Over the last N years I've been on and off studying Japanese and not getting very far with that kind of half arsed approach towards the end of 2017 i got a bit serious about learning Japanese and have been putting in the effort and I'm loving it more than ever i made a video about this on YouTube which you can see here but that's beside the point. This blog post is a dump of my "Japanese bookmarks folder" that has been slowly growing in my browser for 8 years now it contains a curated list of language resources, tools, guides, tips, tricks, hacks from the deepest corners of the internet.

What I'm Using

Memcards

Probably the best flashcard app I’ve used. why? because it was specifically designed to solve all the problems I had with other flashcard tools, to keep my studies fun, and most importantly to not waste time!! I’ve been using it for eight years now... for everything from grammar to vocab, and I’d highly recommend you give it a try too.

No ads, no bs, just the best flash card tool you can get.

Japanese Learning Guides

Fast Track 100 Grammar Points Condensed

This is one of my favourite resources its organised, its categorised and its short and sweet, probably not for the absolute beginner but if you're looking for some reaffirmation of a grammar point you learned about recently or just want to quickly recap without pulling out the 2 inch thick grammar dictionary this is a great site with examples for everything in that as promised short and sweet way.

DJT Guide To Japanese

I have a feeling that this originated from 4chan back in the day its a good guide about how to learn japanese, what tools they used where they got them from etc and it has links to some of the best pre-made ANKI Decks you can find.

Mangajin

Way back in the 1990's there was this physically produced publication of a series called "Mangajin" its no longer available, but thankfully someone has digitised and archived the entire thing online its a full guide to Japanese for the manga reader.

Genki Lessons

I don't know if this is affiliated with the books or just a coincidental name conflict but "The Architect" (such a wonderful name) has created a whole stack of videos explaining Japanese grammar and language.

Imabi Japanese Book

This is a HUGE HUGE HUGE HUGE free book of Japanese it starts off at the beginning and takes you all the way through to some crazy hardcore native level lessons.

Tofugu's Learn Japanese Article

I'm reluctant to add this to my list, everything they do seems to be focused about selling wanikani and textfugu which albeit are fantastic tools, that in my opinion are priced way way way too high for what they are (yes, even on sale たかいです！), if you can filter out the marketing this guide is a wonderful resource

Japanese General Blog / Video Posts

DJT Guide To Japanese

I have a feeling that this originated from 4chan back in the day its a good guide about how to learn Japanese, what tools they used where they got them from etc and it has links to some of the best pre made ANKI Decks you can find.

Nippon Talk

This is a blog where all the posts are made in both Japanese and English its great reading practice and even has Furigana options!

RPG Japonias Traductions

Although this site is in french (and I dont speak french lol) they have a tonne of game guides, you can google translate this page to perform a translationception like move and learn about JRPG game specific vocabulary from series's like Phantasy Star Nova, Star Ocean, Valkyrie Profile, Tokyo Mirage Sessions etc.

Learn the Fun Way - Japanese 3DS

Surprisingly FluentU i don't use their products and probably never will but they have a really great blog about Japanese and this is an article that stood out for me about using a Japanese 3DS to bolster your vocabulary, and find ways to practice language that are suitable for children i guess this applies to DS, PSP and any other system that was available in japan with cheap games on eBay.

Nihongo Sharks The best way to learn japanese

This is a step by step guide about how to learn Japanese, granted its his opinion but he speaks and we don't, so its worth listening too

Mr.Men In Japanese + Video

If you grew up in an English speaking country chances are you've read these as a child... well now you can read them again as an adult and in Japanese where they make even less sense than they did when you were a child. I kid i kid, these are just great practice.

4 Reasons You Should Read Yotsubato

Title says it all, i love this book its one of my personal favourite series's its super easy to read, no magic, no dragons, no fantasy words its just about the crazy stuff this kid gets up to on the day to day and believe me some of it is hilarious.

Is Japanese Hard? Why its easier than you think!

Brought to you by that awkward Irish dude who spoke in that ted talk about becoming a polyglot Benny Lewis, a great article that explains why Japanese is not so hard, i find reading these kinds of things motivating, clearly that didn't work for the first 8 years of my study but i'll put that down to me being me because its working now.

Easy to read manga for beginners

I used this website as a guide for my eBay manga purchasing rampage and every book i has been hilarious, fun and easy to read (with a dictionary of course)

Tofugus Guide to japanese gaming

This is a good blog lots of resources and links to places where you can watch or find games in Japanese and some information about how to go about playing yourself for learning purposes.

