Dreaming Forest and a Church in the Background

As I said before, I’m a connoisseur of pretty images. I’ve fixed the December’s Dream image, this time with a link to be bigger image so you can see the better quality and be really immersed in the detail. Check out the right side of the blog if you want to see the link.

Also with this entry, I found this one in (where else?) CGSociety. It was ages and ages ago but the image is still pretty fascinating to look at. I perticularly liked the way the light played in the picture, illuminating the white walls to a subtle glow. However, I kind of thought that the misty stuff at the bottom makes it more messy than magical. Overall outlook is very, very good though.

I have an idea on where I would envision this in my game project, just to give you guys a visual idea of which part of the story I might relate this image with. This one would be the Church of Holy Mercy, one of the major sacred sites in my game world. The atmosphere I'll be trying to create is something between awe and sanctuary because outside the church is a conflict-torn city with a history of bloody riots on its streets.

I've been trying to render this image into something suitable for a background cutscene but image quality kept distorting every time I use Paint. I may have to purchase some big guns called Photoshop (crappy pocket money). I’m hoping to submit the game project as my Thesis-Project-Part-02 (assuming that I’ll live that long after the Monday presentation) so this image, along with several others, better come out right.

If I get frustrated enough, I’ll either sleep it off or past it aside for a while to work on December’s Dream short story (again, see right side). I have an idea on the outlook of the setting might be, but if you would like to contribute about what you like to think the hell is the character is doing in that setting, be my guest. I'll take your idea and use it in the short story. Expect the short story to come out between Christmas and New Year.

She's home...

My mother got home from England yesterday. Since that she left the country and left me home with her husband and youngest son to clean up after them for over a week (barely managed not to get the house to fall apart, starting with the kitchen sink) my inner b**ch was ready to dump everything into her travel-weary hand and leave me to play Tradewinds 2.

But she had a sore throat from the cold of England and possibly carrying some air-borne traveler’s flu. And she also got me souvenirs. Three tubes of salami, chicken, beef and spicy, better than any you’ll ever find in a Malaysian supermarket. And so for this blog entry, I ate my crap before I could have it.

Amongst family members, *Mak is the least person I’ll spout and rant about. It would have been quite different say, year and years ago when she hadn’t joined any charity group or Good-Bye Aunties’ groupies. I suppose there some sense into the madness of tart-tongued old ladies and their high-teas that made Mak less a working mother and somewhat a mellower mother.

Advantageous for me at least, because with her, I could share some crap-about-my-day stories which I couldn’t share with anyone else. Like my thesis report and that I got a presentation next Monday (December 3rd 2007) but of course I didn’t go into detail about me possibly failing the paper.

Mak is more sympathetic than my father when it comes to my failures, partially because she had been living with *Ayah for over 30 years and prior to that, she was the eldest girl in a family of nine brothers and sisters (yes, both Aidilfitri and Aidil’Adha holidays are a riot but that’s another story).

Other than that she got home with chocolate and three A+ Grade English salami which I loved (2 of them were over a foot long!). Which is not to say that she didn’t have her moments of b**chery at times. Like when it was her fault that we’re both becoming late on our way trip to Pontian (her hometown) and she took it out on me, seeing that I was the only other passenger.

At the moment for now, she’s probably cooking or cleaning up the mess Ayah and my younger brother made. She’s always cooking or cleaning, one part because no one else would, one part because she’s the woman of the house and one part because it’s her second nature. Eldest sister of nine brothers and sisters always have a habit in cooking and cleaning since coming from the backwaters of Pontian, JB.

My mess? It’s all in my own room thank you very much, which all mothers know that it’s highly territorial to volatile-tempered undergraduate students. I suppose that’s why she brought me home juicy salami.

Mine-ss... miiiiiiiiiiiinee... my preciousss...

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!

Introducing Me

In the light of my most recent attempt to achieve numbness of emotions then posting about it in here, I've realize that I have yet to actually introduce myself. Well, since I don't really want to introduce myself, I suppose it's all polite courtesy for my future self when she re-reads all this (I'll be 30 and gray before my time and she'll go "Giirl, you're a pathetic imbecile." Not that I except she could be better than me seeing that I created her.

And in so creating said future woman, let's define current woman. I'm in my early twenties, at the age where I should be maturely able to leave home and go build the nation or something. But I can't . I'm stuck here because I haven't graduated yet and I took the full bachelor degree course instead of doing diploma first and earn a bit of pay.

Along the way, I gained a few 'F's'. My folks think that the stupidity lies in the school. Maybe they won't admit to themselves that their slug-a-woman (wow, sounds like a bad comic book heroine) had actually blown thousands of ringgit in depression.

Woah, did I just said depression? I mean stupidity. Yes, I'm not depressed, I'm just stupid. No I'm not anorexic, I'm just stupid. No I'm not suicidal, I'm jus-... well, you get the idea. Around here, emotional problem means that it's an embarrassment to the family.

Sure we can all say "Oh, she's just having a slight fever. Let's get the Panadol," but the fact reminds that we're a society that abhors emotional problems. It's unstable. It's a weakness and God only knows if any other family member might be suffering from the same thing but had not yet manifested. Not good for the breeding stock of the rich and dato'ed (Dato' is kind of like a Malaysian knighthood, though its value had decreased somewhat for years).

Again, I've said that I don't care what people think about me, but mostly I was referring to people I won't see ever again. Goodbye-Aunties I call them, never around to say hello, just following *Mak to meet, greet and then say goodbye, it was a very nice wedding/function/party/whatever-social-event-please-don't-invite-my-mother-if-you-think-she-might-drag-me-along-again.

I do, however, care a little bit of what people might think of my family. Just a very small bit; Il have to do a CAT scan of my brain if I need to look if it's still there. I try not to expose them to trouble if I have to, especially since I caused it.

Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean that the trouble would disappear. They do, however, have a bad habit of growing to massive proportions. Usually when that happens, I divert their attention to something else until the storm blows over. A cheap and dirty trick but if it works, I don't care.

Next to that, I'm also a slightly appreciative person. Especially about art. Not art as in museum gallery but art as in computer-affiliated cyber galleries. Check my December month's image. It's a nice pretty image which the original I got from CGSociety.
If the original artist knew I'm using this image to enhance my blog, whoopsie then. But it should be not as opposable as the image had been shrunk a lot to fit the blog page so the quality is kind of lest=s dramatic than the original.

I like pretty images. I would look all over the Internet for particularly nice images worthy of decorating my PC Desktop. Sometimes, I write a short story about what I've e found. Expect the one for December sometime around December (duh!). I'm not an artist myself (there's a school horror story in here but I won't bore about it to you. Yet) but you don't have to be a chef to know classy food from fast-food.

But most of all, I like to write. Fantasy fiction mostly, about my magical imaginary world. I have it slightly more structured as time goes along. It's a great way when you can't afford to own a Warcraft account and much faster to zone your head out too. In this cyber community I'm in, they're all cool on making plain vanilla old-school RPG games. Kind of like Final Fantasy before it took to worshiping the 3D religion.

When I'm not wasting my time on building a cheap game one coding line a day, I waste in writing about my imaginary world. I got some of the basics in the right places, mostly the technicality of magic and some minor histories. I've always wanted to write a book since Enid Blyton corrupted my childhood and I still do.

But I have no place for my fiction to get expressed. My mom calls my fictional writings as 'mengarut' or nonsensical. Sufficiently, family support is that very last thing I would ever ask of them when it comes to my most precious thoughts of all. I just don't think I could stand their oh-so-overwhelming concern.

That's what this blog is for, a place for my thoughts. It's true because I said it so and it shall be so (cue God-mode moment here, bear with me). And when it comes to keeping my private thoughts safe, I feel better believing that my future self would actually be thinking, "Girl, you're an okay imbecile."

The Ranting Continues...

Yesterday didn't turn out so well, huh? Yeah me... But as one must always induce positive thinking, one shall perceive that the rantings of yesterdays as manure to tomorrow's outlet. I think it was a politician who said that, maybe even a Chinese business man because I'm sure as hell that manure today is still manure tomorrow.

So pretty much, I got home in one piece yesterday. Drove all the way in one hand only and my left hand too. I had to use my right hand to hold my forehead up and those darn salty water out of my eyes, lest I'll have to stop by the side of the road and bawl like a baby. So I'm emotional. Sue me.

So yes, there's every possibility that I might get the failing grade on my thesis. Since we all charitable people, I'm not going to rant out on how I didn't bother meeting my supervisor (wrote about that already, go figure). Especially if my previous supervisors got a wind of me. I imagine them metaphorically crucifying me on the altar of the IT faculty but teachers being teachers, I would take a real crucifixion over an 'F'. At least I can die from crucifixion.

So I have one week to ferment at the pit of my stomach. No biggie. If I'm not too genius, maybe I'll work on that database my other course wants me to do. Me being me I can't guarantee I'll make it a working one, much lest hand it in time at all.

The three big differences in this is that the movie thingy was just a database file, the lecturer is nicer and I have two other people that going to fall down with me if I screw this up. I may not care if my world ends between tomorrow and twelve seconds after I end this blog but I make an acquaintance suffer the wrath of the 'F', I'll roll over and die first. At least my group has a reason of fatality to excuse my lack of progress.

Passing over the hazards of school, I guess I did feel something close to better after the snot drive (wiped the steering wheel before I left the car). Got home just after sunset prayers, hung around the kitchen table area until *Ayah and *Genius (my littler brother) got home.

Interactions with Ayah just got low but not grudgingly. Frankly, I try not to care. Then he asked if I was okay. Now really, a man who raised you from diapers and still paying for your petrol money is sufficiently capable of reading your mind. More so since I still got red eyes from the boo-hoos.

Just for being a jerk, I kept eye contact away and ignored the question until my father asked me a third time around. I supposed a teeny weenie part of me just wanted to throw hints at him that I was capable of lying to my own father (like I haven't done it with various types of well-practiced faces before).

So I just said I had a slight fever. Being that it rained that morning, it sounded justified so he just left. Ayah, like every other male in this Confucian-ingested province, brushed it off and went to his business. I can't show emotions to my father. Firstly, I'm not pretty when I cry and secondly, I scream when there's finally somebody to see me cry (not good for the neighborhood).

Thirdly, he's a guy. Guys can't handle emotions, as Oprah had taught us. And I don't talk emotions with a guy. Maybe I would but it'll be in a bitterly joking manner that's worth its weight of sarcasm in bricks. I drop a lot of hints to my family but maybe I'm just bad at hinting to them that I got emotional problems. If I were to hit Ayah with a big sign that says "I'm the Stupid One", he probably still wouldn't budge.

But hey, he's in the dark and I'm in dire jeopardy, which incidentally, I'm going to bury myself in bed clothes until D-Day comes. I am not going to talk to anybody about this, lest if it's an authority figure. But I do plan to rant something out a little bit more, not here, but definitely in a chat room.

I think I'll steal some 50 cent coins around the house and fork it over to the cyber cafe and meet the gangs at GW cyber community. They're e not really friends but they share a little interest with me so I'm going to screw this over to them anyway because I'm anonymous. Just blur out a line or two, hear them chat back "Oh you poor baby...," then blow this over.

I consider it healthy exercise to finally get something out. Otherwise I'll have to pull over on the side of the road in a car then bawl like a baby.