It occured to me one night recently and I don’t want to talk about it, but it did give me this idea.  I have always loved the notion of creating my own video game but I was never infatuated with the actual work and frustration of actually making my own video game.  When I purchased a copy of Flash last year and started looking around at tutorials I became encouraged that I could indeed royally screw this up and naturally I was entitrely correct, so I gave up on this potential form of content a long time ago.  Well, for some reason unknown to my mind even though this mysterious quality I’m referencing here is in fact an integral part of the way my mind obviously fails to work properly, I have decided to try again to fail miserably.  Such are my ambitions in life.

Shockingly dull was my surprise when I managed to put together even this simple little non-interactive (and thus entirely non-game like in any sense) simulation of a few key components of one potential game concept:

Balls.  Big ones.  The tricky part was not putting my fist straight through my monitor every time Flash produced a result that was unexpected in the sense that I had not anticipated its ability to work in exactly the most painfully unsatisfactorily illogical way possible.  It is, I am certain though unable to prove conslusively, reasonable to attempt to get Actionscript to add two numbers and multiply them by the square root of a color and then divide the output by a jpeg of a squirrel playing the bassoon.  It will give you an answer in pixels per square blue screened insanity and leave you with no hair except for the chunks still clutched tightly in your fists.  There are moments, brief yet terrifyingly intense moments, when I am not fond of how Flash operates.

And yet, I made the cute little totally non-game you see above.  At this point I make no promises because the odds favor nothing coming of this effort.

Actually I will make this one promise becuase I feel supremely confident in my abilities even though I am suberbly inept when it comes to actually applying them.  Having said that you will find it does not relate to the promise which is this – no tutorials on how to make a Flash platform game.  Ever.  Go insane on your own terms.

Content to provide, and so I have.  Dark Purple UFOs is alive, and if you were to go there right this very next several hours you will find that indeed provided content is available and colorful.  It still needs work overall, and perhaps a couple of different kinds of content in addition to the story that will be very poorly written, but there is something there and that is not such an important accomplishment but I’ll take any kind of progress with a smile and sigh.

Two parts are posted thus far with a third nearly written.  I’ve settled on a style for the artwork, pretty much as featured in the image above, which is colorful, clean, and relatively easy to produce.  Hypothetically the way things will work is I will create several entries per chapter, with each chapter being a category to select on the right side navigation menu.  Clicking on a chapter takes you to the first (oldest) post for that chapter and then the “forward” and “back” links will move you or your hyper intelligent gerbil along through that particular section of the overall story that has no real purpose or direction but does at least have this much structure.  I need to work on the forward and back “buttons” though, as right this very lunar cycle the links reference “previous entries” instead of forward, which is not terribly intuitive.  The stories themselves are confusing and frustrating enough, I will at least try and make moving through them a more pleasantly straightforward experience.

Now, there was this other business I said I was really certainly absolutely almost sure I was going to go through with this time but did not.  I’m not going to be a freelance illustrator any time soon.  I have a job and it sufficiently provides continual sources of headaches well enough by itself.  For now it’s just going to be about DPUs.  Let’s just see if it goes anywhere and from there we will know where we are giong from here.

What are those two looking at by the way?

Some progress, hopefully of the sustainable variety, has taken place over at my darkpurpleufos.com site.  Some serious tweaking to the blog front end, which is not quite complete but this is likely 80% done.  I need to add a sidebar link for a contact page and a link to this blog.  Plus there are a few other little touches, like inserting graphics for the next and previous entry links, that need to added in as well.  Overall it is starting to come together as I even have the first couple of entries written, though not quite fully illustrated.

One little detail regarding the new design is the header image, which has removed two characters and added one new one.  This is not complete yet either as there will be two more characters added next to the new one on the left.  This is because the whole idea of what DPU.com is about has changed.  As I’ve found over the years if I cannot keep some momentum going on a given concept then it is likely because the concept is just not as interesting as originally hoped.  The first idea was based on these aliens being here on Earth to simply observe and report, and then they hire a local human as their subject matter expert and sort of a liason to the human world.  I had a few other ideas to mix in with this generic concept over time, but it never seemed to be getting anywhere.  As it turns out things were still too close to reality for my mind to take serious interest in it.

