When Unreleased Games Make You Sad

I’m so mixed with conflicting feelings right now, I don’t even know how to begin.

To most people, I understand that the event is wholy insignificant and something that you would shrug off in a day or two, but to me, it spells the end of an era, a dream realized too late, and how time can truly make some things in life irrecoverable.

WARNING: Long rant ahead, so I’ll just clip the history lesson out and leave it for those willing to trend the road to my past. And by long, I mean it.


I will first present the meterials I saw that inspired the feelings:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/news.php3?date=2003-9-24

First of all, Penny Arcade has every reason to do the things they do – they understand games that rock and games that suck and those intricate things about how games are made and how games work, and they poke fun at things with a true conscience; they don’t hype or bash things because they want to be “hip” or want to be the “in” crowd. Which is precisely why it hurts that they’re bashing Doom 3, and there’s nothing anyone can say to defend it.

Of course, those facts would give you the least bit of clues why I would feel so shocked and depressed over the entire ordeal. Well, since we were on the topic of traveling down memory lane, let’s take it all the way back to when I dream about what I’m going to be, shall we?

About 12 years ago, our family bought our very first PC. It was a 80286 with a monochrome screen and a single floppy disk drive, but it was actually an impressive equipment for its time. Computer softwares were hard to find back then, and games were virtually non-existant. There were, however, PC magazines that my brother was able to obtain, and from those magazines came games – ones that you actually had to type in yourself into the computer in order to have it run, and so, in those days we were easily amused with small text adventure games and the almighty dice betting game, which had me hooked for months with its digit dice throwing action.

Close to where we lived back then, there was a computer store that we frequently visited just to stare at the new VGA color monitor and this amazing thing called Sound Blaster, and to demonstrate the power of these two things they always displayed the demo for the most addictive game of its time – Castle Wolfenstein 3D. We would stare at that same pre-recorded demo for hours, looking at the same dog and guards being killed in the same way and the same route taken, and being amazed everytime by the blood pumping action and gory sound effects. I looked and the game and thought, “Whoever made this thing is GOD” (that is before I met the REAL God, but let’s save that part of me for another entry some other time).

Years later, when we replaced our old computer with a 486, the computer gaming industry was just taking off. If you knew anything about computer software and Hong Kong (Hint: Arrrrrrrr), you would know that we sure got our share of games off the shelf as soon as they came in from either Taiwan or the US. It was around that time when Doom and Doom 2 came out, and it stood out because once again, no game was even close compared to Doom… it was THE first person shooter and any computer gamer who wasn’t playing it was an idiot, period. We worshipped id, even from overseas, and we wouldn’t mind handing the world over to the guys who made these games if that’s what it takes for them to make another one.

Then, we took our leaves from the pirate paradise to the United States, where we were once again cut away from all the games we wanted and isolated into playing the games we still had over and over again. Aside from the occasional packages of games mailed in by my brother’s loyal friends, we were bored and frustrated and we didn’t like going out because nobody could understand us (in all sense). Once again I dug back into my old copies of QBasic and started writing codes again – this time, without any source code. I picked up old dusty books about programming from the library and swallowed the knowledge whole, and spend all of my free time writing one game after another. Whenever I finish one, I would force my brother to sit in front of the monitor and play, reluctantly, for hours until he faked a thumbs up and I started on a new game with a smile on my face.

My brother found his escape from me when he went to college. Because he was a CS major (in UCI no less), he found his way into archives of web pages and newsgroup posts about game programming. Back then, people were excited about anything they discovered about game programming, and whatever they had they were more than happy to show it. My brother, who started to become as interested in game programming as I was, started digging up files on drawing fractals, rendering fire (that was a favorite for many coders), manipulating bitmaps… anything and everything one needs to write their very own commercial quality blockbuster.

Here is a little side story: as I started writing games for the VGA 13h mode (320×200 with 256 colors), I realized that stick figures were no longer good enough for games, and that I had to actually learn how to draw in order to make better graphics for my games. It was then that I finally started seriously learned how to draw, and this is why it became my first major hobby today.

So, back to the story. One day, during a day of the usual file digging, my brother found the source code for Castle Wolfenstien 3D – the very same one that we spent our days gawking and dreaming over in the yore days of our first computer. Furthermore, we learned about the very story of John Carmack and John Romero – people like us who made their way into the big leagues all on their own. There was an entire generation of game programmers who wanted to follow their footsteps, and I became a diciple out of a river of followers. I started taking game making as serious business at this point – I wanted to make good games, games that can actually sell, games that the world would play and be happy about. Lo and behold – all the tools I wanted I have, and so I’ve spent years alone, living in my own little world of games I wanted to make and games I was making. Even though I got a copy of Quake 2 at the time as not to lapse out of the id chronology, the Daikatana incident was completely obscure to me – my world was mine and nothing else in the world mattered to me. Game was my life.

