Sleep Is For The Weak. And The Sane.

I have no idea if its been a week or not since my last post. Everything beyond a few days before....uh....yesterday....is a blur. I vaguely recall going to class somewhere and ending up being seated behind a huge white pillar and having to stare at it for the entire class. Also something about gay sex on the computer screen, alcohol, Robot Chicken, kittens (particularly one named Sophie), and a metric fuckton of development on my projects.

No matter.

The last one is the one I want to talk to you today, all you total of three people who will end up reading this.

The zombie game has been splashed, after a huge step back, with a healthy, steaming bucket of perspective.
Right now, we have three people on our team, and oh man if it doesn't take at least three times that many to make even the simplest of RTS games.
I can at least say with confidence that in terms of design and art, we have just about as many people we'd need (barring cutscenes, but Ramon's apparently all over that).
There's me, and there's Ramon. One (me) on general art, texturing, and all the rough-and-tumble 2d design work including interface design, drawing pictures of zombies, designing levels, writing up design docs, laughing maniacally, and killing hookers. One of those isn't actually true. Ramon is on everything else, namely, the 3d stuff, namely, modelling, animating and the cutscene that he's working on for 430. This ensures a pretty constant and even workflow for the both of us.

Which leaves George.

George has gotta shoulder everything else that's -not- art. The code, basically. I've told him that I'll help him with any code that he needs. I've also made some hefty recommendations that we need more programmers, but based on his generally cold-shoulder reaction to all of it (he wants to pull it all himself) and all the humming-and-hawing and subject-changing that he did while we were talking about the prospect of getting more people to help with programming, I'm not sure how likely that is to happen.
I don't know George too well. I'm not gonna make any judgements on his capabilities, in fact, I've heard from a bunch of sources that he's a hand with the stuff. We'll see how it goes.
In the meantime I'll hope this entire thing doesn't turn into some sort of cosmic horror and eat me.

On the lighter sides of the news, thousands of capitalist pigs are sure to die in a space shuttle crash on the moon.

No wait, that's from Airplane.

On the lighter sides of the news, we've made some progress. We've settled on an engine to develop this thing off of.

BEHOLD. IRRLICHT. -ENSTEIN.

Yes we've chosen the Irrlicht engine to wrangle this thing to the ground with. With luck, we'll have better luck than Steve Irwin did with the stingrays.

In art news, I'm currently typing up a design doc, which first and foremost will outline what will be done by the end of the semester. Its not going to be a working game. In fact, it wont' even be a fully developed demo level. But it will be something, and you will be able to both blow up zombies and use zombies to eat people's faces.

And for now, really, that's enough.

In the meantime, the full Design Doc for the game is going to be written in case we want to pick this up at some later time, and all the designs will continue in spite of the pace of the rest of the game.

BUT ENOUGH TALK

GIMME MY WAFFLE SUNDDAAAAAEEE-

I mean

GIMME MY PICTURES OF ZOMBBIIIEEEZZZZZ-






These are just a few of the zombie designs I've dredged up, only about three of which will probably be in the game.

Coming up:
THE PATHETIC HUMAN FORCES

Fuckall I'm never going to get any sleep.

PLACES! LIGHTS! GET THOSE CURTAINS UP!

A year ago I left this little scrap of blog to the wild, dark and forbidding depths of the interwebs.

But a good creator never forgets about his baby, so here I am, after a yearlong hiatus full of sex, drugs and rock n' roll, except without the sex, drugs and rock n' roll.

Now you all may be wondering "But Patrick, an entire year has gone by! Surely you'll tell us about what's been going on, and relate to us all of the crazy adventures/wild parties/bear hunting expeditions/explorations of lost civilizations/mary-had-a-little-lamb-riding-a-goddamned-unicorn experiences that you've had? Or at least tell us what lamb-sacrificing insanities you're up to now!"
And boy, wouldn't I.

