Hello everyone! Welcome to the wonderful world that is my weekly blog that I totally don’t write within an hour of when I post because I completely forgot about it until said hour before I post it due to hanging out with friends at firework displays and whatnot. Anyway, this is my blog in which I talk about videogames I’ve played, visual novels I’ve read, and then maybe other things including but not limited to programming, anime and whatever really tickles my fancy at the time of writing. So while I count down the days until Future Snoop Dogg appears in front of me and asks if I want to go to the future, I better get started on this blog!

Absolute Obedience

Well I’ve been wanting to talk about this one for quite some time now, but I’ve never really found any good reason to focus a week on this visual novel. But you know what the hell, this week I delved into the world of Absolute Obedience, and oh boy, what a world it was.

So, let’s just get this out of the way at the beginning, this is a gay visual novel. Not gay as in “oh boy I’m so edgy using this a derogatory term” no, this visual novel is about homosexual men having sex with both homosexual and non-homosexual men. As stated before I actually prefer yaoi to yuri, for reasons that you readers have probably figured out by now but for obvious reasons I’m not going to state outright. Oh right, and also.

So, let’s continue.

This game stars two protagonists, Kia and Louise, in West Germany post World War 2 as they run an agency you can pay to get back at other men. Not by killing or anything like that, of course not, instead by getting one of these guys to have sex with them. Now this is a pretty great and stupid premise for a visual novel, as it allows the whole having different characters to get with conceit to exist without ever having to replay the game for anything. It also allows each character to get their own unique story, albeit a short one, to really flesh them out. Then again, due to the fact that there are ten different stories, the guys you go after don’t really evolve past their initial stereotype. When you complete all ten routes you can choose between the Kia ending and Louise ending, in which they both have a really important client or something. Again, I think it’s a rather interesting approach to take and lets the main aspects of a visual novel shine.

And I haven’t even gotten to the unique part of the game. So, you start off the game with these twelve options, making the intro rather overwhelming and incredibly tempting to just go with the guy you think looks the hottest (which for me was a tossup between a footballer and a spoiled shota brat looking kid... no regrets). However, you can’t really do that if you want the best ending in the game. Each mission has an ending date, and if you take different mission, the first one could just straight up expire and you won’t be able to see that story. On top of this, each route has different ending ranks. You get ranked on your performance, which is completely based upon what choices you make in the usual visual novel fashion. This means it’s entirely possibly to fail a mission, get a D rank, and continue on with the game. Some choices will only appear if you play the missions in a specific order, which I can only guess means the character you picked uses logic from a different mission on the current one or whatever videogames, meaning there is a proper set order to get the highest rank in the game. While this is really cool, it did just force me into looking up a guide to tell me which mission order to go in, because at a point there was too many things for me to screw up and not get the best ending. This also means that there are four endings to every single mission, ranging from the A rank completion to the D rank completion, so it’s pretty time consuming to see everything the game has to offer.

Overall I thought the visual novel was really good, but quite obviously not for everyone. Thanks to the mission structure the game can go in rather different directions for every character you try and seduce, and of course make the main characters rather interesting in their “This is only a job” attitude to the majority of missions. And honestly, the idea behind this is absolutely amazing. Instead of killing someone to get back at them for wronging you, there is some kind of weird agency that will seduce them into a gay relationship? Most of the reasons are pretty great too. One of the missions involves a prince, in which his uncle has ordered the ‘hit’, in the hopes that it will disgrace him and get him banished from the country, so that the uncle can take his place on the throne. Another is to hurt a footballer so that his team will lose the final match or something like that. A lot of really silly justifications all around.

Also there’s this guy.

Maybe check it out?

What the end user can’t see

The most interesting thing about programming for me is what the end user can’t see, and while that might classify the majority of programming; I’m talking about a very specific part of games. There are a lot of tricks programmers use to achieve a certain effect, and most of that will go completely unnoticed by the end user, and that fascinates me.

