogans (since our Parliament is spouting those words almost every week) because when the tai kor comes, things get criminal. Think gang recruitment and I’m not joking s**t here. I don’t have to be a police officer or a news reporter to put two and two makes four. And I used to walk on some of those streets and know folks who still walk on those streets.

These aren’t bored teenager. They’re perverted teenagers. Next to being perverted means already being bored (which makes bored and perverted teenagers an over-use of adjectives), the possibilities of the kids' greater entry to criminal exposure and manipulations are so numerous, you can’t swing a cat without hitting a shark-grinning tai kor in the face.

If you want to get them teen creeps out of trouble, you got to play the same game as them ‘big brothers’ do. Because sure as the teenagers got soup for brains, these tai kor don’t wear law enforcement uniforms and they swing money bags instead of batons. Once the right kind of good guys put on these costumes, be nice with the teenagers. Hang money on a fish pole and herd them to a different direction as they follow hungrily. When you netted their respect, make them do community work for money.

Like pick up the street trash, maybe even sort by recyclables. Give money. Get them to paint the city’s iron fences. Give money. Encourage them to join the Rakan Tetangga and help make streets safer. Give money. Make them vomit the information about these dirty tai kor. Give money. Money, money, money; the root of all persuasion.

It’s not cheap (duh, they are rich kids!) but let’s scream out the music here. The reality remains that you can’t get kids off the streets, not as long as there are inattentive parents, nice streets and perverted teenagers. Hell, you might as well not have bothered. Let these kids do their syok-time, get on floating high and slur profanities at everybody in a skirt. Yeah, that how we want the tourists to remember Visit Malaysia Year 2007.

If the country ever got to something like that, doing nothing about the teenagers, then we know we’re truly running out of smart people. So at the very least to get something done for the sake of getting something done about it, very least for the overworked G-Men can do is to try to divert their attention away from the even more bad guys.

Because as school holidays are still going on, this country doesn’t need to keep digging its own 50 year old grave without its teenagers playing a High School Musicale version of My Chemical Romance.

Teenagers scare the living s***t out of me,
They could care less as long as someone'll bleed
So darken your clothes
Or strike a violent pose
Maybe they'll leave you alone, but not me!