But I won't. I won't go into everything I've done in the past year because if I would, this post would be a ga-fucking-zillion pages long, and I'd be so laden down with hubris I wouldn't be able to walk to class without looking like a long-haired, asian Quasimodo.

As for the now, its September, and once again I'm loaded with more projects than Southern Chicago.
Let's go through a quick tally shall we?
-"Dusk of the Dead" a real time strategy game
-"Royal and Manchester, Cybernet P.I.s" a animation
-"Euphoria Inc." a graphic novel
-"Hellhounds On My Trail" a graphic novel
-"They Came From The Internet" a webcomic

An RTS, a 3d animation, TWO graphic novels and a webcomic. Out of these five projects, only two of them are -not- related to school, and those are the last two. I held back from going forward with Hellhounds On My Trail as a class project because as far as I know, AK isn't going to get me the next part of the script for the thing until he's fifty fucking years old, and I personally feel the webcomic could be kept up without any people stabbing me in the face to get me to do the work.

Needless to say, I got my work cut out for me this semester.

Of particular interest though, is the new game that I'm working on: Dusk of the Dead.
Yes, its a real time strategy game, its going to be a fully functional real time strategy game. Yes, its a play on "Dawn of the Dead," and yes...its a real time strategy game about zombies.
I'm working on this with two other guys, one is in charge of programming, the other is in charge of 3d animation and modelling, and me? I'm in charge of game design, specs, texturing, sound design, catering, being the fluffer, and all the things that no one else really wants to do. HAH, just kidding, I don't cater.

Are you excited? I am.

The basic idea is thus. Like any good real time strategy worth its salt, there are two sides to the conflict. And like any good zombie game, its set in an urban environment that's been completely and utterly destroyed.
The two sides are, to be expected, humans and zombies.
The humans are your typical real time strategy peoples. They collect resources, and crank near limitless amoutns of new units out of clown-car like factories, build fortifications, and send out waves of units to conquer the opposition/survive the impossibly huge onslaught.
The zombies are a little different. We haven't quite decided on a solid scheme for how they'll be implemented but my thoughts are thus: they collect resources, but instead of pulling stuff out of mines and piles of junk lying around, like the humans do, they have an entirely different set of resources: bodies.
The idea is in this hopeless, remnants-of-human-civilization world, not only will there be packs of congregated civilians seeking refuge in barely protected shelters, there will be bodies littering the streets of our cities, and using these bodies, the undead will bolster their forces.

I think its solid.
No.
I think its absolutely fucking kickass.

And this thing is going to be made. Dammit.

The Final Hurrah. OR IS IT.

Hell week.

Crunch week.

Finals week.

Call it what you will. At this point you could call it fucking Great Uncle Ichabod's Superhappy Funride and I wouldn't really care. Because Great Uncle Ichabod's Superhappy Funride just spent two weeks soundly kicking my sorry ass for some unnamed and as of yet unrevealed crime.

But I remain strong.
In the midst of the near anal violation offered by having a semester's worth of procrastination come down on my head like a 6-ton wench launching itself off the Empire State Building, I have worked, steadfastly, on the little project that we like to call Astro McFly.

Game designs, art-wise now consist of the game screen, recolored designs for the ship, background tiles, asteroid obstacles, five or six different stars from the grand ol' 70s including Charleton Heston, Clint Eastwood and Jean Seberg, and components for eight or nine different drinks, and enough flashy flavor text and kitchy looking stars to take over a small country. Anyone feel like a Harvey Wallbanger? I'll just have a screwdriver without the orange juice if you don't mind.

The collective gathered again a few hours ago, it was a party. And by party I mean 'coding fiasco'. Once again the ability of ActionScript to baffle rears its ugly, ugly head. Problems with the arrays and the appearances of some certain drinks in the menu bars kept the program from being complete and did a real bang-up job of frustrating the hell out of Jared and Sean.

Hopefully we'll get a chance to keep working on this. All of us really want to see this come out to be a good game, especially after we merged the graphics and what we had of the code last night. Let me tell you it looked fucking AMAZING.

