Biography.txt

Can be found in Fuzzbucket: in the Math classroom's trash can.
 Wasted Youth Part 1
 Wasted Youth, Part 1 – Biography
 The development for the game that would eventually be named Wasted Youth, started in July, 2009.
 I had released Bunny Invasion: Easter Special a few months before, and had started 2 other projects, both of which I just didn’t have the motivation to complete. I was desperate for an idea to work with.
 I didn’t want to release ANOTHER sequel to Bunny Invasion, for which I have some big ideas for.
 It should be said that at this point I was trying to make a living from creating Flash games, while giving my brother, Dave (who runs the website, GPStudios.com) a possible career also.
 The success from Bunny Invasion 2 and its Easter spinoff, was pretty left-field. As I have written in the Bunny Invasion 2 Biography, I had just left university after an awful 7 - 8 weeks there. Maybe less, I’m not sure. Either way, I didn’t stay there for long. And a few months later, I was handed quite a handsome sum of money for something I did purely as a hobby.
 From that point on I was determined to make something of it. (But as you can probably guess – those plans didn’t quite come to fruition.)
 The conception of the basis for Wasted Youth came to me when I was playing Resident Evil 3.
 For some reason I was playing some of my old PS One games, probably in the hope of coming up with a new game idea.
 The idea was pretty simple – A strategy game, like Resident Evil, which allowed the player to explore an area and complete puzzles, ultimately aiming towards solving a big mystery.
 In other words, my idea was to create Resident Evil 3.
 I imagined the game in the style of an old style RPG, Finals Fantasy 1-6 top down graphics.
 I immediately started work from this very basic idea, and started creating a little village.
 Stupidly, I just started making stuff with absolutely no plans of how they might be used. I created a weird little blue alien character which wore pants and a pink vest.
 I didn’t even know what the game was about, but now I had a quaint little village and a happy blue alien wearing y-fronts. Nice.
 This only took me a few days though. This isn’t why the game took 18 months to create in case you’re wondering…
 That said, it wasn’t completely wasted time, because ultimately this was the foundation of the game.
 Within this tiny bizarre world, I had created a very basic 3D system in which you could go behind or in front of an object. Also I had created a walking animation, collision detection, and NPCs that also walked around.
 Thinking about it, this took more than a couple weeks…
 Anyway, from this point I asked my other brother, Rich (who wrote the cutscenes for Bunny Invasion) for ideas. He had suggested in the past a game set in a school, but I don’t remember him saying much more than that.
 I think it was me who suggested setting the current game within a school, and the rest was history.
 And now allow me to explain that history in tedious detail…
 Rich went away for a few days and came back with quite an epic plot, something like 20 pages. I think I was pretty displeased by the epic-ness of it at the time and the lack of jokes. I realised it would take longer to make than I had first imagined.
 So I began making the school. I started by drawing out blueprints for several buildings: Main building, Dormitory, Sports Hall, Music Building (copying my old school pretty much).
 I created the walls and the corridors, and then I got to work on furnishing the rooms.
 Now this took something like a month… And all I was doing was drawing the objects. They were all black lines and white fill. (Incidentally, for a short while I considered leaving it black and white. It looked nice, and it would have avoided a lot of hard work.)
 Now from here on, the months start to meld together in my head.
 I have to admit, I cannot understand why this game took so long to make. As I’ve said over and over on my news blog at GPStudios.com, I have no idea where the time has gone.
 Yesterday it was spring but now its winter! The dog’s dead, my hair’s greying, AND I’M FUCKING COLD!!!
 I consider the year 2010 to be the year that nothing happened, relative to me at least. The year I took a break (but in actual fact was toiling over an incredibly big undertaking called, The School Game. Imaginatively named by me.)
 After drawing half of what I needed to, I started being quite unorganized. I started doing loads of other things at once, which I think may have contributed to wasting lots of time on things that I would eventually re-do anyway.