Tools and Resources

Memcards

Probably the best flashcard app I’ve used. why? because it was specifically designed to solve all the problems I had with other flashcard tools, to keep my studies fun, and most importantly to not waste time!! I’ve been using it for eight years now... for everything from grammar to vocab, and I’d highly recommend you give it a try too.

No ads, no bs, just the best flash card tool you can get.

Anki

The king of spaced repetition software, its free, its easy to use it has a metric pound of community support, the bread and butter of learning anything even beyond Japanese you can use this for school, work, birthdays, names of people etc. They have a free android app but the ios version costs that's how they keep the lights on in the office and the staff fed so forgive them for that its well worth it though.

Animelon

Watch you're favourite anime with contextual subtitles, you can pause read hover your mouse over for translations etc a great website for fun study time.

Japan Codes

I've used these guys to buy Japanese iTunes cards in the past, up front they do need to verify your ID before you can purchase so it can take a few hours before you get your card but every transaction after that is quick and fast, great if you want to use Apple Music Japan where you can find a literal tonne of music to listen to straight from japan.

Apple Music Japan

No link for this one, do some google-fu and find out how to do it there are tonnes of guides online i will say that as of January 2018 it is still possible to setup a Japanese iTunes account and stream music outside of japan. I'm not going to tell you how to do it but i will say don't give up it took me about 5 guides before i found one that worked for me.

Bilingual Manga

Unfortunately his site seems to have died down towards the end of 2016, they have some really great manga scans in both raw and translated that swap out when you hover your mouse over them!! A really great place to practice reading beginners manga like Yotsuba.

Sen Manga Raw

Frequently updated this is the source of so many raw manga for you to practice with.

Tune-In Radio Japanese Stations

If you get into jpop, anime, jrock etc this website has a bunch of free stations you can listen too while you do you daily thing whatever that may be. As a side note this is where I first discovered wagakki band a few years back my literal favourite band of all time now.

Read The Kanji

This is a great tool, the N5 Level is completely free and all other levels are included in a $5/month price, i dont think many people know about this one but it puts kanji in context and shows you sentences in basic Japanese so you can grasp the meaning of the kanji, the readings and how its used rather than just drilling vocabulary in isolation.

Wakarukana

This is like a self manga test, you're partaking in a survey to see what you understand, all the text is quoted from manga and your score is benchmarked against the community.

WaniKani

I cant ignore it, I know its expensive, even when its on sale. Though it is a great tool for learning the 2000 base kanji they say it will take a year but seriously you'll be doing like an hour of reviews a day at their rate, spend your time reading books instead and learn in context its faster.

Textfugu

Brought to you by the crazy golden crabs who made WaniKani comes a text book just like every other text book that you have to pay a monthly subscription to access and this odd 'email us' after you've paid $120usd to convert to a lifetime membership campaign is just dodgy, that said the textbook... its good... but again not worth it buy yourself genki, minna no nihongo, Japanese from zero etc. I'm just putting these here for the people who will email me and say "you forgot wanikani and textfugu"

The search for Lorna

This is a short story written in both English and Japanese for convenient study, there's a couple of other stories on this website too just scroll down to the japanese section to read more. This website focuses on translating the same few short stories into as many languages possible so if you find that you can understand this story better in say Hebrew... you can read it in Hebrew and Japanese at the same time.

Japanese Tease

This is a blog, and they have some really great book reviews for all kinds of study books, resources, manga lists etc.

Japanese Ammo With Misa

Another blog, tonnes of great content here, book reviews, study sessions, guides, tutorials etc. she used to be available for hire as a tutor but I'm not sure if she still does that.

KAWAJAPA

Another blog, same deal as the others, tutorials, guides, book reviews, lots of content here too.

Free Japanese Audiobooks With Transcripts

As long as you're not expecting to get harry potter or any other A-List book this is a great resource!! you can find little red riding hood, puss in boots, Cinderella etc all narrated in high quality Japanese with text transcripts for comprehension study and reading practice.

Japanese Level Up

Blog, again lots of content to read in the vein of the other blogs (tutorials, guides, books, etc)

Tutors and Conversation Exchange

Kekashi Japanese

Online Japanese tutor website.

Other

Top 5 Must See Magical Girl Anime

Its just a list of the best maho shoujo series's and why you should watch them!

Simple Particle Editor

Simple Particle Editor is an asset that adds to game maker a complete functioning in-room particle editor so you can design, test and develop your particle systems right inside game maker without ever having to write a single line of particle code again!

Shmup Bullet Hell Math

Full bullet hell mechanics for spawning bullets.