If we do we've got three or four days left.
In those three or four days I also must complete my Java final, and a five minute soundscape that I have not yet begun.

Yay for Great Uncle Ichabod's Superhappy Funride.

Astro McFly...Now In Technicolor

More on this soon. I mean it this time.

Sausage Link (Get it?!? Cause its a link....and...)

More more and more in a few days coming.

Parody Me This

I never thought I'd be able to hammer this out in one and a half weeks.

But here it is, in all its Flash animated glory...
I present to you....Project Two. Or is it Three? Jesus, I don't fucking know anymore. Its a parody project, and at 3 AM in the morning that's more than enough of a damned identifier for me:

FuckingFinally

This was one hell of a ride to create.
The moment I got the idea for the project I opened Notepad and immediately began jotting down ideas.
Everyone (well not everyone...a lot of people) has seen those commercials done by the US Army. They feature closeups of soldiers standing tall and proud, silhouetted against the sunset, or standing stoically over their work from their field of expertise, like a mortar, and saying simple phrases meant to stir the heart like "If there is terror overseas...I shall confront it" or "I am a protector of our country".
This continues while a heart swelling, patriotic tour de force plays in the background until it ends, finally, on one soldier saying "I am an army of one" and everyone watching goes "Wow" and their hearts are supposed to swell with pride as they are inspired to get their fatsacks off the couch to enlist for a few years of getting your ass kicked.

I'd also recently watched the flash animation "I am Resident Evil" by Legendary Frog. If you haven't seen it, just google "I Am Resident Evil" and it should be the first one that pops up. It takes the same style as the commercial, except applies it to the popular scare-your-pants-off zombie survival game Resident Evil.

So I thought why not apply it to executives of big corporations?
...
It made sense at the time.

ANYWAYS...first came the obvious ones: Starbucks, WalMart, Enron, Shell, Microsoft.
Then I hit up some of my friends and asked them for some names of corporations that had a reputation for being asses in general. This dug up some more names: Reebok, McDonalds, the RIAA, ConAgra, Disney, Firestone.
Once I had all my names, I could start animating...all I needed was voicework.

Thank sweet fuck almighty god that the internet exists.

If it weren't for the internet, there is no way I would have been able to have received all of my voicework in the time I did.

But there it is.

"I Am Corporate Greed", presented by yours truly.

I'm going to bed.

What Do You Want From My Life???

Still haven't figured out how to make this dungheap work.

Please god someone help me.

Link...He Come To Town...Come To Save...Th- Nevermind
(The link above doesn't have any of the music files attached to it, since I finally got that already figured out, for fuck's sake. All code involving the sounds attached has been commented out.)

Show Me The Money! And By Money I Mean Sketches!

We may.
Just may.
Have progressed out of the initial planning stages of things.

I am a link. Hear me roar.
There is the initial gamescreen design for the game that we have (temporarily) christened "Astroy McFly"

Here's the concept: you play as Astro McFly, someone who is very Astro, and Fly.

You pilot your spaceship, unofficially named by me as the McFly Express, through the dangerous byways and flyways of space, avoiding asteroid debris, dodging the fuzz, who are trying to shoot you down, and collecting parts to mixed drinks, which just happen to be floating in space, to please your cargo of celebrity partygoers.

Awwww yeah.

I too am a link. Hear me roar.
In other news this is the first time I've ever been able to tell someone "I just drew a spaceship with an afro" and mean it.
(For those of you who are easily lost, the link goes to sketches for some potential designs for the McFly Express)

I am a link. Here me mumble incomprehensibly about roaring.
That is the game schematic....a sort of map of how the game is going to go from one screen to the next, starting from the loading screen all the way up til the Win/Lose screen at the end of the game.
Its not pretty. If it had a name, it would be "Grigor" and would have the unusual hobby of wrestling bears into submission using the weight of its ugliness alone.