In the past, I’d absolutely hate doing these tricks, because even if the end user can’t see the tricks, I know that they are there. So, because of that, I would never be able to remove myself as the programmer or designer on a project, because, well, I knew too much. Now-a-days, however, I know that this approach is completely pointless, because after all, what the end user doesn’t know can’t hurt them, right? Right. So I’ve started doing more and more tricks as of late.

In my latest game, Bullet Bill 3, I do a lot of these, and I’ll share some of the sillier examples. First is in the koopa enemies. In my game I try to make the Mario enemies act just like their actual game counterparts as much as possible. So, when you hit Koopas in this game, they go into their shell, and can attack enemies as they fly to the right. This created the first major problem I’ve had with the programming side of this game. Basically, the Koopa has two different states, normal movement, and in their shell. When they’re walking around they act just like Goombas do, they walk at a certain speed and if they collide with another enemy, they turn around, if they notice there isn’t any ground beneath them, they turn around, or if they are floating in air, they drop until they reach new ground. Pretty straight forward stuff. The problem arose, however, when they switch to being in their shell. In the shell they move faster, detected when they hit an enemy and kill that enemy, fell if there wasn’t any ground beneath them, bounced when hit bricks, yadda yadda. The shell was the main problem; I did a check every frame if the shell was hitting anything in the enemy ‘umbrella’, so to speak. Of course it was, as this check just checks if it’s colliding with anything there, and it was of course hitting itself. Therefore, it would try to kill itself, every frame. I added a rule to exclude itself from the search, but then because the shells move a lot faster than when they are walking, it would sometimes completely pass through enemies, and never detect them actually hitting. I literally couldn’t do a check in between the two points as I would have to do two things. One, it would detect itself again and then stop the check, and two, determining if it hits all of the enemies on every frame would lag the program considerably, especially when there were multiple shells in play at once. My solution was to completely remove the shells from the enemies ‘umbrella’, and create an entire different subset called ‘projectiles’. This solved several problems, as I could check all of the enemies without fear of it detecting itself, and it wouldn’t lag when trying to kill other shells or whatnot. The problem that arose from this, because in programming when you solve one problem you create like three more, was the enemies check would just completely break whenever a koopa would be removed from the game, and a shell got put in its place. I really don’t know why this problem exists, but I’m no doctor. My solution was to not actually delete the koopa. In my game, when you kill a koopa, the code tells it to spawn a shell at the exact same x and y value, and then moves the koopa to x value -65536. To the end user, who will never know this unless they happen to read this, absolutely nothing seems wrong. It looks as if when you hit the koopa, it goes into its shell and happily rides along. But in truth they are completely different objects in the game, because otherwise everything breaks.

Another instance of this was something I talked about before, about how I completely redid a bunch of code in the game to make it prettier for me personally. It’s kind of weird when your goal in re-writing code is to make sure that the end game looks exactly the same as it did before.

Again, I don’t really know where I’m going with this, but it’s always an interesting thing that’s in the back of my mind when it comes to coding. I make terrible games that no-one in their right mind should ever play, but just imagine what random stuff is happening in actual games that get released on consoles. I remember rather vaguely on one of the 2011 E3 podcasts a Naught Dog programmer was talking about the flooding mechanics in Uncharted 3, and how that entire level is inside a giant cube or something incredibly confusing like that. It’s rather incredible to think how many weird tricks and tips programmers actually use to get these effects to work.

Oh god you guys, I didn’t play any videogames this week! Pretty crazy right? I really don’t know how it’s already Saturday, but hopefully I’ll have more content for you next week. This week has been rather crazy, which all ended on Friday with my only finding out I had to hand in a 1000 word essay literally one hour before it was due. So really, I should be incredibly thankful I write these blogs, because it’s helped me write a lot faster! Before, that would have taken me about 5 hours to write, and even then I still wouldn’t be happy with it. Now, however, I got that done with 20 minutes to spare. Let’s just hope it was slightly higher quality than the terrible shit I write in this blog. Proof reading is for suckers!