So now we have the same trio of aliens, who I still feel have a lot of potential as characters, and a completely different world for them to visit.  Now they are visiting a fantasy world complete with wizards and dragons and kings.  They, being standard SciFi aliens from a technologically advanced race have never seen nor believed in the existence of magic.  The fantasy world has no need for deep scientific research and understanding because they can just solve major issues with magic.  In fact scientific pursuits are outlawed in the kingdoms of the world, though one of the main characters, a scholar named Kyr, is part of a secret society that is bent on developing science as a legitimate approach to improving the world.  The aliens drop in because they have been tasked with finding a new world to observe and study, which is part of some larger mission they refuse to discuss or reveal for a time.  They end up making a connection with Kyr since he thinks more like them – science instead of magic – and wants to help them in exchange for them teaching him all about their scientific advancements.  Edrik, the new character in the header image, is his long time friend and is sort of a knight though mostly just a party going lay about (i.e. a fart arounder).  The other main character to be added is Edrik’s girlfriend, not yet named, who is in fact an influential witch in the king’s court and one who is not at all fascinated nor sympathetic towards science as an alternative to her magic.

Plenty of room for nonsense and aimless and shallow storytelling.  More updates to follow, more fun to be had, and no visitors to worry about…

It seems the promise of a new world labelled only as Dark Purple UFOs has stayed with me more persistently than I might have imagined it would.  Though I seem to aimlessly wander around my mental laboratory, looking for new elemental substances to throw together in the hopes of concocting something original but never giving any one experiment time to sufficiently flourish, I do indeed occassionally become infatuated with just one basic idea.  I had not thought this particular one would end up as such but I am starting to suspect it may yet be so.  In fact, I think the novel I’ve written and the concept for this site could even belong to the same world and could each be elements connected together by the same silly strings.  Perhaps all of it for as long as I have been trying to find something to create has been connected to this same alternate universe that it seems now I am inevitably going to plunge into feet first and holding my nose while holding my hopes.

Here is what I’ve been working on lately, as a tangible way of demonstrating my progress.  First, I seem to have settled on a site layout:

The characters depicted at the top are rounding into my five central characters who appear in all the stories.  A few of them have appeared in other posts, in similar form, while two others have been added. The alien one in the middle is not going to be a major character, just there for some comical moments, at least that is my thinking at this point.  The one I had not really been expecting to show up was the new female character on the right, who I think is going to be a programmer/hacker who helps the research team navigate around Earth systems and aids them in developing various programs for thier experiments.  One idea there is that she has developed and runs some kind of futuristic version of an MMORPG game, but in fact the game world is meant to be an intricate study of human behavior to benefit the research team’s goals.  Her name is going to be Vyx, which comes from one of the short stories I submitted to a contest last year.  I do not plan to develop any kind of convenient romantic relationship between her and Martin (I’ve renamed Phillip to Martin, for now, just to keep this character from overlapping with one of the characters I put in my novel, which is a really useless piece of information for you because you cannot read my novel and this site isn’t operational and so begs the question as to why you’re even reading this right now).

The other piece that seems to be falling into place is that I will be using Flash content, but likely not creating long movies.  Instead pages of the story will contain very short clips that show some action or express some moment with just a few movements or event depicted.  This way I can keep the Flash portion of the content simple and quick to create.  The approach of creating long and detailed movies was clearly slowing me down, yet this seems to have potential. For now.  For example:

This little clip would be part of one page with the text of this part of the story displayed next to it.  The stories will be written out, I think, in first person as though they are journal entries, while these clips and images will visually provide details of what was really happening at the time.  I might go the route of putting the dialog into these clips and images as well, though I’m undecided on that part.  I have a feeling it will end up all mixed and mashed up as it goes along.  The secret really is to do whatever my imagination happens to find convenient at that particular phase of the lunar cycle.

One of the next items on my to do list is to update the “under construction” page on the actual DarkPurpleUFOs.com site, just to let anyone wandering by know that yes something is actually going on there, but to come back next year.  Someday.  Theoretically.

-Josh