Hisashii nou. If you’ve been following my Twitter feed, then you know the primary culprit for my absence. Really enjoying Zelda Musou. Now, you might recall that I was expecting to get a good bit of writing done on an extended road trip last weekend. Well, that was the plan, but then I fired up Kakusei (as in Fire Emblem: Kakusei) and there went my day. Crom x Reflet is my OTP. Battle couple extraordinaire. S-ranked their social link before I even had Chapter 5 beat.

Anyway, on to the topic at hand, I took a break from gaming yesterday and so I got a little writing done, doing some work on Chapters 29 and 32 of Tico4. A few weeks of focused work and I should be done with the story. I’m not quite sure what I’ll switch over to next. We’ll see. Stay tuned.

Just a bit of housekeeping to note. You know those tabs up top? Originally they would lead you to pages keyed to major categories for entries, but they would only display the first page correctly. Trying to view older posts wouldn’t work unless you selected the category link on the sidebar instead. I’ve since uncovered a plugin that resolves this issue. Now clicking on the tab has the same effect as the link in the sidebar and you can view all entries categorized as “WIP Update”, “Commentary” and “Ramblings” respectively. This is a can I’ve been kicking down the line almost ever since I started this blog, but now I’ve finally resolved the issue. One less thing for me to worry about. Enjoy the new and improved navigation.

I managed to get some writing done for a change, mostly finishing Chapter 22 of Tico4 and doing a little work on Chapter 24. Maybe more will follow. It’d be nice to get back on track. We’ll see. Stay tuned.

Partially due to the fact that spam comments were piling up, I felt the need to check in. Contrary to what you may have thought, I have not in fact fallen off the face of the earth. What time I had to spare for writing last week was devoted to reviewing Tico3 before wrapping things up. Speaking of which, I need to update several chapters with some minor edits in the near future. I didn’t get around to working on Tico4 any and I’ll have to debate whether or not I want to pick that up or switch over to TTWC1. We’ll see. I may not get much writing done at all as I have a significant bit of work to do. Stay tuned.

I’ve pretty well finished Ionathas’ Chapter 2 of TTWC1. Honestly, it turned out a fair bit differently than what I originally envisioned, but that might be a good thing. I will tease one thing: Duke Cronos gets a bit of redemption in this one. Given how poorly his own section of the book went for him, it’ll be a nice change of pace. In other news, Chapter 3 shouldn’t take very long to finish as I’ve already written the dialog and just have to flesh out some narrative. I may even get through Chapter 4 before I switch back to working on Tico3. How far will I get? Stay tuned.

I pretty well finished up the first section of Chapter 19 of Tico3, added some dialog to the second part and jumped ahead to do a little on Chapter 20 as well. At this rate, I’ll have a buffer for Tico3 to match my lead on TTWC1.

Look for the update this evening (Stateside time). Until then.

I finished Cronos’ Chapter 3, but I’m going to let it simmer a while before I go back over it and prep it for the site. In other words, it’s getting pushed back to Friday, but at least it’s still coming out this week. Of course, the delays here could mean that the next chapter of Tico3 gets pushed back a week. We’ll see, though.

I’d had some issues with my FTP until recently and so I wasn’t able to test out this code that would get the tabs functioning the way I wanted them to. That issue has since been resolved and now those tabs up top conveniently display all the posts in the given category. (Yes, I know you can get the same effect by clicking the category link on the sidebar, but the tabs are just an additional convenience.)

It’s a little embarrassing, but not being a PHP whiz, I had to narrow down the catid for the targeted categories through trial and error. No, it’s not a particularly elegant solution, but I got the job done. Now let’s see if I can get any significant amount of writing done today. Stay tuned.

I mentioned on Twitter that I should provide more detail into the animation project Kazuya’s working on. The idea is to make a KoG1 short in a style reminiscent of Puchi Eva. I’m thinking of using the fight with Sonia in Rowan from Chapter 5.

The task would be one thing if Kazuya was already a proficient 3D modeler/animator, but he’s still learning the ropes and I’m doing a little study myself to give him more meaningful direction. (It’s almost entirely conceptual on my part as he’s the one with the software way across the pond.) If you’ve been on Twitter, you’ve seen the base model in progress I posted (over much protest on Kazuya’s part). With the base model as the starting point, a few variants will be put together and from there, it’s a matter of hair styling and costuming to make those basic models into the characters that need to be on the stage.

There are a lot of assets that need to be put together and I’m kinda pushing Kazuya just to get it done within a reasonable timeframe rather that indulge our mutual perfectionism. If we can make this hurdle, we should learn enough to do even better next time.

Part of the deal with 3D work is that if you get the assets right, you can just reuse them rather than recreating them from scratch each time. Well, it also applies to 2D work, especially when Flash is involved (and that’s also something I’d like to explore).

Anyway, I’ll try to tease more production shots in the course of the coming months and maybe even extra stuff like animatics and such. Stay tuned.

My idea is to organize this blog by relevant page while still showing the most recent ten or so posts on the home page, but I’m still researching a way to do that efficiently. I’ll try to get it sorted out in the near future. I’ve been seeing some potential avenues of approach, so I’ll try to keep at it in the time I can spare from everything else that’s vying for my attention.