Armored Stylus

UmiKawa

2009-11-15T18:14:35Z

I just got the DS port of Umihara Kawase and I'm really loving it, of course. Between this and Ninja Five-O, my DS now has hardcore rubbering action in both holes.

The "DS" version of the PSX game appears to contain an extra 30 levels or so. I don't know how many levels of the original I saw. This game has a new map that shows what levels you've been to (and a "how many levels visited out of how many levels exist" indicator) and how the levels intersect (once you've been to them, anyway), and even the original PSX game has something like 120. I'm pretty sure I didn't even see half of them! The PS/DS versions also have a "zoom" control so you can be zoomed in to see the detail or zoomed out to see more terrain, and a detailed minimap on the lower screen shows your position, enemies, and level exits. You can also set the shoulder triggers to control the zoom (sort of weird, when I tried it). The default setting has the shoulder buttons set to nothing, which is strange, because in the original all four of the PSX's triggers were set to aim your shot at angles. I prefer having them set to the upper angles, this can really help when you're trying to keep Kawase-san from sliding down into spikes but also need to grapple onto something behind you. I do feel like the controls for reeling in are a little sluggish, I'm not sure if it's the game, me, or the DS control pad. If it's the pad, it's the first time I've prefered the PSX' digital pad for anything, ever.

I read over at Tiny Cartridge that the game only sold 4,200 copies its first day. I'm always a little suspicious of the first-day sales really being representative, especially in UmiKawa's case where they may have pissed a lot of people off with the PSP version and players were likely waiting to see how good a port it was. I hope they sold more, but obviously in the west the series is most famous for people emulating the Super Famicom version, so with the precedent already set I can't help but think people are already primed to steal it (also it's an older game being sold at full price, not really a great move). UmiKawa on the PSX is one of my all-time favorites, I've bought it twice already (once new from NCS, and once used while in Japan), and having it on the go is worth a lot to me personally. If anyone wants to buy it over at Play Asia, PM me for my $5 off coupon, I never seem to be able to use those things in time (my last one expired the day before I remembered to order this!)

Gunstar Moonwalk

2009-06-29T07:12:54Z

A friend and I played Gunstar Heroes on the 360 today. The emulated version kind of sucks, they've re-routed all the menus into the blue "Sega Classics" frame, to the extent that you never even see the original title screen (or the extended intro) unless you sit and wait for it at the menu, and even then it's tiny on-screen. The really weird thing about it is that if someone dies he can no jump back in with half of the other player's life. This makes playing with two players of differing skill level really stupid, because the first player to die doesn't get back in until the other player dies too. Also, the achievements are totally lame (you get one for beating the end boss, and one for beating the game) with absolutely nothing interesting in them. No extra incentive to beat the game on other difficulties, no incentive to try to one-credit clear, or any other sort of interesting challenge. Laaaame.

Anyway, there's a weird glitch in the game that I found easier to initiate with the Xbox pad: when walking on a sloped surface, if you quickly press in the opposite direction you're moving, your character turns around but keeps walking forward. So I was doing it pretty much every chance I had because it was just so easy. When my friend (who hadn't seen the move before) asked what I was doing I told him this was just my way of mourning the loss of one of the greatest musical influences of our time.

VOOT on 360

2009-04-30T06:19:38Z

Gamertag: Gsilverfish

I am loving VOOT on 360, guys. I wish I had a twinstick for it, but the 360 controller is.. hrmm.. tolerable. It seems that Q-Stepping is a lot trickier than before, and I have better luck when I do it with the Right Analog stick, but I'm "trained" to use the left, so it really throws me. In general I've just avoided using it, which is unfortunate, but I think I'll get the hang of it eventually.

I've been playing in the ranked matches and having a great time, though I have to admit it's because I'm winning a lot. xD I have a score that's like 22W 7L or something like that. This is probably because I'm picking my targets, trying to get matches with people who I assume to be around my level but in actuality really aren't. As you win more fights, your rank goes up, so I've been challenging people who are higher and higher, and on the occasions that I went against players who were obviously much higher ranked I got whupped pretty well. The but the best way to gauge skill is clearly from the W/L ratio, not the rank. I didn't see very many players with more wins than losses, and I expect my ratio to drop dramatically as I work my way up the ladder (though I haven't seen anyone with such a high rate yet).

Almost everyone online is Japanese, and I think that's why I have difficulty connecting to them, the majority of my connection attempts end up failing. But once in a game, it runs extremely smoothly. I've noticed a little hiccup only once.

My connection itself is not great: I used a crossover cable to bridge the 360 and my wireless connection (I'll need to feel a lot more invested before I fork over $100 for the official adapter), and it works, but while I have it set up like that, periodically the wireless connection eventually drops, and the only way I can get it to work again is to delete the bridge and build it again. It doesn't take too long to get back on but it's annoying, especially if I get booted in the middle of a match. (No one has dropped carrier on me so far, so I'm a bit embarrassed to have this happening.)

