Spyro The Dragon, PlayStation (1998)

Streamer Spotlight: MunchkinDoom ( @munchkindoom​)

Candice Renee Townsend, aka MunchkinDoom, is a partnered content creator from Brooklyn, New York. She advocates for inclusion within the gaming industry while daring gamers to be their true, authentic selves. “I like muffins, too!”

Are there any particular moments on your stream that stand out to you?

I’ve had so many moments! From finding out I was partnered with Mixer, to crushing charity donation goals for Feeding America, to being able to stream full-time and donate to others that helped me along the way. Picking one moment would be a disservice to my journey, and those that have helped me. This journey has been nothing short of amazing. Speaking of help, there’s a video of me crying in happiness because another streamer helped fund the very chair I stream in now (Hi, @thePreacherLive)!

What advice would you give to someone wanting to join the space? 

You have to know your “why.” Why do you want to do this? Is this “why” strong enough to keep you pushing through the tough times? My “why” is to expose the gaming world to women who look like me, and to encourage more of them to step into the light and embrace themselves. If I just give up now, I may not inspire the first world-known Black female eSports player…or the next ten. I want that to happen, whether it’s me or someone inspired by me.

How do you see #BlackExcellence365 being celebrated in your streaming experience?

I see #BlackExcellence365 as us defying the odds, pushing boundaries, and no longer accepting seats at certain tables because WE are creating our own tables with tons of seating! We have to commit to uplifting those who are paving the way so that others can drive along the road of success, or we all fail. Personally, I’m always on the lookout to see how I can help other creators of color, and even mentor many within my community with my #realtalks. We have tons of value to add to this industry, and together we can show the world that value.

How can we disrupt the gaming industry so that there is an increase in women of color being celebrated?

Social media is one of the most powerful tools we have known to man. Anyone can become an overnight success, and we have the power to make that happen. If we can help some of our ladies go viral for their accomplishments and success within the streaming industry, we will be one step closer due to the increased exposure. An excellent way to disrupt the gaming industry in a positive way is going viral for all the RIGHT reasons (which I have kind of done twice…once with Missy Elliot’s help).

If you could live in any video game universe, what would it be?

No-brainer! Final Fantasy VII. I would be Tifa, ride chocobos, gamble at the Gold Saucer, beat Sephiroth, and live happily ever after with Cloud. It’s my favorite game of all time! I think it would be pretty cool to summon giant entities to help me in battle with shiny globes of materia; it gets no better than that!

Thanks, @munchkindoom​! You can pop in and say hello in her streams here, or show love to her Tumblr!

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Breath of Fire 3, PlayStation (1998)

Oooo, I need to play this.

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Candles Update 26: Kyle’s Guitar

So I have the shade up and running. But for the shade to fulfill its purpose, I need notes: musical notes. So I hopped into Apple’s Garage Band and I tried to grab some notes.

Shhh–this is a secret, but there’s a chord we’re focused on. The notes are F, C, C#, and G#. I used to play this chord in high school, having no idea that it was an actual “thing”, or that I would reuse it for the basis of a puzzle 20 years later.

But for Kyle’s Guitar, I need more than these four notes. For this to be a “puzzle”, there must be “wrong answers”. I’ve decided to include every guitar note for all six strings within the first 5 frets. Not including playing a string open, that’s 30 notes…well, something like 12 notes in 3 different octaves…whatever.

I played every note in Garage Band and exported. As I was editing the audio to include one note per track, I remember that guitars break the tuning pattern between G and B strings–so there’s some note sharing. I think I’ve set it correctly. We’ll see…

Next step–make a playable guitar. My writer suggested using an interface. Since I had a guitar 3d model available, I opted to use that.

First, I duplicated the in-scene model and childed it to the player. I start the game with it deactivated so that it may be activated later. The model I downloaded had to be blown up to 1.5x size to be “realistic”. But because the guitar cannot get too close to the camera without clipping, I had to blow it up to 4x to sufficiently fill the screen.

To “pick up” the guitar, I’ve set a new check for the tag “Guitar”, and I can make the call in PickThingsUp:

Then in my guitar script (which is actually on the player):

Looks like I need to delete that PickThingsUp reference…

Here, I grab the necessary scripts. You can see the two functions to “pick up” and “put down” the guitar. All pretty straight forward–but I ran into a weird bug. In the if statement, I found that when holding the guitar, if tried to put it down…it uh, didn’t work. I’m not sure why this is happening, but since I’m using the same button to pick up the guitar and put it down, I thought I’d make sure to never allow the two actions in a single frame. The script was working fine previously, but the next day not so much. This seems to fix it. Next, I’ll be trying to build a canvas-based UI that lets the player click on notes…and we’ll see how well I’ve picked out notes for the game.

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