Month: January 2015

First Reflection

by Damon Caskey

WRD111-44

Kolf, Emily

2014-01-18

Caskey, Damon V

 

Topic: Reflect on yourself as a writer. What is your process? Does it work for you? What aspects of your writing are strong and which areas do you think you need to improve on?

 

If you were to view this recent article (if you wish to, please create an account and let me know so I can give it access), you would find I the following is really a reiteration:

I do have a large body of written work, but am not by any fair standard a “writer”. It simply isn’t within my purview. That said I am a trained and experienced verbal communicator, particularly with improvisational public speaking. When writing, I attempt to leverage this skillset by imagining I am speaking to a group and simply attempt to transcribe the resulting stream of consciousness.

It’s a crude method and of little use for formal research, but does allow quick fabrication of content and by nature is vocally presentable. The detriments are incoherence, source citing and poor reading flow. These are all areas I wish to improve upon.

A semi-professional profile with (silly) picture may be found here. Thank you for reading. I look forward to working with you and the class body!

DC

Multi-Layer Stage Example

by Damon Caskey

Multiple stage layer example with OpenBOR. See gallery below for stage broken into its individual resources.

Layer example

This stage is comprised of eight layers. See text for description of each.

From front to back:

  1. Posts are the default OpenBOR front panel.
  2. Palm fronds are a panel type entity to allow wafting animation.
    1. Layer: 100
    2. Speed: -0.25
  3. Play field is the default OpenBOR panel.
  4. Boat is an animated singular obstacle type entity. It is fully animated and has collision enabled. It can thus be hit and ultimately sunk, but only by throwing enemy characters out of the play field (more on that later).
    1. Layer: -8
    2. Scroll: 0.17
  5. Bay and nearest area of the city are made from a series of panel type entities. This is to allow animation of the various city elements and gleaming water.
    1. Layer: -10
    2. Speed: 0.2
  6. A second series of panel type entities creates another layer of water and city area for smoother scrolling.
    1. Layer: -11
    2. Speed: 0.3
  7. A third and final layer of panel type entities comprises the furthest visible water.
    1. Layer: -12
    2. Speed: 0.4
  8. Background is OpenBOR’s default background, set to autoscroll mode so the clouds are always rolling by.
    1. Bgspeed: 1 0

With eight independently scrolling layers, the visual effect is that of near 3D scrolling when characters traverse the stage. A final touch is an invisible entity resetting the stage palette to the next of ten increasingly darker and redder hues every thirty seconds of real time. This creates a sunset effect during game play.