I haven't met up with any of my old VO crew from Japan, but I am told they are all on there. I haven't used my headset yet, I'm saving it for when I meet up with people I know online instead of random strangers.

Dawn of Time now with LiveJournal feed

2008-11-30T18:10:37Z

Some kind person has created a syndicated LJ feed for Dawn of Time. Thank you, mystery stranger!

Project Wonderful

2008-08-25T18:52:11Z

Last week I started advertising Dawn of Time via Project Wonderful through a few sites that I like. The interesting thing about this is that so far the costs and result (relative to how many hits the site gets) have been the same on almost every site. For about every 1000 pageviews, I get about 1 unique hit. It varies from site to site but that seems to be about the number. I'm a little impressed by this, because I am sure that I "view" (or ignore) well over 1000 ads before I click on any of them, though of course it depends on the ad, and I imagine with advertising "focused" at webcomic viewers there are a lot of people (1 in 1000 apparently) who are interested in clicking on ads to see new webcomics. The cost so far is about $.02 cents per click, even though some sites cost considerably more, the results seem to be the same.

The main exception is PVP, which is the most expensive site I've used so far, but gets the poorest results despite getting the most views, which is probably due to ad placement way below the comic and even below the current blog where people are unlikely to see it. Although PVP is giving me a lot of hits in total, if I can get the same results for less over a longer period of time (also by taking that money and advertising instead on a variety of sites) then that seems like better use of money (also I believe an ad's effectiveness increases as people see it in more places). The other exception is qwantz.com, where the ads are placed directly below the comic, right before the blog, where I think they DO catch the eye more, and there my cost per click is only $.01 and I am getting a higher number of clicks out of my views.

I'm not getting a huge number of views from any of these sites though, but it's been an interesting way to spend $10 (so far less than that, actually).

Webcomic!

2008-07-25T15:35:31Z

People on my DA site already know, but I have started a webcomic! Unsurprisingly, it's about cavegirls and dinosaurs. Danny has kindly thrown together a proper website for me that's still under development, ie, most links don't do anything, there's a shop button that suggests I will be attempting to sell things, space for ads that doesn't have any ads in it (I plan on using Project Wonderful), etc.

Currently my plan is to update on a MWF schedule, and once I'm sure I'll be doing this for a while I'll spring for a domain name. I'm a little hesitant because I've never quite had the stones to do a webcomic before, and I've wanted to do one for about 10 years so that's 10 years of self-doubt that's lingering over me right now. XD But I'm having fun and I think it's coming along well, and that's the important thing!

Anyway, check it out if you like!

Dawn of Time Comics

Old school Crabmeat

2008-07-16T07:11:47Z

Something to brighten your day!

Mario Kart Wii Code

2008-04-28T21:04:52Z

Mario Kart Friend code! 0817-4175-0471

Some problems can't be solved with giant robots!

2007-12-15T05:16:40Z

It's time for some robot talk!

I'm watching Mobile Suit Gundam 00, the new series airing in Japan right now. I just watched episode 8. The story in this one is that even in the face of technological advances providing mankind with an infinite energy source, people are still killing each other for some reason or other, so a group from space known as "Celestial Being" has made four super-powered Gundams that no earth force can match in order to intervene in any military conflict, and basically kill everyone until they surrender. The idea appears that eventually the earth forces will become so frustrated at this that they all team up to destroy Celestial Being themselves, and maybe then they'll be friends after that.

I was thinking they were working towards something clever. The over-poweredness of the Gundams is an acceptably plot device, though typically it seems that their enemies are just retarded. Every now and then they encounter an ace pilot who can actually harm them, but the vast majority of robot pilots apparently just stand there and wait to die (maybe this is a budget constraint). Even in episode 8, I saw a human with a rocket launcher (you never know what a well-aimed shot from that might do!) just STAND THERE waiting to get shot, and we never even got to see what the Gundam's counter to undetectable close-range infantry fire is. I guess they didn't think of something clever?

Anyway, what has happened is, terrorists have taken to blowing up random targets in random places in the world in order to make Celestial Being release its control over our precious armed conflicts. This seems like scary stuff, and I'm sure you're curious what they're gonna do to stop this and more importantly how does it involve giant robots. It turns out that terrorists are sloppy. The first bombing was done via time bombs and remote detonation and barring any time consuming CSI activities, untraceable. The second act was apparently more of a hands on job, and a terrorist is seen leaving the scene in a suspicious hurry, he gets IDed, and traced back to a massive terrorist group who has big, fat, easily-targeted bases all over the globe. Celestial Being gets the info leaked to them, the Gundams move in, destroy them, and our terrorist-hating freedom-fighters rest easy and we all feel good about ourselves.