Russian bear wrestling by ugly aside, that is what we have so far....there seems to be a general consensus that its a good design for the game. Though our lead programmer seems to be missing.

I'll get back to this at a later date.

An Addendum

For those of you who care (and you shouldn't, considering you're still reading this despite the title of this little thing), it has occurred to me that there is a chance that I may be absolutely fucking wrong in everything I said in the post below this one.

If that turns out to so you all have permission to beat me with a sack of oranges.

O Heart! Or Parody!

Thank heaven for parody or we'd all take the world a bit too seriously.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2005-04-15&res=l
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2005-04-18&res=l
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2005-04-20&res=l
^
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I am of the firm belief that Jerry and Mike have once again proven themselves online comics masters by pulling this out of their collective asses.
Its a pure mark of perfectly orchestrated internet genious that Penny Arcade has managed to not only make fun of the absurdity of webcomic breakups, but to make us actually believe that they are experiencing one themselves.

...webcomic breakups?

For those of you who out there who actually have social lives outside of the computer and the world of webcomics, there have been a few notable breakups of fantastic webcomics created by multiple author/writer/illustrator teams, most notable of these the breaking off of Largo from the writing team of the much-celebrated comic Megatokyo.
Many viewers have, since then, had nothing but beautiful, glowing flames and complaints to heap on the new one-man Megatokyo comic.

I remember first reading the Penny Arcade news post for that first comic that I linked up there at the end of last week.
I thought it was for real. Gabe and Tycho, the two-man cornerstone of the webcomic world, were breaking up. It couldn't be happening. It couldn't possibly.
It would be an event that would affect the world of webcomics forever....as while Tycho's writing defines the humor of Penny Arcade, its Gabe's art that is the visual identity of the comic, which is almost as important given that its a comic...not one of those ebooks that you get off of obscure literature websites.

I remember my heart skipping a beat when I first lay eyes on the comic the next day and found Gabe's art gone....and not in the way it skips when you see a burning fox of a woman walking down the road. No, this was more the OH GOD ITS HAPPENING ITS FUCKING HAPPENING WHAT THE F- kind of skip. It was the end of an era. The end of an -age-....a golden age of comics. Tycho couldn't draw to save a bag of dog droppings. I was watching history unfolding before me, a new era in webcomics was beginning, and I had a feeling that it involved a lot of good old fashioned downhill rolling.

Thank heaven for parody or we'd all take the world a bit too seriously.

Long live Penny Arcade.

OFFICIAL (very offical) PROJECT PROPOSAL

Game Genre: Suspense/Horror Exploration and Puzzle Solving

Working in a group that consists of both artists and programmers, I am of the belief that any project we undertake should balance both of these aspects of creating a game in Flash. Not too art-heavy, yet not too code-heavy, either.
A suspense style or survival/horror type game would be perfect in this situation. The artists of the group (and myself) get to flex their imaginative muscles on drawing environments, critters, backgrounds, objects, and creating the visual and audio ambience of the entire game, while puzzles and environmental and even possibly time-based events will keep the programmers busy figuring out how to incorporate code into a graphical environment while still making the puzzles and mini-games easy enough to play, yet interesting enough to drive the story along.
The specific theme…..whether it be vampires, zombies, lycanthropes, abstract spectral beings, cosmic horrors, or ghosts….is unimportant. Its equally easy to be frightened by a shambling ghoul as it is to be frightened by hands bursting from the walls. What is important is that the game must play towards the viewer’s fear of the unknown, the unseen, while still driving the viewer to explore and discover further. The setting can be any number of places…a park, a manor, an underground lab.
I’m hesitant on deciding on story-wise and environmental specifics without the rest of the group’s input…if everyone can agree on a theme or setting that they like, it makes the project that much easier to work on.
As it is, I, personally, have always wanted to work on a project where I could stretch the more twisted parts of my imagination and show them to a wider audience.
That, and its fun to try to scare the flying pants off of people.

