John Zeitler

Frangible Time Update: Episode 1 is done with a total count of 17,500 words. I’m probably jumping the gun here, but instead of a post, this is a little bit of what I’m working on.

Law of Time Travel #1
If causality will be violated in the future, causality will have always been violated. The reverse is not necessarily true.

Law of Time Travel #2
If a traveler causes a paradox in another person’s life, a stable branching timeline is created. If a traveler creates a paradox in his or her own life, a fragline is created.

Law of Time Travel #3
If a fragline is not corrected within a certain amount of time relative to the traveler’s frame of reference, the traveler will be destroyed and the fragline will replace reality. This is not an ideal solution.

Corollary to Law of Time Travel #3
The universe has ways of fixing fraglines.

Today, my Xbox/Games For Windows Live Gamerscore exceeded 9000 points. The achievement that put me over this plateau was “You Never Forget Your First (10G)” from BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger. My current count for achievements is 507 individual achievements across 76 games, totaling 9005 points. The average value of each achievement is 17.76 points, with an average count of 118.49 points per game (Xbox.com reports 19.75% gamerscore completion and 24.28% achievement completion, with two fully-completed games). It took 64 days to reach this point from the previous plateau of 8000 on July 4th, 2009. 65 achievements were collected in this time, totaling 1005 points, with an average value of 15.46 points, and a collection rate of one achievement every 23.63 hours.

Today, my Xbox/Games For Windows Live Gamerscore exceeded 8000 points. The achievement that put me over this plateau was “Boss Rush: Raiden Fighters Jet (40G)” from Raiden Fighters Aces. My current count for achievements is 442 individual achievements across 70 games, totaling 8000 points. The average value of each achievement is 18.09 points, with an average count of 114.29 points per game (Xbox.com reports 18.96% completion, with two fully-completed games). It took 77 days to reach this point from the previous plateau of 7025 on April 18th, 2009. 57 achievements were collected in this time, totaling 975 points, with an average value of 17.11 points, and a collection rate of one achievement every 32.5 hours.

Today, my Xbox/Games For Windows Live Gamerscore exceeded 7000 points. The achievement that put me over this plateau was “Rant All You Will (30G)” from Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II. My current count for achievements is 382 individual achievements across 63 games, totaling 7025 points. The average value of each achievement is 18.39 points, with an average count of 111.51 points per game (Xbox.com reports 19.79% completion, with two fully-completed games). It took 105 days to reach this point from the previous plateau of 6070 on January 3rd, 2009. 56 achievements were collected in this time, totaling 955 points, with an average value of 17.05 points, and a collection rate of one achievement every 45 hours.

Okay. I spent a bit more time working on the game last night, but today’s progress– even thus far– has been tremendous. I’ve got a preliminary loading screen, I’ve got things set up for dynamic loading (read: loading only what you need for the scene ahead of time, then unloading only that when switching scenes), I did up the character positioning setup and drawing code AND created artwork for the demo characters…

…and I got it running on Windows. It’s optimized for 720p right now (which means it’s WAY too big for average screens), so my biggest problem right now is getting the art rescaled to a standard size for the Windows version. I also have to set up an alternate control scheme, as I’m not going to demand that the people I’m giving this to have 360 controllers attached to their computers. Overall, I think I’m about 6 more hours away from a publishable alpha game (I chose not to put any music in for this alpha, beyond some sounds that will probably need to be replaced).

Those six hours are going to be next weekend, folks– I’m going to go enjoy the rest of this one, now that I can.

I feel like Rocky Balboa climbing those steps in Philadelphia right now. Seriously, the sense of accomplishment I’m getting just from having gotten this far along in development of the XNA project has me incredibly psyched, even as it’s slowly sinking into my subconscious that I have a hell of a long way left to go. Still, as the video below adequately demonstrates (despite my rambling), my C# skillz are getting stronger.

Today, my Xbox Gamerscore exceeded 6000 points. The achievement that put me over this plateau was “Hack A Turret (10G)” from Bioshock. My current count for achievements is 326 individual achievements across 58 games, totaling 6070 points. The average value of each achievement is 18.62 points. It took 51 days to reach this point from the previous plateau of 5125 on November 13th, 2008. 48 achievements were collected in this time, totaling 945 points, with an average value of 19.69 points, and a collection rate of one achievement every 22 hours and 35 minutes.