But what the hell, right? First of all, because the various world governments want to go back to war mongering, they should be the ones funding this terrorism. These should not be traceable terrorist "cells" out in big groups, they should be independent agents building bombs out of whatever is available (and being well-funded, they should be able to get whatever they need) and leaving town preferably before the things even detonate. Isn't this how real terrorists are? Isn't it why they are so hard to pin down, because although training camps and such do exist, you can't just squash them all at once? Why even use agents who are even traceable, whose affiliation with terrorist groups is even known? Terrorism is scary because the terrorist could be your neighbor and there's really no way to know! On top of this, the government had a fabulous chance to really demoralize Celestial Being by feeding them BAD INFO. It would have been hilariously tragic if instead of terrorists they had accidentally hit the densely packed sweatshop full of women and children next door? Yeah?

Anyway it was probably a mistake to think this show was going to be intelligently written, but I really wanted it to be. :(

Copula Plurality and Singularity

2007-12-02T22:02:33Z

I was wondering today if North really is always up on maps (answer: it's not! And take note of the origin of the term "the Orient" while you're there) and then I got curious again and found what appears to be scholarly study on the matter of "Number Agreement" between American and British English. What I mean is that Americans always treat plural entities that exist as a single unit as a single entity in language, but a British person might say something ridiculous like this: "Our bakery continue to deliver fresh hand made bread." I am pretty sure all my British friends have already heard me go on and on about this and are probably all sick to death of it, but it's just nice to see that other people have noticed this in both countries and I found the following quote (presented in American-style quotation) matches what I was thinking exactly:

"Many of the British examples strike American speakers as completely unacceptable, even 'awful,' to quote one young informant."

A thing that really interests me about this is that I have only noticed this when talking to real British people, as opposed to say, British people on TV or in movies (and in books too). I'm sure I'd have caught on if I watched the BBC more often, but it almost seems as if, in anticipation of American export, these shows are pre-corrected for American audiences because, of course, if all of a sudden classy British people started sounding like complete grammatical retards then all those comments about how stupid Americans sound would probably lose some of their punch.

But seriously. I know you guys aren't retarded, and I'd like to think you extend the same courtesy to me.

Stuff from work..

2007-09-12T23:03:08Z

The other day at work we got in this "PlayMais" stuff that's pretty cool. At first glance it looks like someone soaked a bunch of packing peanuts in food coloring, but I'm thinking these are something else. Apparently they are made entirely out of corn starch and nontoxic dyes, making them safe for the little 'uns to munch on (they smell a bit like stale cereal), and if you get them just slightly damp, they get sticky and adhere together really well. With a bit of force you can get them apart and reuse them, though they seem to tear a bit. You can cut them up and/or mash them into other shapes, too. Anyway, I was charged with putting something together as a sample.

He wasn't supposed to be Godzilla when I started but I worked from the head and down from there, so bad planning on my part meant this was the only way I could have made him stay upright. At least not without using some sort of support stick (and anything would work, the stuff is practically weightless). I had a lot of fun working on this and our sample box has a lot of blocks leftover..

I also finally bothered to take a picture of the window sign, I designed the pelican. Someone else had to go to the trouble of vectorizing it and putting up the vinyl, but I got to do the fun stuff. :)

PS

2007-09-06T02:12:50Z

More dinosaur riding!

Horrible

2007-09-05T23:38:06Z

I just killed a horrible fat-bodied spider who scurried around my wall in a way that I found unsettling. And I've seen a lot of spiders on my wall, so to say that there was something unsettling about this one does actually mean something. It was long in the body, but its legs seemed shorter than usual somehow, and there was a reddish tinge about it. "Oh, you have to die," I told it, hoping it wouldn't disappear in the time it took me to grab a paper towel for clean smashing. Then, as I disposed of that one, this OTHER spider limps across my kitchen floor, with half its legs kinda mashed somehow. I was sort of fascinated, because it was hard to tell just what was wrong with it, but really, it had to go too. I am not thinking like "put it out of its misery," kind of thing here, and it's not that I delight in killing spiders exactly, but for me to not kill spiders its important for them to stay out of sight and harm's way, and I can't be walking around barefoot with spiders on the floor who can't limp out of the way if I step on them by accident. That's gross!

Now I'm all freaked out. Maybe I'll put on some shoes.

80 Billion Years Later

2007-08-25T06:46:17Z

The other day I got ahold of Frank Cho's Shanna the She Devil TPB. I've never really gone for Frank Cho, particularly that Liberty Meadows thing he does, which has never managed to hold my attention for more than a couple strips. Shanna had me with the concept alone, "a bikini-clad woman genetically engineered by Nazis lives in the jungle fighting dinosaurs," which sounds like a winner to me. Though Frank Cho's art is phenomenally great, with a premise like that I was expecting something a little more on the absurd side of things. I know, you are thinking "how could it not be absurd?" Somehow, it just feels really ordinary despite things like a bolo made of dynamite blowing a T-rex's head off or Shanna wading through a sea of velociraptors dispatching them left and right with a machete. It's still good, a tight little adventure story, and somehow takes itself seriously without making a fool of itself. The Nazi connection also reminded me of Hellboy right off the get-go, and Shanna's Nazi origins are never touched on. Not that you can expect a thing like Hellboy from anything but Hellboy, but, you know, Hellboy is really weird! Shanna is just a hot chick fighting dinosaurs! Nothing weird about that!