DON'T DIE ON ME NOW

I've told people that a computer's operating system is much akin to whatever it is that connects the human brain to the rest of the human body. Without it, the computer is retarded. Nothing but a brain, which, as wondrous and complex as it is, is about as useful as a spongy lump of fat and cholesterol can be in any other situation when it has nothing else attached to it.

I'm sending this post out now from the Syracuse University computer labs located near Kimmel Dormitories, because my computer has turned into a paralyzed vegetable capable of only four words.

"Operating System Not Found"

Tomorrow morning I'm going to try to wrangle myself a new hard drive from the student store and get Windows installed on it, and hopefully, the data on my hard drive will still be salvagable.

Glee.

!@#$

It's come to my attention fairly recently that I swear a lot in my blog. Namely the word 'fuck.' Well, not a lot, but more than is to be expected....the profanity is there, in other words. Especially when you note that this blog is supposed to be for a class, though I post other non-class related stuff in there as well.

But why, Patrick? Why the dirty mouth? Surely there are other ways of expressing yourself that doesn't involve the words fuck, shit, and damn.

Well I don't know about 'damn' and 'shit.' But I would like to say this.

"Fuck" has got to be one of the most versatile words in the English language.

I can make it mean anything. Nouns. Adjectives. Verbs. Adverbs. Conjunctions.
It can be used to punctuate a sentence, to add an extra emphasis to a sentence or to take away from a sentence.
George Carlin even proved that fuck could be just as effective put inside another word too, i.e. in-fucking-credible, or unbe-fucking-lievable.

It can be used to get an idea across very quickly, and very effectively.
"Fuck off" has half the length, and about three times the punch of "Leave me alone."

In other words, I like the word fuck.
Its a valued, versatile, and hardworking member of my vocabulary.

If any of you have a problem with it....
....too fucking bad.

Damn My Eyes. Or Fingers, Rather

So.

When my instructor told me oh so many weeks ago to -save- constantly, and to -save- many versions of your Flash work in seperate files.
He wasn't kidding.
...obviously.

Of course, I, being the collosal dum-dum that I am, didn't listen until I've already lost a metric fuckton of work in my last Flash Actionscripting exercise.

The original idea was to create a lens flare effect, similar to the one I posted down below a few posts ago, except to elaborate on it and make it look not-quite-so-crappy.
Attach a sound, change the shapes, bind the lens flare to the mouse. While not quite as easy as pie, there's still a progression there.
However, as I have taken care to mention before, I am a colossal dum-dum.
Somewhere along the line I managed to totally lose any semblance of sound or mouse-tracing in the entire project. The code for the sound is -there-.
This:
mySound = new Sound();
mySound.attachSound("WAAAH1");
mySound.setVolume(100);
mySound.start(0,9999);
...which is the code for creating a new sound object, is sitting -right there- in the middle of my code.
All things considered, the moment I hit Ctrl+Enter, I should hear the sound of a grown man crying from some unspoken atrocity being committed on him.
But instead, I am greeted with the stony silence of the ages. And some circles that drift across the screen when I click the mouse.
I have managed to do the simpler things like bind object alphas and the actual drifting to the click of the mouse:
http://web.syr.edu/~pctsao/LensFlarePyramid.swf

But any semblance of the tribal wonders of a lens flare shining behind a the silhoutte of a colossal, nameless pyramid have thus far been lost in the seas of my stupidity.

Damn my eyes. Or rather, my fingers. Damn my fingers.

Down With The Sickness

Isn't being sick a wonderful thing?

...

Unless we're talking psychologically sick, if you said 'yes' I reserve the right to give you a left hook across the jaw.
Being sick blows. It blows harder than a northern wind coming down from Greenland if they installed a huge-ass fan that spanned the width of the country, powered by a half dozen nuclear power plants the size of Kentucky.

And that's pretty hard.

One of the many many reasons it sucked like a whore out of Amsterdam is it kept me from focusing on....-anything-....for a full two or three weeks. I can't really say for sure whether it was two or three, cause I was too damn delirious to pay any attention.

