Hi, this is Driller from the administration team.
What you are seeing is the full transcript for the April 2022 edition of the State of the Prophet Driller. Click here to view it on YouTube.
Touhou 5: Mystic Square NES Demake‘s Development is Well Underway
It’s great to see you on this April Fools Day and the second State of the Prophet Driller for this year. I have some things to tell you at the moment. The first big picture is the Touhou 5: Mystic Square NES Demake. Development is already underway, despite Chuhou Joutai 3 being developed at the same time! Most of the assets for the demake have already been completed. The same engine from the Lotus Land Story Demake will be reused in the Mystic Square demake. This was done in an effort to save time and money. One of the biggest challenges will be the cutscenes. I completed the script a few months before development actually began. That was a monster of writing – and on the week I finished the tutorial for Chuhou Joutai 3, I worked so hard I went to Pizza Hut as a way to reward myself.
Issues involving Adobe Premiere and Livestreaming
The second thing has to be video editing and livestreaming. For months, I’ve been having to put up with lag whenever I’m trying to livestream Mario Maker 2 courses on Twitch. In some cases, the video would end up stuttering and going off sync, or in some cases freezing completely. The video editing part would be, for almost a year, my PC would end up crashing when I’m trying to render a video or in some cases while editing in Adobe Premiere. I don’t use Pinnacle Studio anymore because it’s glitchy, it crashed all the time, and rendering is pathetically slow. I just thought this was a pain in the rear. You can probably understand why a lot of videos I’ve been making, mostly the PC-98 originals and covers, are shorter than normal.
Keyboard Issue Mostly Fixed
I also had another problem with my keyboard earlier this year. A relatively few keys, including my “S” key and 1 key on my numpad were spamming. Any time I would push those keys, it would type two of the same thing, and it got awfully annoying. Not to mention I was also having this problem back in the day whenever I would play Minecraft where you end up placing two blocks instead of one, usually because of a glitchy mouse driver.
The first thing was I figured I would need to remove the keycap and clean out any possible gunk underneath it. I had a keycap remover that came with my previous keyboard that I ordered from Japan last year, but I could not find it. So, I had to order one of those versatile ones from Amazon. It was pretty cheap, costing only $5, plus another $5 for shipping as well as tax, so it cost me roughly $11. I also needed a can of compressed air so that I can blow away the gunk that would be underneath it. Luckily, my father had not one, but TWO cans of compressed air. Sure, they were old, but I figured they would be effective. When it arrived two days later, I removed the keycap and did the cleaning, but the problem came back and got occasionally worse, typing three of the same thing!
I ended up getting in touch with Razer technical support via email, leading to me being concerned that I would have to send the device to Razer to have it get serviced, and right when that was about to happen, my “S” key suddenly worked again like normal. It turned out that I needed to install a Windows Update to rectify the problem, though I still occasionally have this issue at random. I don’t know what caused it, but it may have been due to a glitchy keyboard driver or something.
I’m Getting a New Laptop in Mid-May
Simply put, a small amount of my work hours when I’m not preparing assets or programming is fixing things that go wrong. So, I’ve officially come to the decision that I will be getting a new laptop, and it will not be any PC. It will be a MacBook, and I will not be having it until mid-May based on Apple’s estimated shipping date. So far, the only Apple products I’ve owned are an iPod Touch from 2012 as well as three iPads from 2013 and 2014 respectively, and my current iPad is my 2018 one, which is filming me right now. I will continue to use the Windows computer that you see behind me for game development, and I will only use the MacBook for video editing and livestreaming.
Getting a Mac will be a whole different experience. I’m used to using Windows, but my now-defunct elementary school had Macs, and the graphic design and video editing labs at the university I graduated from last year had Macs as well, so you can say I have had some experience with Macintosh computers and its proprietary operating system Mac OS. The very first Mac OS version I ever used was System 7, and my first Windows operating system was 3.1. I even set up a Windows 3.1 emulator on my old laptop to bring back some memories.
I almost had a Mac in the early part of the 2010s decade. My family was considering getting a Mac as their next PC, but it never materialized. I understand that Apple products are on the pricy and expensive side when it comes to most electronics, but it’s their technology that stands out. The MacBook I’m getting will be a MacBook Air, and it will have the specs that my workstation is using right now, including a 1TB SSD and 16GB of RAM. Although the base model starts at $1,000, adding those specs will result in me jacking up the price to $1,600. And to make matters worse, I ended up including the Apple Magic Mouse alongside a USB-A to C converter, which in term ends up raising the price to $1,720. Not to mention I will be paying more than $100 in tax. I was planning to get my MacBook at Best Buy, but they didn’t have the 1TB model, so I had to get it online through Apple’s website.
That would be nearly the cost of my old Acer Aspire AX3950 from 2011, which I don’t use anymore ever since Microsoft discontinued Windows 7 in 2020, and I haven’t turned it on since the day Chuhou Joutai 1 began development in June 2018, just sly of a few weeks after I graduated from high school.
Chuhou Joutai 3 Demo is Complete, Game Will Be Steam Exclusive
You’re probably tired of hearing me talk about computers. What about Chuhou Joutai 3, you may ask? Well, development is going smoothly. As of this video’s filming, the demo is almost done, and the base game is halfway complete. I intend on making Chuhou Joutai 3 a Steam exclusive for one reason. First of all, this is to take advantage of the new Steam extension made for GameMaker Studio 2. If you were expecting an itch.io release for the game, you thought wrong. This new extension will also have built-in anti-piracy measures to make the work of pirates much more difficult. The DRM for Chuhou Joutai 1 and 2 were cracked in less than a week after their release in May 2020 and July 2021 respectively. This form of DRM for Chuhou Joutai 3 will always require players to be subscribed to the Steam servers. If you are not, then the game will redirect you to an anti-piracy screen similar to the fake anti-piracy screens that were created for a bunch of Nintendo DS games.
I remember back when the Mario Party DS anti-piracy screen surfaced, and many asked Nintendo if their programmers had inserted the screen. Of course, Nintendo would not answer it.
That’s All For This Post
Anyway, that’s all I have, and as we watch the days get longer and things get warmer for us in the Northern Hemisphere, we’ll be able to enjoy the warm fresh air once again. Not if you live in the Southern Hemisphere, where the days for you will get shorter and things get colder. You can probably understand why you won’t see any signs of cherry blossoms blooming or autumn foliage. That’s because the transition from seasons can take a while.
For us here, we can just go out and catch that Undefined Fantastic Object. I hope you’re enjoying your spring, or autumn if you live in the Southern Hemisphere.
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