5 Emitter Types, with 5 Demo rooms.

RM2 Framework

A base game, a collection of helper functions to get you started immediately, These are the things I create every time I start a project, connected together and working in such a way that you can get started making your game instantly.

Visual Game Curves

Allows you to use "Paths" as value curves within your game, Comes with a little mini top down shooter demo that makes use of player level, experience and an 'exp curve'

Virtual Joy

Virtual joy provides you with a fully customisable and simple way to implement on screen joysticks.

Smooth Cameras

Smooth Cameras is a library for Game Maker Studio that allows you to easily implement customisable smooth cameras in to your game.

As a programmer there are a few features that mainstream options didn't have or weren't readily usable without addins or ui digging that Pyxel just had the main one for me was the ability to create a tile-set docent which would set each tile in the grid as its own image but allow you to edit all the images together in a single file and the ability to load in premade pallets 8 and 16 bit pallets (one of the secret tricks to making better art restrict your colour selections with a hard defined pallet like dawnbringers)

Here are some of the features they talk about on their website:

• Tile references with transformations Draw in one tile and they all update instantly. Tile instances can be rotated and flipped, still referencing the same tile data.
• Animations Make animations easily and export them as sprite sheets or animated GIFs. Onion skinning helps with aligning things between frames.
• Tileset importing Pyxel Edit can import images of tilesets or mockups and identify all the unique tiles automatically, allowing you to edit and rearrange old tilesets or doing edits of mockups easily.
• Tilemap exporting Export your canvas tilemap in XML, JSON or plain text format for super quick game prototyping. You can also repeat the last export operation with a keypress, to quickly re-export for small changes.

As a whole I have found this to be one of the best pixel art editors out there, its simple enough to pick up and use without lengthy tutorials, its powerful enough to create an entire games worth of assets, relatively cheap for what it does, with full pallet and pallet swap support and a bunch of other powerful features.

Visit their site to download here

2017 is rapidly coming to an end abruptly and if you've been following me for a while you've probably seen over the last month or so a lot of changes coming to the channel, website, and rm2kdev as a whole. Time for the new years resolutions, so lets have a chat about all the changes and whats coming over 2018.

YouTube

To start, the entire brand has been overhauled to this delicious red with a new icon and font, as such all my social media accounts such as YouTube have had massive overhauls the channel icon has changed, video branding is different and they start with an awesome jazzy intro now to get you pumped for the video to come.

New videos and New Video Types are coming too:

• New Game Maker Tutorials
• New Unity Tutorials
• Premium Tutorials On Patreon (Unity 2D RPG Anyone?)
• Possibly a book!
• "Lets build" series's with live streams
• Viewer projects
• Book Reviews

Patreon

I've introduced a patron page now, a way for fans like you (hopefully) to directly fund the channel and help push us in a direction that suits your viewing style as well as getting some epic rewards like your name featured in tutorial videos, early access to videos before they arrive on YouTube, and a private discord channel where we can talk about your projects and assist with issues or technical questions.

Twitter

Twitter has always been a cornerstone of our conversations, you can find me here every day often angry at the government for introducing some crappy tax or posting photos of food and games not much is changing here just the way it looks.

Whats to come

Looking back this year was pretty slow, we had a couple of videos here and there but nothing of substance this was mostly my fault with time being constrained by work related activities (which is still the case) however i think 2018 is going to be different I have recruited some help in running the social accounts here with the help of the LOVELY patreons without whom this channel would have died multiple times over (shameless plug, please help) and can spend my spare time focusing on more on content creation than administration.

It's a question I'm asked daily, Indie Game Developers just starting out their new side careers, Game Development Students, Professionals we're all facing the same problem! Where do I find GOOD assets for my project. It's very hard to find game artists willing to work with you on your ideas let alone work with you for free on the hopes and dreams that one day the vision will make you both millionaires.

Unless you're one of the privileged few to have found or made a solid team online to work with then your out of luck when it comes to affordable customized good quality game assets and so I give to you the 11 places that I find game assets for my solo work.

P.S. there's no reason why you cant buy an asset pack in unity only to use those graphical resources in Game Maker or RPG Maker now I'm no lawyer so don't quote me on that check the license.

Open Game Art

This place is amazing there are so many great assets hidden in the depths of open game art however it is littered with for lack of a better word... crap and their filtering and searching features are sub par at best. There really is some great stuff here but you're going to have to look hard to find it!

Gamedev Market

While it hasn't been around for very long this marketplace has quickly taken off seeing hundreds of Game Asset designers flocking to start selling their art here. It has a great rewards system and a good sense of community you'll be sure to find some gems on this one.