Anyway, even before I got the comic (perhaps I got the comic because) I was wanting to draw a girl riding a dinosaur, so here we go. I ended up putting it off for well over a week, because the gift store just moved to a new location and I got myself good and tired moving it all week long. Still, moving a whole store in just a week (5 days actually) is not bad! So now that things are back to "normal" I can lose myself in this more easily. I'm really pleased with this, though when I look at something sort of similar I did before I'm a little surprised by how much more subdued the coloring is. I didn't post it here, but the same thing happened (although at least somewhat intentionally) when I drew this picture of Sonic. What's going on??

Also, 88 Billion Years Ago!!

Monsters!

2007-08-16T00:32:27Z

I've got some bad guys, wooo! They all use the same skeleton so animations can be borrowed from one to another, and of course with something like this they are all looking rather similar to each other in body, but really I think I get a pretty diverse selection just in altering their giant, giant heads (and there's the size difference, too). In-game they'll differentiate by their attacks and/or weapons, so they shouldn't seem too similar. The thing that really impresses me (and I was a little worried!) is how well their mouths operate (each mouth is shaped entirely differently) and give a considerable amount of character using the exact same bone animations. Maybe I shouldn't have been surprised, but what the heck, I am anyway. Each character comes in under 600 triangles. I suppose getting some backgrounds made up ought to be a priority..

Media Products!

2007-08-15T21:07:58Z

So Souhou Kihei Gun Ground arrived and I played the crap out of it for a few days. Well, maybe it played the crap out of me, I'm not sure, because it got pretty frustrating near the end and overall I'm not sure if I liked it that much. I've basically been waiting for this game for 5 or 6 years now, because a portable successor to the Assault Suits series of 2D mech games seemed like a no-brainer on GBA (or now DS, I guess). So when those kooks at D3 picked up the torch, I was pretty excited, thinking ahah, someone with passion for this sort of game within that company has finally pushed it forward! The end result is really not what I was hoping for at all. For one, and you can tell this just from looking, the graphics are terrible. Flatly textured 3D robots cavorting about on drab 2D backgrounds is a far cry from the exciting environments we had in Valken, and while bosses do appear occasionally they are about as exciting as larger versions of the other enemies (some of them aren't much more than that). There are a couple "auto scrolling" sequences where you dash through a canyon, but the illusion is broken as soon as ground-based enemies appear and walk around on the rapidly-scrolling ground as if it wasn't moving at all. The enemy AI is ridiculous in the early stages of the game (we'll say at least 30% of it), and I'm talking "stand there facing the wrong direction while I shoot you in the back" ridiculous. If the enemies were pre-programmed, pattern based, that would be one thing, but these are more like the "bots" you find in tournament-style FPS games, and I think ultimately that's what this game is modeled on. Every stage has the same objective, wipe out X enemies (they don't tell you what X is) until the stage ends, so there's no need to explore the level until it's time to go, because the enemies will just keep showing up endlessly until the area is cleared out. Even Leynos/Target Earth had some depth of strategy with its endless swarms of enemies, since you had different objectives to accomplish while enemies came from all directions. One of the better features of the game is its multiplayer mode--well, I assume it's "better" because it does seem to be well-supported, with VS and co-op missions for both multi and single cart modes, but I haven't tried it yet. Looking at it from that perspective, that maybe it was just a multiplayer slugfest with a half-assed single player game attached, that at least makes sense and I was clearly wrong to think of it as the 2D mech 'em up I expected, but it doesn't really make the game better, either.

I read through Casual Rex and Anonymous Rex by Eric Garcia. These books are entertaining but also troubling at the same time, they are quirky detective stories with the hook that the detective(s) are dinosaurs secretly masquerading as humans, because it turns out that there is a secret society of dinosaurs living among us, wearing elaborate human costumes to keep from being discovered. I've never really read detective books so from that perspective alone, it's pretty fresh for me, but the dinosaur angle.. the thing of it is that most of the time the dinosaurs could be any secret society at all, robots, aliens, KKK members, whatever, because the fact that they are dinosaurs makes little difference to the story, and mainly the science of it (it is marketed as Science Fiction) is completely ridiculous. Dinosaurs, although incapable of mixed breeding consider themselves one "species," they all have retractable claws, sharp teeth, and appear to be carnivorous regardless of species. In order to fit into costume, the main character, a velociraptor, wraps his tail around his body, but velociraptors and their related buddies had rigid, inflexible tails. On top of this, there's a scene where he uses it as a prehensile tail to pull himself out of a hole. What? The implication seems to be that the dinosaurs are made of rubber, right down to the bone, as one scene describes two dinos in the heat of argument, in costume and so close, face to face, that if they were "suddenly out of costume, their noses would have bashed into eachother." A funny image, but what exactly is being implied here? The dinosaurs have a fierce pride in their secret dinosaur society and consider themselves vastly superior to humans (taking credit for most human accomplishments, because really it was just a dinosaur in disguise anyway), right down to the way they talk ("ape-fucker" is a common derogatory term) and this gives the book a real condescending tone towards humanity in a way that makes me think that perhaps the book is really intended for furries or something (also there's the weird costume sex). It wouldn't bother me except the dinosaurs plainly have all the faults that humans do, and there isn't a trace of irony in the writing (regarding humans, at least). Even Anonymous Rex, in which the subject of human-dino relations (sexual relations!) comes up, never goes anywhere with the possibility that maybe the dinos are just as flawed as the humans are, or maybe that the humans aren't so bad. But regardless, I have grown sort of attached to the books anyway so I've already got the third book, Hot & Sweaty Rex, on order. XD (I'm hoping maybe this one will address the matter but I'm not betting on it.)