At any rate, I saw the movie Sin City over the weekend.
...
Go see it.
Now. RIGHT now. Go here -> www.moviefone.com. Find the theater nearest you. Buy tickets. Wait for the time to come. Then SEE THE MOVIE. If there was a way for me to reach through this screen to collar you and shake you back and forth while saying this I would.
I kid you not. Sin City is, bar none, the most amazing movie I have ever seen. I will tell you no more about it, because that's how I went in seeing it, and to be honest it utterly blew me away.
If this doesn't get big I will be shocked.
Of course, if this gets big, there will come the inevitable fanboys, the endless quoting of lines from the movies, the mobs of fans, and of course, the inevitable endless parodies.

First will come Saturday Night Live, and MAD TV. Then the Simpsons, or South Park. If Family Guy still ran, it would be Family Guy, too. And don't even mention the endless amounts of internet prop it would get.

Is this a bad thing?

It can be a bad thing. Things like satire drive such nice things harder into the mass marketing spotlight, which tends to have a habit of spoiling the nicer, fewer-and-farther-between works of art that come out once in a blue moon. On the other hand, it makes for some truly genious work in multimedia all on its own as well. Just look at Newgrounds (www.newgrounds.com), the premiere online location for independant flash artists and cartoonists...it has an entire section devoted to parodies, tributes, and imitations done in Flash.

I may as well jump on the bandwagon. Sketches and ideas to come soon.

That last sentence took about fifteen minutes to write. Its impossible to write anything when you hack up a lung everytime you write a word.

I hate being sick.

Flare That Lens, Baby

Oh my my my its that time of the month again. No, not for my man-period, that's just a myth. Or is it? No, its time for me to put out some of my coded works once again.

This one was a mite easier than all of the others, if for the sole reason that I didn't have to code it completely from scratch as I tried to do with all the others. A lot of it was based off of a tweening demo that was posted on the class website a week or so back.
It still needs some work, coloring-wise and overall movement wise, and polish wise, and it needs some sort of sound or music or -something- to give it that extra umph...ok so it needs a bit of work, but its difficult to work when your brain is pounding on the insides of your skulls whining about pink and yellow monkeys threatening to sell it life insurance. I'll add that in a few days. The polish, that is, not the monkeys. But for now....

http://web.syr.edu/~pctsao/LensFlareEffect.swf

That Old Black Magic. I mean Storyboard.

More on this later when my brain isn't so addled its ready to fall out of my ears:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v165/machiavelli33/Photoshop/Storyboard.jpg

Mad

When the world drives you mad, one of the finest things you can do is to let it.

Mad

When the world drives you mad, one of the finest things you can do is to let it.

Snow Day

I've been in Syracuse University for about two years now. One and half if you really want to do the counting.

It's come to my attention that in all those two years, I have never taken the time to stop and simply take in a snow-fallen landscape.
So tonight, just about two hours ago, I did.
I stopped in front of my dorm on the way back from dinner and instead of ambling inside, muttering a hello while flashing my card to the RSA, and tottering upstairs to this computer...I just stood outside, and didn't go in.

Anyone who knows me well enough know that I love big cities. Los Angeles, New York City, the bigger, the taller, the more sketchy, the better.
The Walnut Hall area, as far as I can acquaint it, is as close to the big city feel as you can get.
Sure, Marshall Street and downtown has bigger buildings.
But its like when you're watching Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, and the animation is so superb, so fine tuned, so detailed, that you can't but help notice the minute differences between the animation and what's real, and in the end, it'll all be better if you just scaled it back.

That's what its like in Syracuse. Downtown, Marshall Street, you see the big buildings and you get the feeling that you're in a big city, until you start noticing the little things that tell you that....well...you're not in a big city. Its too quiet, for one. And too clean.

