Week #033: Community Impact, Transformed

Unfortunately, no, it isn't yet time to begin with the starters. I'm glad to see the poll getting enough hits to make it interesting, though, and I'm sure it'll just continue to pick up as we move along. You guys really seem to like the mythical starters! and it seems you really want to see the dark starters revealed as well.

What I am here to deliver, is what was asked about what I get up to when I'm not working.

Some weeks ago, I founded an "Alphabet Challenge" with a friend of mine. I believe this was just after I got over a cold and I was looking to ignite my artistic fire once more. The challenge was simple: draw a character for each letter of the alphabet, though we had the option of deciding on our own secondary themes as well (for example: for a bit I considered doing all Mega Man characters, and later considered all females).

These three are only the first three (A, B and C for those playing along at home) in the challenge, which are unfortunately all I've made time for so far.

If there's enough interest in these, I'll be sure to post the next three once I get back to the project.

In other news, there's a pretty amazing community movement happening over at the SEGA forums. Challenged by a developer from Sumo Digital, the studio behind Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed (which is a game you should really look into if you like racers!), the community has assembled a large cast of petitions in an effort to show their support for a strong DLC presence to be made in the game. If you're a SEGA fan, whether it be classic or modern, I strongly encourage you to get involved and sign a few petitions to show your support for characters like Vectorman, Ristar, Bayonetta and many others! The movement is doing well, but they're looking for it to do even better before it's December 1st deadline.

It should be no surprise that I support such a movement with how much we here at SND Games like to involve our own community!

That's about it for this week, but I'll see you all again soon.

Week #020: Now For Something Completely Different

It may look like I haven't really done a whole lot since we finished up Maximus and got him into the game. While I did take some time off for recharging after that, you can rest assured that we're still hard at work polishing the game up. You just can't always immediately notice it.

If you've been following the progression notes, you may have noticed my entry for "character fixes/polish". This is what I've been focusing my attention on for the last week. While everything may look fine and dandy with the characters at the moment, this is because they're equipped in their full armor sets. Beneath that there are numerous graphical errors that, while hidden by the equipping of a full armor set, would have become eye sores once the characters were only wearing a few select pieces of armor instead of the whole set. Instead of putting this off until such equipment management became possible, I decided to get it done ahead of time.

Again, this is unfortunate since it's mostly behind-the-scenes work that not a lot of people will see. Even Sam and Dan were sometimes at a loss in regards to what I was talking about working on! I tried to take some before and after screenshots to show as examples this week, but I felt they weren't doing a good job of expressing just what was going on.

Instead, I have this for you.

For those of you interested in what kind of stuff I draw in the little free time I allow myself for that kind of thing, I also posted my rendition of Cave Story's Curly Brace over on my deviantArt account about a week ago.