Another series I've really enjoyed recently is Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd & Grey Mouser. I found out about it because I was looking for an barbarian stereotype that appealed to me and wasn't Han from Guardian Heroes (Didn't work out anyway!), and then actually started reading the books because the comic shop had a copy of the recent re-release of Swords and Deviltry that caught my eye. After deciding I wanted more I popped back into the bookstore and sure enough, there's a used compilation that contains not only the first book I just read, but also the next two, for just 5 or 6 dollars (a far cry from the $12.95 pricetag on the individual new releases!). Having read so much "epic" fantasy (Goodkind, Jordan, Brooks, etc) I find this different spin on it to be dreadfully appealing. The stories (most of 'em) were written for Science Fiction and Fantasy magazines ranging from the 60s to the 80s, so although there are recurring characters and there are often links between one story to the next, each is a wholly self-contained adventure and some of them are not adventures at all, like the time when both heroes give up adventuring, Fafhrd discovering religion and Grey Mouser discovering a way to extort money from religions, and hilarity ensues as the two are inevitably drawn into conflict with eachother. The stories often feel like individual "adventures" that could be used in Dungeons and Dragons campaigns, or a "day in the life" of roguish adventurers, and that day-to-day, ordinary quality (despite the occasionally cosmic importance of their doings) is quite appealing. (This is also, I think, what attacts me to Dickson's Dragon Knight books.) The writing style is also very different, as Leiber isn't afraid to omitt things that an "epic fantasy" author would have spent entire books describing, like the time our heroes need to go off stealing various magic talismans of one kind of another and the entire adventure is neatly accounted based on "historic records" of their actions in less than two pages. Sort of like Luigi's story arc in Paper Mario 2, it reminds us that item quest plots are a dime a dozen and the author doesn't need to draw them out unless he really wants to. And that's sort of the thing that's nice about the writing, it's not afraid to just say (or even imply) that something happened, rather than going into detail about every little thing--if I hear "the distinctive ring" of Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth one more time I think I might just die from it. Anyway, still working my way through that, and I've picked up a few Lieber short story collections, to see what he's like when he's not writing about these two characters.

Yasushi Suzuki Artbook; Dungeon

2007-08-04T21:46:46Z

I just received the Yasushi Suzuki artbook put out recently (in the US!) by DrMaster, and it is pretty spiffy. Primarily it has a lot of his non-game works, so it's not much I've seen before. He's done a lot of fantasy novel covers in Japan, even some for western authors' Japanese publications (George R. R. Martin) and they are drop dead gorgeous. Another unexpected surprise is a bit of Zone of Enders 2 art he did, which you can imagine is also awesome. All the Ikaruga art you've seen before is in here, but very little in the way of Sin and Punishment. I'm guessing Nintendo holds the reprinting rights to that stuff because what IS in the book is a Dengeki N64 cover and the cover art from the novel, both pretty inferior to the other works in here. I have a Sin & Punishment ad pamphlet I picked up in Japan that has quite a bit of concept art in it, and I was really hoping to see it in a larger format here, so that's a disappointment. But the book is nice, nice paper, nice smell, a thick clear plastic jacket over the whole thing, and oh yeah there's a forward from everybody's favorite never say Dave Halverson, talking about how much he loves the S&P cover art but doesn't mention how it isn't in the book. Hah!

Also today is more Dungeon, almost rounding out my collection of the English TPBs (undecided if I want the Night Shirt prequel). This is a comic from France that I've developed a liking for--I guess really I like the author/sometimes artist, Joann Sfar, because Amazon's been recommending me things he's done since I got Vampire Loves earlier this year. I really like the simple art style, and the stories are of course really great. It's a story about people (or animals, or monsters..) who work in a Dungeon and have adventures usually on the outside. It's not at all accurate to say "think Dungeon Keeper, the comic," (which is how I describe it to my friends when I try to get them interested in it) but at the same time, it gets the idea across, it's funny fantasy. Also, all the characters are animals, I guess, backing up that idea that funny animal books are still salable in Europe. I'm really interested in this series and I'm under the impression that there is more than has been translated into English, but I've never really been able to find anything else on it. Does anyone else know anything about it?