Unity Asset Store

This asset store has one of the largest communities going they have so many resources available its not funny. Most of the resources are geard towards 3D Users but nevertheless they still have a sizeable 2D category.

Graphic River

Still my personal favorite the Envato Marketplaces are some of the best going they have stricter moderation on the content that is uploaded which means all the artwork is usually higher quality game ready type stuff. This is the first place I check when I'm looking for assets just due to the sheer number they have. They also have really good searching and filtering features and a bunch of sister sites for everything like logos, sounds, video effects etc.

RPG Maker Web

It goes without saying that these assets are going to be geared towards Role Playing Games but if that's your thing then this is your place! All of the game assets you find here are going to be pre-formatted for use in rpg maker versions but they are still great and I use them all the time.

Game Maker Marketplace

YoYoGames has only recently launched their market place but its started to grow you'll find some decent assets here but again like open game art this marketplace has no to limited moderation or quality control so we're going to see a lot more get rich quick schemes in here but thankfully it has decent content filtering and search capabilities.

GSHelper

This used to be called the Game Salad Marketplace but it was changed to GS Helper, And as would be implied by now this is the marketplace created and used by the Game Salad community I cant say I've had much experience with this one but looking through their pages they have a few decent assets so I though it was worth a mention.

Graphic Buffet

A relativly small marketplace with some fairly good assets. Most of this stuff is SVG so it would be a good fit for any game with 'that style' if you get what i mean? :)

Game Art 2D

pzUH is a guy from Indonesia with some serious art talent. You'll probably find his assets floating around the internet on all sorts of market places because he has SO many damn good ones again most of this stuff is going to be SVG so unless your game is 'that style' then these probably wont be that useful for you but if it is 'that style' then you are in for a treat!

Kenny Assets

This dude is an absolute legend in the indie development community he has created an ever expanding library of assets that caters to essentially every single need that could ever be needed. Kenny's assets are CC0 which means absolutely royalty free.... no purchases, no watermarks, no credits, no limitations absolutely nothing these are yours once you download them to do whatever you want with.

Kenny does take donations and if you do use his work i'd seriously recommend buying him a couple of coffee's because the work he has done for free... in his own time... for the goodness and kindness to everyone in the game development community should be rewarded Buy Kenny Totally Optional

Scirra Royalty Free Assets

Brought to you by the people who made construct and construct 2 comes the Scirra Royalty Free Asset Marketplace! Quite a few nice assets over here so again I thought I'd mention it. I don't use it often but I have used it once in the past.

UnLucky Studio

This one was suggested by a reader who left a comment on this post! I checked it out and this site appears to offer some great free gamedev resources as well as some guides for programmers to create their own art and a udemy course.

Craftpix

This one came in an email to me from the website owners, i had a look through their site and it looks like they have plenty of quality assets so i thought i would add it to this list for you all!

It's almost too simple of a realisation to explain, but it is important to know, and it is the truth: Every video game, without question, has a story to it.

I must differentiate between a story for the game and the story of the game. Some of the world's most wildy successful games don't come with a synopsis - just look at the Tetris series (unless you're counting Tetris Worlds, which I absolutely don't recommend under any context ever). The stories I refer to are about you, making and playing the game. If you pour your time and energy into something, then the process becomes a part of your life; There isn't a way that it can't.

It may seem strange given my shoddy programming history that I would feel so certainly about this. You could even argue that I wouldn't be qualified to make such a statement. I believe, however, that skill isn't what is necessary to understand this so much as recognising the drive to make video games - or, indeed, anything. It's not what you do, but why you do what you do. There are many aspiring artistic geniuses out there, and I had the earnest innocence of a toddler carving masterpieces from Play-Doh, but we can both feel the passion of creative expression. I successfully managed to change the colour of Wonder Boy's pants to blue, and that's what mattered in the end to me. It was a simple goal, but it took time. It took effort and investment. If you've ever written, drawn, built, sewn or worked towards something, you can understand the pain and pleasure that the quest brings.

Sometimes, something so immense can be created that it becomes greater than yourself. It defines you. If we may go back a subject, the now-confusingly-titled The New Tetris on Nintendo 64 was a huge part of my childhood. I would learn years later about the antics of lead programmer David Pridie, who had such a frustrating time during its development that he and several other programmers hid a rant (hilariously) berating the incompetence that they'd worked with into the final coding of the game. He assumed that it would not be discovered for years. It was discovered within three days of release, landing himself and H20 "into a bit of hot water" - but in the end, it all made for an amusing twist to the tale. David Pridie sadly passed away in 2001, but his legacy and the story of the game he had worked upon has lived on. The game becomes alive in that way, and to deny the journey of it's progress from idea to completion is to deny the concept of life itself - the greatest story.