But right outside my dorm door...it may not seem like a big city at first glance, but stick around during the evening, and there are little things....small things that remind me of the city.
One of these things is a single, lone street lamp right across the small street in front of the door.
When its on at night it flickers, on and off, continually. And I like it.

I've always known it was there.
But until tonight, I hadn't really taken the time to take it in. To notice it. To ...appreciate it.
And everything was covered in white.
Every day up to today since the beginning of December I've known that the white stuff was coming down from the stratosphere to puff up the Earth in a blanket of pure cold.
Never really took the time to stop and look at it though.

Its funny how so many of the beautiful things around you spend ages ignoring while they're frolicking right in front of your eyes waiting for you to pay attention.
All you have to do is not want to go home.

A First Attempt At Some Real ActionScripting

There's snow by my window.

Absolutely exemplary the Syracuse weather spirits, the snow persists on even as we go into late February, the sky blessing and cursing us at the same time with light dustings of powdery stuff every so often to remind us that yes, we're in Syracuse, and yes, its fucking cold.

But in spite of a late winter that hadn't even kicked off by mid January, the snow is still retreating noticably fast, dashing aside any premonitions I had had about a late winter slodging on into May and perhaps even June.
We'll get flakes once every so often now, the pitiable little crystals plummeting from the sky in a valiant attempt to bring Syracuse back to its former hellishly wintry splendor, while the trees, the grass and the various foliage shed their skeletal winter coats and attempt to shine green again.

Its in the midst of all this, that I, like one single blade of grass trying to push through a foot of leftover snow, attempt my first mind-numbing foray into Flash Actionscripting.

Its in the midst of all this that I am reminded of why I dropped out of the Computer Science program senior year after having slogged through it my entire high school career.
Its not like its hard...no not at all. Its cake, compared to OpenGL or Java or any of those mass bigtime languages. Cake with icing and three cherries in fact.
Its just -picky-.

The interface for Flash, I found, is -extremely-, extremely click-sensitive. Not saying that it takes more or less pressure per click than any other program, but in saying that the interface is a lot less forgiving in terms of selecting objects and working with them and such.

First thing I did was give the pen tool another chance.
After trying half a dozen things that I could think of off the top of my head, consulting a few books, and trying some more things scraped up from the bottom of my braincase, I was still unable to move two control points across the screen.
I rewarded all of my hard work by deleting them.

Next I attempted to replicate one of the white line borders from the project below by drawing it manually...procedurally, as it were.
This process alone took me two hours. One single fucking white line took me two painstaking hours, most of which consisted of a random mixture of frustrated searchings, looking up tutorials, and occasional cries of "AGH WHAT THE FUCK" that ended up really confusing my roommate.

Finally, finally, I was able to create a single white line.
This white line was unable to move. And as hard as I willed it and wished it to move across the screen on its own, or maybe by the power of my mind, it remained resolutely in place.

So I deleted that too, and just used the line tool.

From there converting to a movie clip symbol was easily done enough. The coding was puttering on nicely until I tried to test the movie and it showed me the one line sitting on the left side of the screen.
It still wasn't moving.
Nevermind the fact that my code is supposedly telling it to run across the screen and do little flips and act like it was happy despite the fact that I could use up my hands and feeting counting and still have times left over where my roommate was confused with my shouting.
It still wasn't moving.

SO then, I took a breather, took a step, took a step -back-, and looked at the code and the timeline, and the symbols...everything.

Then I made two clicks and four keystrokes.
And suddenly it was working-

SWF:
http://web.syr.edu/~pctsao/VectorAnimation.swf
FLA:
http://web.syr.edu/~pctsao/VectorAnimation.fla

I had spent more than an hour and a half of frustrating shouting, typing, recoding, and saying inspiring words to my monitor trying to get this thing to work....and it was all done in two clicks and four keystrokes.

That's awesome.
And by awesome I mean its the most torturous thing I've been through in a while on the computer, and really brings to mind why I was never a -huge- fan of the compsci.

There's snow by my window.
Maybe I should go outside.