More 3D Guys

2007-07-30T07:34:32Z

Here's a couple more guys! Previously we had a heavy hitter and two mages, so here's the speed characters, Archer and Ninja, with emphasis on long range and close range respectively. Since neither of these guys look quite so Guardian Heroes-ish I suppose the idea would be to show everybody together so they can all "blend" but.. But I only posed the two of them together! :( I've started working on some monsters, so they'll probably turn up next.

A particular difficulty so far in development is that Danny keeps switching engines (Sorry for ignoring your question last time Baines, because I didn't know the answer!) because it's really hard to tell, when you are trying to use one that's free, if it's any good without doing a considerable amount of experimenting, so I think we're on what now, engine 4? 5? One of the problems with the ones that are freely available is they are not geared for the type of game we're doing, with heavily "tiled" 3D stages, they're more intended for stages that are just dropped right out of a 3D program, whereas ours will be somewhat programatically generated. So now we're looking at a pay-engine called Unity, which develops on Mac (and for browser plug-ins, oddly--but I'm very impressed with what they can run in a browser!) and can publish on either platform once we pay for it. I am not sure what prompted this decision entirely but Danny spent a lot of time converting a PC into a mac in order to develop with it, so.. maybe this time? It seemed so counter-intuitive to me to do it this way (being that both of us own PCs) but he managed to convince me at least as far as I stopped complaining about it. Being able to provide a Mac version this time would be cool, at least! Anyway THIS time in a proper development environment where we don't need to scratch-build quite so much, we've already got something that vaguely resembles the very beginnings of an environment, which is further than we've been so far.

Scylla

2007-07-22T19:36:04Z

Those Greeks! It's like there's a moral in every monster. For some reason yesterday I took an interest in Scylla. First, you have Glaucus, the man-fish-god-thing, who fell in love with her, a beautiful sea-nymph and one of Poseidon's groupies or something. But she would have none of that! So first we have beauty rejecting the poor loser. Then Glaucus goes to Circe, to ask for a love potion, but Circe ends up falling in love with him, but of course, Glaucus is too hung up on Scylla to be interested in Circe, and hey, who knows if he was interested in Circe anyway? She's always turning people into pigs! Anyway, Circe illogically takes it out on Scylla (why didn't she just feed the love potion to Glaucus?) and turns her into a horrible sea monster with ravenous snarly dogs sticking out of her waist who snatch and devour anyone who comes near. So, maybe Scylla was a bitch on one level, but you can't blame someone for not being interested (it probably had nothing to do with him), and guys have to understand that aphrodisiacs are not an appropriate solution!

So in my interpretation, Scylla is a pitiable sort of character, and why not? It's not like the topless hottie residing in that pack of toothy grins wants to eat people, or at least, it's a far sadder thing if that's the case, because we're to assume she has no control over it. She's an emotionally-unstable man-devouring monster and it's totally beyond her control. HOW LIKE A WOMAN.

Seriously though, I just thought it would be neat to draw.

Drama Drama Drama!

2007-07-17T21:08:01Z

Oh man! So LJ has that handy new feature where you can see the most recent comments to your journal on the homepage, rather than having to dig them out of old entries where you'll probably never bother to look, right? So today, it's anonymous comments on that whole local business dramabomb, and just looking at it without even reading it, I'm thinking oh no, what (deserved?) ire have I drawn by making this public again?

But this time it's extremely level comments from Banjo, saying that it wasn't him at all, and now I feel like an ass for jumping to the conclusion that it was. I never had anything on here (publicly) ragging on his restaurant while it was open, but even so--I have to apologize. Banjo doesn't have an LJ account so I have no way of telling him that the air is clear (at least for me) and I wish he was still in business just so I could go in and tell him personally.

I guess the moral here is that people will continue to google their names no matter what! Also Michael, don't be so quick to point a finger.

First appearance! :O

2007-07-16T21:38:09Z

So here's a few of the characters for that new game I discreetly mention from time to time. :) No weapons yet, haha :D But the plan is for a sort of dungeon crawling-brawler (a Dungeon Brawler?), the only game idea Danny and I seem to be equally jazzed about. At the moment the game is just a pile of art assets and code, we've yet to string any of this stuff into anything playable yet. We haven't really done 3D before (though SkyPuppy's 2D engine uses 3D acceleration), I've done some modeling here and there obviously, but the coding is all-new (a shame since our 2D engine is pretty awesome) though making use of some pre-existing engine that Danny's still fiddling around with. We had been meaning to stick with 2D because, you know, 2D is cool, and we'd talked about this game before but I didn't want to have to draw 2D characters from so many directions, and then finally it just occurred to us that hey, we could do 3D if we wanted to... so there you go.