Developing a video game is a patient art, and like any project, you cannot spend that long on something and not become attatched to it in some way. Joseph "Joe" Mirabello, creator of the awesome indie-hit Tower Of Guns, wrote an impressively-if-not-disturbingly-well-detailed article last year describing the painstaking process of getting the game off the ground. To briefly summarise the amount of time taken: It's a lot. As in, a "3850 hours over 600 days with additional unaccounted-for factors" lot. He persevered, however, and the game holds a solid critical success - the cliched-but-classic underdog story. It's true that hard work can pay off and leave you with that incomparable glow of achievement, but it requires sacrifice to earn it. Call me over-enthusiastic, but that sounds like the making of a legend to me.

What does this all mean, though? I could babble on for days about infamously-tortured developments or unfathomable success, but how does it all relate to us and why does it matter outside of curious amusement?

The stories that I didn't mention about The New Tetris before are the ones that are most precious to me. They never had anything to do with H20, or the vented vitriol of a former employee. They're silly tales about a small child in the country getting a life-changing Christmas present. They're about his wonderful, slightly-technophobic father getting sucked into his world and the jaunty laughter that comes with a light trash-talking from your family. Through the agonising trials and tribulations of that game's creation - and I strongly recommend that you read those acidic paragraphs to get a good feel for the people and circumstance that shaped it - David Pridie and his team blessed me with fond childhood memories. It became a part of not only who I am today, but the countless others who played it. It's that symbiosis to art and literature that fascinates me and connects us all.
From inception to distribution...
From the makers to the players...
From the godly to the catastrophic...
We all share part of that story on an unimaginable scale.

In conclusion, I say to all those that wish to try:

Don't you want to go on a journey?

On behalf of gamers everywhere, I urge you - please do. Go for it. You can do it. You are about to undertake a fantastic adventure, and I'll totally sit here on the couch and eagerly await it.

There are so many Game Development tools out there and they are here to help us make games faster and be more efficient. However with the vast array of hugely successful game development tools out there many smaller unknown tools go unnoticed, that's why I've decided to do a quick write up about 10 game development tools that you may not have heard of yet.

Shoebox

This is one of my favorite tools out there, Shoebox is a free image manipulation tool capable of so many things such as Packing Sprites, Texture Ripping, Generating Animation Frames, Bitmap Fonts, Pivot Points, UI Slicing and so so so much more!

Pyxel Edit

Comes in both a free and paid flavour one of the greatest dedicated pixel art editors out there boasting a super simple interface with powerful features like onion skinning, tile repeat testing, tilesheet packing and exporting to open formats such as JSON, Xml as well as powerful animation tools Pyxel is another great tool that you may not have heard of!

Sekaiju

This is a completely free and open source (now who doesn't like that!) midi sequencer! its super easy to learn and will let you start writing some classic 8-bit style music for your games in no time at all! With a tiny footprint of 18mb and a practically portable "zip"install this is a win win! (For English just open the Sekaiju.ini file and change UserInterface=Japanese to English!

BFXR

Totally free sound effect generator that runs in your browser (That's right no downloads!) this thing is a beast for any game development project, be it prototype or final product that your working on bfxr will get you up and running with all the sound efects you could imagine and all the sounds it generates are royalty free!

Video Tags

This is actually a small utility I made (yes... me :P) if your ever recording some game-play footage, game development logs or video content in general for your games and related projects then you can use this to leave markers during recordings (I.E. if you cough or the chair squeeks etc) so you know where to edit later.

Crazy Bump

If you're doing any sort of 3D work and decide that you need some normal maps, spectacular maps or some other map that this tool supports then this is the go! you can use it to generate normal's based on some image processing and a simple diffuse map a huge time saver while your prototyping your next game development project!

How to create a language

Have you ever wanted to create a fake spoken language like Al Bhed found in Final Fantasy 10 or Simlish in The Sims this is a comprehensive guide published by Pablo David Flores and based on the great book "Language Construction Kit - Mark Rosenfelder" on how to do it. Covering everything from sounds and tones through to actual alphabet creation which on its own could be totally useful for games with a fantasy setting and some hidden ancient languages / texts.

Graphics River - Game Assets

This is a huge marketplace where I get most of my assets from when I'm working on a project and cant find an artist. They have everything you could ever want from tile sheets, sprite sheets, branding, logos, game worlds and so much more this is one of the best places to find game artwork that you can use legitimately in your projects.

