Medical Necessity Dev Diary #4

Another Saturday, another update for Medical Necessity! And we have a lot to talk about this week! First things first, I’m excited to introduce Matt and Steven, our new audio designers! Hailing from San Francisco State University, they’ll be working with Pat for the next few weeks to design the different sound effects, music, and ambiance for our game. We’ve added a lot of different changes, all of which are visible in this GIF, so let’s break them down part by part! Artwise, the player character’s healthbar has changed back to the original, dynamically-colored green circle in order to visually… [Continue Reading]

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Battlefield 1 – Turning Tides Review

Hi, this is aabicus with the SPUF of Legend! Battlefield 1 came out with the second half of the Turning Tides DLC earlier this month, and I’m loving every single part of it. Now I need to mention a few qualifiers just to be fair: I didn’t try out any of the new guns because they take a lot of time to unlock and I’m playing on a friend’s account (speaking of which, special thanks to Yessirreebirb for letting me use his account again), where was I oh yeah he’s saving up his warbonds for something else so I mostly… [Continue Reading]

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Medical Necessity Dev Diary #3

Happy Saturday everybody! This week started off with a bang when we got to playtest our game with a group of high schoolers from a local college. It was our first mass playtest, and we were super excited when they loved it! So far people enjoy the exhilaration of strafing gunfire while trying to decide who to heal to survive the level, simultaneously putting to rest a debate we’d been having in the sidelines. My original design document planned for the bullets in the game to be hitscan; invisible straight lines drawn from the shooter that instantly hit the first… [Continue Reading]

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The UMP Strikes Back

Recently, I got the chance to play PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS, the battle royale simulator that took the entire FPS community by storm and beat King of the Kill at its own game. I played on my friend’s account, and earned a single kill in my first (and as of this writing, only) round: I’m not gonna lie, that’s the reason I’m writing an article about the UMP right now. The Heckler & Koch Universale Maschinenpistole was made to serve as a lighter and cheaper alternative to the equally-famous MP5 sold by the same company. It’s known for being extremely moddable, and perhaps that’s why… [Continue Reading]

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Medical Necessity Dev Diary #2

Hey everybody! Another week, another update for Medical Necessity! You may have noticed our last Dev Diary showcased footage consisting entirely of cylinders firing at each other, well not anymore! Ben’s been hard at work implementing placeholder animations and sprites so we have more attractive characters to watch as we work. It’s not always necessary to have artwork at such an early stage, but by getting the animations complete, we can tie certain behaviors to those animations and it creates less work down the line. Speaking of AI behaviors, Carry and Pat have been hard at work finding new ways… [Continue Reading]

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Dev Diary #1 – Introducing Medical Necessity!

Hi everybody! Last month I first mentioned my upcoming video game, Medical Necessity, and our team has been working hard on it since the new quarter started! I also mentioned that I’d be writing weekly articles chronicling the experiences I’ve had making a game as part of a group. For this first one, I’d like to introduce my teammates! Carry is our Development Director. With years of programming experience under his belt, he’s our primary Unity programmer and the brains behind many of the breakthroughs that have setup the foundations for our game. Carry worked for a Chinese game company… [Continue Reading]

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Your Royal Gayness – New Visual Novel Released on Steam

Your Royal Gayness was a successfully-Kickstarted visual novel that passed through Steam Greenlight. For the past few months, I’ve been writing quests for the project, and yesterday the game was finally released! All of my quests are random encounters, so you may see them whenever a daily event pops up to make your life more complicated. My personal favorite involves a national scarab-racing team. Have fun!

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How to Play Half Life For Free

The original Half-Life is one of the most important and influential first-person shooters ever released. Have you ever wanted to experience it but don’t own the game? Well now you can! Half-Life comes bundled within Sven Co-op, a free-to-play GoldSrc mod available on Steam. In this article, I’ll be explaining step-by-step how to setup Sven Co-op so that you can play Half-Life they way it was meant to be. Step 1: Go to the Sven Co-op page on Steam and download it by clicking ‘Play Game’. Step 2: If you don’t already have Steam, you’ll be prompted to setup an account. If you already… [Continue Reading]

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Payday 2: On Joker Cops

There are a couple reasons I frequently finding myself grabbing Joker skills in my Payday 2 builds; firstly, they’re under the Mastermind skill tree, which also comes with all the medic skills. The top joker skill, Hostage Taker, lets you regenerate health every five seconds if you have a converted cop. This works great with most of my favorite perk decks, especially my current love Stoic, which has phenomenal tanking potential but no innate way to regenerate the slivers of damage that will slowly wear you down throughout a heist. But even when I don’t spec all the way into… [Continue Reading]

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aabicus at College: An Update

Hi everyone! I’ve been almost completely silent on both the forums and this blog, and I apologize for that, but as I mentioned in this video, I’ve been attending a Master’s program in Game Design, and it’s been loads of work. Luckily it’s been amazing and enjoyable work, and I’ve just wrapped up my first (and supposedly the busiest) quarter. It has been so great getting to explore so many different elements of game design in an academic setting! This article is basically a compilation of what I’ve been doing the last four months, and a bit of discussion on… [Continue Reading]

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