Obviously there's a Guardian Heroes vibe going on with these characters, and that's just what happens when I do fantasy. :) I tried at least to get the barbarian/fighter-guy to look a little less like Han but in the end I just gave up and went with ye old homage. That's what we'll call it, anyway. There will ultimately be a ton of carnage on screen at once and the characters will not be especially large, so we've taken the low-poly approach (I admit I'm more comfortable with that, too..). Also not being sure what exactly our engine is going to be capable of (and on a variety of computers), heck, I'm worried the polycount (around 1200 each) is too high already. ^^;

Lighter Side

2007-07-08T17:07:56Z

Everything all comes together at once. You'll all remember my encounter with the smelly bookstore, known as Organize Noise--see how I fearlessly mention it by name, and the subsequent encounter with its owner and our internet lamer friend, the owner of Banjo's Sammich Company. The bookstore has gone out of business, so I had been meaning to make the post public again--not that it matters at this late a time, but it was something I had planned to do eventually. On top of this, karma has apparently struck down Banjo's, because they're going out of business too--after hardly a year, even, when it's generally standard practice that restaurants operate in the red for at least their first two years. I've heard a few reports that the owner was something of an ass when he was not making anonymous LJ comments as well.

On top of that, I'm leaving the bookstore, so even if they were still around, as a non-bookstore employee I no longer consider the posts inappropriate.

But yeah, leaving the bookstore! No more sexy bookstore nerd mystique for me--not that it ever worked--but there's certainly a bit of prestige that comes from a bookstore that you don't get from other retail outlets. The woman who runs the gift department at the bookstore is moving to her own storefront, and offered me a job there that will be more laid back and less stressful, and really, the bookstore needs someone willing to work more hours than I wanted to (and I had already turned down the offer of more hours at least once), so I think this is best for everybody, except possibly that I'd like to keep that mystique.

Yesterday was my last day at the store, and I think I caught the eye of a girl who I might, possibly, have been interested in. Maybe I'm just rebounding off of that private post I just made, but being my last day and all, I really should have tried something. It's a real shame.

I'm in a book again!

2007-06-11T19:15:41Z

Quite a while back Dock invited me to do robots for another how-to manga art book, and I ended up contributing about 50 pictures (not just robots). The book is called 500 Manga Characters, I just received a free sample copy and that link is to Amazon's product page so it must be ok to talk about it. ;) It's really a pretty nice little book, and not so much a how-to (same with the other one) as a fancy digital coloring book, with EVERY drawing included in the 500+ page tomb and then duplicated on CD for your digital-coloring amusement. Dock's other books focus heavily on digital coloring so this strikes me as a pretty nice suppliment for people who aren't into drawing so much but do like to play around with color. I was pretty proud of what I submitted, but at the same time seeing the book makes me wish I had worked even harder.

Actually also seeing my art up along with the Sweatdrop crew is pretty exciting, the page layouts are attractive and everything looks good, but my art jumps out at me because I seem to use a thicker line than everyone else. I was working larger than the suggested guidelines, but it still looks a little rougher than I might like. At the same time, it also emphasizes the fact that my fatty lines are more varied in their width and maybe a bit more interesting for that. I just wish I'd managed to achieve the same elegance everyone else has.

I'm still working on my The O but I'm so lazy.. Hips are done and most of the torso, just need to sit down and work on it more. I went to a store in Yakima to pick up more paint, and ended up finding the colors I would have liked in the first place to work on the S Gundam (so maybe later?) but what I really want is a refill on my Nato Black, an attractive not-quite-black that I'm running really low on. At the rate I'm going I suppose ordering some online would get it here long before I finish.

Danny and I have been working on yet another new game, and that's where my time has been going lately. This makes three games we've "delayed indefinitly" since Sky Puppy but we're both very excited about this one and that's pretty much what the other ones were lacking in... It makes me sad to ditch projects, but at the same time I'm quick to look past it and optimistic about the task at hand. I should have an update about it soon. :)

The O and The Legs

2007-05-05T02:21:00Z

I haven't been working on anything much, but I did get the legs put together a few days ago before I decided to get all neglectful. Next I'm working on the hip assembly (you can see that in pieces here too). There's more skirt to this guy than any other robot I've built before, mainly in that a lot of the parts have both a front and back side to them, and there's also The O's secret arms hidden in the front skirt, so it's a little more complex since those need to fit in there too. The instructions always suggest building the legs and then the arms, but I like to skip ahead to the hips and then the torso, so I'm always building "up" and the parts I make have something to attach to. Also, they look kind of cool without arms sometimes. :)

I found Chousoujuu Mecha MG marked down over at Play Asia the other day, so I've been playing that a bit recently (neglecting Super Paper Mario, ah..). My opinion is still a bit un-formed on this one, it's much simpler and more straight forward than Gigantic Drive AKA (Radical Alchemic Drive), but a lot better than Remote Control Dandy SF, as well. The story is really grating on me though (I had the same problem with Dandy), they give you this big map where all the encounters take place on, but it procedes entirely linearly, and a lot of the "stages" are just conversation sequences that completely fail to capture my interest. I remember thinking Gigantic Drive's story was sort of entertaining and at least complimented the gameplay, but here I just couldn't care less and it completely gets in the way of smashing other robots. If I couldn't read Japanese I might be less bothered by it, but since I can I am compelled to at least skim it and see if anything is of interest.