Trello

This is a super great mostly free project management and productivity tool I use this to keep track of all my projects. What needs to be done, What I want to do, What I am doing and when i am doing it its a fantastic tool for keeping you productive. Think of it as a virtual cork-board with paper notes!

Bitbucket

This is my favorite of all time so I saved it for last! Bit bucket is a git and mercurial source code repository that is completely free you'll get unlimited storage, project management, public and private bug tracking, project wiki's as well as integrating all of that into your source code for free what more could you ask for!

The thing I love most about this is just having my entire project in one place the code... the bug reports and feature requests and having it all tied into the individual code files so I can just login and see whats left to do and whats broken and whats been fixed.

Play video

The code we used in the spike trap conditional statement is as follows
$game_player.x == $game_map.events[@event_id].x && $game_player.y == $game_map.events[@event_id].y

#screenshotsaturday #WorldOfLexica #EnvironmentArt pic.twitter.com/rxy4jdUx5D

— Justin DeVore (@postArgus) March 21, 2015

Close one! Styx is taking on the Hermes train for #screenshotsaturday #gamedev #indiedev pic.twitter.com/rOBIZwpF3A

— Subaeria (@Subaeria) March 21, 2015

Another section now built...ELECTRIC TOGGLEOO is coming to #LBP3 #screenshotsaturday #PS4share pic.twitter.com/ONiEFCEvrP

— LBP RtooDee2 (@R2ooD2) March 21, 2015

With that said allow me to introduce my picks for this week!

Did you see us in @indiegamemag #screenshotsaturday? #indiedev #indiegame #unity3d #pixelart #pixel #ios #platformer pic.twitter.com/3XDdyxd49Q

— ReRunners (@ReRunnersGame) March 14, 2015

Here's the Barber Shop, each character in the pic is a customized player character. #screenshotsaturday #gamedev pic.twitter.com/E6xaSShl8a

— Josiah Jones (@William_J_III) March 14, 2015

Uncle Ben's workshop! #screenshotsaturday #gamedev #indiedev #pixelart pic.twitter.com/Y9OUnL9Pcs

— Children Of Morta (@ChildrenOfMorta) March 14, 2015

A #screenshotsaturday shot and a blog post about building our demo http://t.co/F2dsKQbEZz #gamedev #indiedev #unity3d pic.twitter.com/2jlm7cSF3O

— Sami Kuronen (@ArtIndubitably) March 14, 2015

Well this is a throwback to those days where buying a game digitally was actually cheaper and worked in your favor. Looking back It's clear to see what happened, publishers and producers dropped the boxes lowering their costs, increased security and copy protection and slowly jacked the prices back up to beyond where they were before.

It's no wonder at all why big game studios and publishers are cashing in with record profits they pulled the wool over everyone's eyes and shoved their hands further down your pockets.

Looking back about 4 - 5 years ago, the days when you could purchase a PC game in a store we were paying roughly $50 Australian dollars and digitally it was more like $30 ~ $40 depending on who you were dealing with. But what is going on today? digital game prices are well over $100 for the early pre-launch special mega bonus edition.

That's a digital! game for over $100 and that's a fairly low price I've seen games recently in EBGames (GameStop) at over $150 for the deluxe edition! okay sure you get a metal tin but STILL how is this justified.

Not to mention all the new rules and regulations that come with digital games which I wont list in detail here since the length of this post would explode, but I'm sure we're all aware of the common flaws with the system; no returns, no trades to friends, drm, online checks, forced email spam (companies who force you to register an account first etc) and the list could go on for infinity.

And okay with currency conversions and the value of the dollar over time in contrast to those few years ago some would argue that it all works out about the same well I can promise you that it doesn't if you don't want to take my word for it run the numbers I guarantee that the publishers of today have their hands far deeper in your pockets than they did 5 years ago.

I don't really know where this article is going, I don't have any hard facts or pretty stat graphics to show you I just wanted to get this off my chest and remind you about what is happening in this world. I personally and sincerely hope that one day this industry, this world and the inhabitants of it can go back to a time when Design, Quality and a Good Product came before Marketing, Sales Projections and Targeted Advertising

I don't have high hopes that it can ever be achieved and I don't believe it was ever like that purely to begin with but I hope If you read this and have the opportunity to change something for the better not just games and products but anything in general that you take it and put something out into the universe that hopefully resonates with someone else be it a customer, friend, family member etc.

Thanks for reading my rant I wont advertise my social media at the end of this post since that would be hypocritical this blog receives a decent amount of traffic and if you have an article or place on the internet that has free information of value then comment it in the section below and I will approve it in the spirit of this posts message.

With that said allow me to introduce my picks for this week!