 I made the dialogue box, I made some very simple interfaces, a pause menu, save/load functions, made the character run and walk animations, etc…
 Meanwhile, only half of the school was drawn, and only bits of it were coloured. I still had a long while until I could start on implementing the story.
 So a few months passed. Places got built, interfaces got developed.
 Meanwhile, in about late November 2009, my brother Rich wrote a script for an text-based adventure game where you made decisions to further the story, called Mutant Uprising. Him and Dave had secretly developed the idea behind my back, and Dave was going to create it.
 In the end though, with the script finished and the bare bones of the game completed by Dave, the game was handed to me, and I spent a few weeks developing this. It was a pleasant break from the sheer boredom and frustration of The School Game.
 Mutant Uprising was released in January 2010. Didn’t do very well, but then it was a short project anyway. Got a lot of nice comments – so thanks! (Mutant Uprising 2 is on the way soon MU1 fans.)
 So, some time passed - let’s say it’s now April 2010, because frankly I have no fucking clue where the time went. I think it fell down the back of the desk, blew out the window, or simply went straight up my arse, never to return. Who knows?
 By this point I had the school populated by people, speaking, and I think the missions were being outlined. I decided to remove the Sports Hall and the Music Hall. I was happy with just the Sports field, and I made the art room half its size, leaving just enough room for a music room beside it.
 I also had planned a car park, an Music building exterior area, and all the space between the buildings was going to be explorable. Between the Sports Field and the Main Building there was even a pond!
 Eventually I realised that the space was just far too big. There was so much empty space that would take me months to fill, so in the end I removed these sub-exteriors and designed a map which teleported you to other exterior locations.
 Fast forward a few more months, let’s say June, and the game is seemingly close to completion. 20 missions are almost finished, everybody says something, there is a night and day system. There is almost everything you see now.
 A little later, I think about August, maybe July, I was concerned that the game might be too long.
 I said to Dave jokingly that we should cut the game in two parts, but he decided that this was exactly what should be done. I knew that if we were to cut it in half it would mean a lot more work for me. A few days passed, and I eventually agreed to it.
 So now, not only did I have to finish stuff off, but I had to remove the second half. Not to mention a few more missions had to be created because now I was left with just 12 Missions, several of which are very short.
 We decided to also alter the story slightly to suit the split of the game.
 The 3 missions we decided to insert would be the RC vehicle mission, the laser grid/booze mission, and the first half of the party mission (originally there was no party.)
 Also, the mission with Guy was transplanted from the second half, because it’s just too good to keep from the first part.
 By December, all of this stuff was finished, and so was almost all of the game, apart from a few extras here and there.
 The next month was spent tirelessly testing the game. A process I naively thought would take a few days.
 Wrong. It took a whole freakin’ month. It was buggy as balls. The game was Swiss cheese before we started testing, and I filled it full of polyfil. (The previous sentence was not meant to sound dirty.)
 …And now it’s January.
 So after a bollock load of testing and a few tweaks here and there…
 The game is finished. I am done. My ordeal is over.
 Wait… oh what? You mean…… SHIT!!!
 I often forget.
 Part 2 was left behind a few months ago, and now the story has to be reworked, the missions need to be beefed up, tested, all the other shit. New dialogue has to be written, new lessons, new piggymon cards, achievements, extras… I could go on.
 So, I hope you’re having a fun time playing the game and reading all this filler shit. I’m having a ball just writing it.
 Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
 To those who are enjoying themselves and want a little more, don’t fret! The second half shouldn’t take much time at all. Just give me a month. Maybe 45 days. I’ll have it ready in no time (Relatively speaking.)
 But… If you’re not enjoying it, just imagine the sweat pouring off my back while I sculpt the below-average graphics, polish the overly long corridors, and bravely bring to life that of a boy with a penis in his hand.
 Think of what I’ve had to go through…
 It’s nothing short of a traumatic experience, and I’m glad to be done with it… almost. *Weep*
 Wasted Youth, Part 2: Coming soon…
 To find out how the game is progressing, visit www.GPStudios.com
 -Tom Wilson, Creator of Wasted Youth