Shooowtiiiime!

2007-04-29T20:26:41Z

Long time and no posts. Yep, that's me. The other day was my birthday, and I decided to do something fun so I got started on one of those Gundam models sitting in my closet. Since I moved not only have they been sitting in their boxes, but those boxes have also been placed in other boxes, so, the extent to which these things need to be unearthed is a little more daunting than I expected, and I'm a little surprised by how many have (and I only went through the first box!) This doesn't even count the more recent purchases or the MGs that are too big to fit into other boxes. Like, I was at Sakura-con and I came across a good deal on the MG Acguy and that was just irresistable, as you may or may not know he is my favorite! I also found the Advance of Zeta HG Hazel kit (I was surprised to learn that this and the other AoZ originals are named after characters from Watership Down!), which I've been wanting but not making any effort to track down. That one had a more "absurd" markup on it, I felt, but for a kit that starts at 1400yen or whatever, I figure it's not that much to pay either way. It's been said that I need to lay off those markups a bit, because even though I have been to Japan and know how much these things REALLY cost (ps it's written on the box usually), it is still a lot cheaper than actually going to Japan and buying it, so...

..But what if I was going to Japan anyway? Well, I'm not.

Anyway, I settled on my HG 'The O' which was a gift from my dad a couple years ago. So, that's good right, building gifts? Birthday gifts even! The truth though, I was going for my S-Gundam but I wanted to get some extra paints for it and Jerrols no longer stocks the kind I like (that would be the Tamiya Acrylic), so I had to make do with what I've got. And I like The O plenty.

So far I've just been working on his legs, and they're really quite neat. There's a "skeleton"-like understructure, the back bits, and the yellow armor is attached on top. I did a test-fit, pretending to be all Hobby Japan-like, figuring out how the leg went together. The especially neat part is those red tubes. One of them plugs loosely into pockets on both the leg and the ankle, so it moves as the ankle does, and almost looks as if the individual segments are moving. To paint that bit, I did the trick where you mix thinner and paint together, and then apply it to the model and it runs into the grooves, so you get nice dark "lines" inbetween the segments. This worked ok, but I wasn't able to wipe away the excess, my paper towels just sucked it all back up! The result is that the whole thing looks dirty, which also works, and it does have the lines darkened, so that was the desired effect.

I was also going to try it to do the panel-lines on the exterior, but--I've heard about this--yellow acrylics are thin already, and as I painted in the first place it took at least three passes on most pieces to get a smooth covering. When I added the thinned paint, there was still so much thinner in it that it took the yellow paint right off! (Didn't have that problem on the red!) So it's back to the Gundam pen for me. Actually I prefer to use a regular art pen, it seems to give a better line for me.

For the yellow coloring on this guy, I've gone with a duller, more military-looking kind of yellow. I didn't want to take away any of his The O-ness by going with a seriously different color scheme, though I have seen some nice paint variations, but the cartoon yellow is just too much, I think this looks a lot more sophisticated. Fatness aside, The O is somewhat regal-looking, so I think it's better for him. I'm also mixing in a few grey bits as well. The grey I've picked doesn't stand out too much, but anything to break up that solid yellow just a bit.

I've also opted to do a bit of detail-painting on the internal part of the leg. You can see I've dotted it extensively with chrome silver. When I was in Japan, I don't recall when this happened, but my friend Dane saw the Chrome Silver and said I had to get it, like "more chrome is more better!" or something. I ended up getting it, and it turns out I love it. I wouldn't want to do a whole model in chrome, but highlighting mechanical bits with it is a blast, it really looks like metal when you put it on the right parts. There aren't soo many parts where I could get away with the chrome here, I think, so I just went crazy on the skeleton (there's some grey in there too). I'd probably have more than a pair of unfinished legs right now if I hadn't bothered with the detailing, but I think it'll be a nice touch when it's done.

Yesterday I went to my first wedding ever. Apparently my friends are just not the marrying type, so this was new for me. Now that I think about it, it really was not all that interesting (not that I expected it to be), but basically I just came away with a lot of thoughts like "well, if I was going to do this, I would do it like this.." so all of a sudden it's very easy to see how people (by that I mean girls who have attended many weddings) quickly build up very specific lists of exactly how they want their weddings to be.

It was also done in a church--the same church whose youth group turned me off all organized religion forever by telling me that my parakeet would not go to heaven, so that should be an indicator right there--and the priest or whoever was up there reading off the vows took every chance to remind us that this union was, above all else, sanctified by God and all that is holy. And the couple, are they religious? Not that I'm aware, but I guess their families are. But seeing this--nothing like the vows that we see on "secular television"--it becomes very easy to see why the churchies don't want homosexuals getting married. I mean, I don't have a problem with it personally, but it's clear that these people have TOO MUCH invested in it. I guess that's really their own problem, but having seen this, I understand. That's something, I think.