Hope to see you at GDC and PAX to chat about http://t.co/hbTreVsHhv prototype! #screenshotsaturday #GDC2015 #gamedev pic.twitter.com/Hjd100Wp0m

— Cornelia Geppert (@CorneliaGeppert) February 28, 2015

Check the #screenshotsaturday epicness from a closed demo of @IslandDeltaGame #gamedev #indiedev #madewithunity pic.twitter.com/kDKyN8VmEz

— Sami Kuronen (@ArtIndubitably) February 28, 2015

#OrcishInn #screenshotsaturday underground pipes... big version: http://t.co/KWMCz9KPZe pic.twitter.com/dyYutYVtP0

— Steven Colling (@StevenColling) February 28, 2015

Yep, it's upside-down week! It should fit #screenshotsaturday for #redout! #indiedev #gamedev pic.twitter.com/gXDGGNBN48

— 34BigThings (@34bigthings) February 28, 2015

#screenshotsaturday #pixelart pic.twitter.com/DAg5n6ND9p

— Rob Maher (@r0bbieTheRobot) February 28, 2015

To celebrate my YouTube channel rm2kdev reaching 17,000 subscribers and 1 MILLION views!!! yes that's MILLION with a capital M, I thought it was about time to do a give away!

In light of this let me give you all a little history lesson on my username and then we'll get right into the details of the giveaway. It was the year 2000 I had just begun my venture into the world of #gamedev and I found this amazing piece of software on the internet (which back then was a dial-up 28k modem) called RPG Maker 2000.... Naturally i "obtained" a copy since back then it was not legitimately in English and promptly began work on the crappiest most generic RPG ever made in history!

Some Months later I was ready to distribute my game but i needed an alias online to distribute it under.... no company was going to publish a game made by some 10 year old! So.... i named myself "RM2KDEV" and launched my terrible game... thankfully its long gone, lost or dead on an old IDE drive! For those I left wondering what does RM2KDEV stand for even? RM: RPG Maker, 2k: 2000, Dev: Development. And there you have it, my username as it was and is outlined for all!

Now for the giveaway i have 2 copies of RPG Maker VX Ace and 2 copies of Game Character Hub a fantastic piece of software for sprite asset creation that ties in perfectly with RPG Maker VX Ace for a total of 4 prizes to give away!

To enter simply subscribe to my youtube channel and share this post on your preferred social network (facebook, twitter, g+, etc) 

Leave your YouTube Display Name in the comments section of THIS post! Winners will be contacted via YouTube private inbox.

Dont forget to watch some videos and leave a like if you like them!

Prizes will be awarded as steam keys, Terms and conditions of entry subject to change at any time.

Now I'm sure I'm not the only one who has this problem so i looked for a way to leave some marks or tags in my recording software and couldn't find anything so i decided that i could write up a small application to deal with this task.

Enter Video Tags

Video Tags is a very simple application that allows you to setup a few shortcuts on your keyboard one for "Recording Start" one for "Recording End" and one for "Take Note" with these 3 keyboard shortcuts you can now silently leave notes during your live recordings.

Simply set the start and end keyboard shortcuts to be the same as what your screen/game capture software uses and the timestamps will be in sync then when you cough or make a mistake that you want to edit out in post production simply press the "Take Note" keyboard shortcut and an event will be registered in the events list.

Once your recording is over... you can simply save these timestamped events out to a file along side your video footage for editing at your leasure.

The software is completely freeware you can download it right here:

Video Tags 1.1

You will need to install the Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5 for this to work.

For more information about how it works check out my demonstration video on youtube:

Play video

Please leave any comments, feedback and bug reports in the comments section here!

I'll outline what i've done and where i'm at with hiragana so you can see the progress one can make with this method in such a short amount of time.

Firstly i'll let you know that i started learning hiragana 4 days ago and this is the method i'm using to learn them i'll share with you some tips and tricks along the way becuase you get about half the alphabet for free when you learn it the right way...

Currently i'm spending about 5 minutes 3 times a day following these steps....

Start by reading aloud the columns and writing them down on a piece of paper:

A I U E O
KA KI KU KE KO
SA SHI SU SE SO
TA CHI TSU TE TO
NA NI NU NE NO
HA HI HU HE HO
MA MI MU ME MO
YA         YU        YO
RA RI RU RE RO
WA WO N

As the rest of the hiragana you will encounter are just combinations of these... i do this THREE times a day... once before work..... once during lunch and once before bed it takes about two minutes to write down and read aloud the basic hiragana and the same for katakana.

Now... as for the rest don't bother memorising Combo Hiragana like I said before these come inherently from combinations... memorise the rules to create these combinations since you already have everything you need to read, reproduce and memorise them by learning the basic ones.

KI + YA = KYA (KIII YA)
SHI + YA = SHA (SHHHH YA)
CHA + YA = CHA (CHHH YA)
NI + YA = NYA (NIII YA)

See how they kind of sound like what they become?....  Easy! you will learn and memorise these as you read them in various texts and study tools.

Dakuten however are a little different but still very easy to memorise without actively studying them... when you add a tenten (the double quote looking thing) to ka... sa... ta... it will 'soften' the sound

ka becomes ga.... sa becomes za.... ta becomes da.... in each case the sound gets 'softer' on the ears and becomes lighter to produce with your mouth if that makes sense

ha however becomes stronger sounding.... and it has a one other case the maru (the little circle)... so HA can become BA with a tenten or PA with a maru (the little circle) as a quick side note if you ever see a hiragana with a maru... you know it has to be a P sound EASY!

As you can see its much easier to simply remember the 2 or 3 rules that construct Combo Hiragana and Dakuten than it is to actually memorise an extra 40? characters lol

Now to supplement all of this knowledge you've just learnt download a flashcard app onto your phone called "Sticky Study: Kana" which you will find and get here http://www.stickystudy.com/kana.html and use this whenever and wherever you can fit it in! on the toilet..... waiting in the car park to pick someone up.... anywhere! you can fit in a quick 5 minute session!

Just load it up and hit study the app will take care of everything for you the great news is in your study session the great news is this app when it recognises that you're memorising a character it stops showing it so often and lets you focus on the ones that you are failing to get correctly. It does this in an interesting way by creating 5 buckets of cards placing the ones you fail most often at the first bucket and the ones you get right all the time in the last bucket then it prioritises the ones your failing most often so that you can learn them!

Finally i'll share with you a little bit of neuroscience and psychology enter... ebbinghaus's forgetting curve (see right) this is a curve of learning and memory over time. let me explain this simply, consider that above 60% memory retention is called 'active memory' and anything below is considered 'forgotten but recallable with effort'  as you can see the moment you learn something new a few hours later it has moved to the back of your brain and is now considered 'forgotten but recallable with effort' however 3 days later you see / study the topic again with the forgetting curve on average you will now retain this information for about... 10 days!

So in 10 days you should study the information you learnt on day one again and now the information will be stored in active memory for about 30 days however this time the information is becoming more and more permanent lasting for about 30+ days and each time reducing the amount of information lost over time leaving you with (if you didn't restudy) about 65% retention of the subject.

One month later (the 4th review) you should consider studying the topic again just a brief review is all it takes to bring that information back to your active memory and this time it will stay for about 90 days or 3 months basically considered permanent now because you will most defiantly enter the subject in question again before 3 months is up and if you don't.... then what you were learning in the first place probably wasn't worth the effort... right?

In the case of a language's alphabet you will be reviewing these characters daily so the information should become stored permanently in your brain after a month or so with 100% accuracy and each day more that you read something in the target alphabet the information will only be retained longer and stronger than before this is just how the brain works smarts... talent... giftedness have nothing to do with it. every time you repeat something you are forging a pathway in your brain between the subject and the meaning the more often you repeat the study the stronger the pathway becomes until it becomes something that your brain can access without conscious thought.

Now just as a bit of a testimony to this method here i'll show my progress over the past 4 days learning hiragana. I've used sticky study to graph and track my hiragana knowledge over the past 4 days so that i could show it to you and share how and why this method of study works.

As you can see i started on day one with about 5% knowledge of the subject in question but following the steps i outlined above and being aware of the forgetting curve concept each day you can see an exponential increase in knowledge gained and retained 5% 10% 36% and now 90%

The large jump between 36% and 90% was nothing extra on my part.... it was just easier to remember the things i failed at the day before and get them correct on the fourth day

Right now i am able to read albeit slow.... 90% of hiragana characters and my conscious effort was only spent to learn the basic characters and the rules to construct the Combo's and Dakuten.

You might be thinking that the characters i am struggling with are the Combo's and Dakuten? but you'd be wrong I'm struggling with characters like Ne... Nu... Yu and Me since they all have a very similar design but i can guarantee that by the end of the week these will be downed and my score will be closer to 100% theoretically you could extrapolate that tomorrow I will hit closer to 100% based on the rate of growth  and exponential improvement.

Possibilities

Total : .

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In this video we begin to explore importing RPG Maker Tilesets efficiently into game maker studio, As well as some tile editing principals Using Layers, and Autotiles