But even as I wanted things to remain that way forever, things changed, and slowly but surely the world became something I could not understand. As I upgraded my computer to an AMDK350 and complimented my video card with a Voodoo 2, a wave of second generation hardware acclerated video games came out and rocked the world. Unreal, Final Fantasy 7 – these things moved the gaming universe from 2D to 3D, and those low level algorithms that I once cherished were easily replaced by Direct3D and 3D Studio Max. I looked at the credit screens for these newer games and noticed how the list started to grow – game artist became an entire studio of game artists, there were modelers, skinners, and a host of other positions in game making that I could not possibly fill all by myself. So I still looked upon id as a beacon of something that’s a one man army and could still make it out in this changing world. Quake 3 was about to be released and I sold my soul to pray that those guys would prove the world wrong, that an elite few would make it, that I – following behind them – would make it.

Of course, Unreal Tournament came out when Quake 3 did and on a head-to-head clash, Quake 3 lost in almost every aspect, hands down. There began a hollow feeling inside me that I could not explain, even when the real world opened up to me and I actually worked with and made friends with real people in my real life. Perhaps I realized something that I could not explain already, but I didn’t want to admit it, and so the days go on and I continued to do my thing while my brother graduates and went to work very briefly for Blizzard.

I remembered the days when we literally jumped up and down like little kids when my brother recieved the letter that said he was hired; we haven’t done something like that since we were little kids fighting over Nitendo games. And so it came as a far greater shock when two months later, my brother simply came home as he usually did one day and said “I quit working there.”. At first, he simply told me that he wanted to work on a RTS, but Diablo 2 was the only game in production at the moment and he hated every aspect of it, so he quitted. I didn’t buy into that excuse at all. I knew him, and I knew he was far more patient than I was and if he wanted to work on something like WarCraft 3, he would have waited his life out in that office for a chance to work at it. This being personal business, and our family having a tradition of not probing person business, I avoided the big questions because I knew I shouldn’t be asking them. However, I understood also that his path would be something that I’m likely follow and I would want to know what made him change his mind when we were riding the same dream for so long, so one day we actually got into an argument over the topic and he gave me a grave statement that’d stay in my mind for a long, long time:

“Look, you may not understand this, but the gaming business is not what I thought it would be; I don’t like the way it is right now, and so I will not go back there again, ever.” and with that, the question was never raised again.

Then, I left High School and entered college myself. I didn’t worry too much over my career at first; I’m still riding high on my dream and I was busy having so many other problems with life that I couldn’t possibly be spending time trying to figure out what my brother meant when he said what he said. During this time I slashed my game making hours because school work finally caught up with me, and my knowledge of programming was starting to slip and fall behind until I stopped writing games at one point and simply continued my drawing career, which spawned from my involvement with the online artist community and ended in a big bang in that trip to Balitmore in 2001, which I recorded earlier in this very same LJ if you’re interested in reading about it.

By the time I transfered to UCI (you’re probably thinking, “thank God we’re finally talking about our own timeline now”), whatever game programming knowledge I had was basically trash, but I found Flash (which is essentially a perfect game engine) and NewGrounds (the perfect place to “sell” Flash games online). My dream career took a twisted turn as I now focus on making games for flash and putting them up on NG as my testing ground. My first two experiments were brutally torn by the crowd, both with good and valid reasons. I learned my mistake and knew what I had to do to get better, and so I did. By the time I was about to put Ronin up on NewGrounds, I was actually putting more than just a game at stake – in my heart, I want to redo that Quake 3 vs UT match up, my games against professional works done by entire game studios, a no bars held contest on a website where hundreds view your entry in minutes and you could rise from nothing to fandom in days, if not hours.

It was precisely why I wrote what I wrote about Ronin here in my LJ, although I didn’t realize that beforehand.

As a result, Ronin did well, but eventually it lost its way to bigger projects led by bigger groups of people who had more professional resources. I don’t regret a thing I put into that game – I made it so that I myself could’t possibly find a fault in it, but where my ability lacks the game would fall short, and there’s no denying that I had reached my human limits as a single person effort. Summer came and I had more than enough time to rethink my grand scheme of being “game programmer elite” in contemporary times as a little bit unrealistic. Combined with today’s conservative economy, I thought that I couldn’t possibly land a job in the gaming industry right now with what I have, especially since I could contribute to most things but didn’t specialize, plus I was totally blind to modeling, skinning, or mapping. Even as I toll people I wanted to do it, secretly I was building a coffin for the dream, as it was a thing of the past and it was probably going to make it.

So today, years after id came from nothing to gaming giant to geek cult Gods to the center of controversies, they are finally about to fall back into nothing. I can see it coming from miles away – years of delay, John Romero taking his leave and making his share of mistakes, and now this. Like hearing the music pump up as a big breasted bimbo walks into the shower in a horror film, you scream and pray “don’t go there” when fate forces things to go nowhere but there. I will cry when Doom 3 comes out, I will cry when it gets bombed, and I will finally pound that nail on the grave – no, the last nail upon the many nails that I’ve pounded in the past that sufficiently break the wood coffin down into wood splinters and ashes. I watched as two things that I love and respect from the past and present – id and PA, clash and tear my heart apart.

And that is how much one little rant means to me. Now, with the better half of my life gone, I’ll have to start from the ground up. Not only that, but I’m walking into an economy that’s no longer willing to pass free money out to amateurs; neither do I have a lot of time to learn anything else, since it is my last year in school and my debt will rear its ugly head very, very soon, even before this school year ends (financial aid will not cover my spring quarter). Perhaps the thing that’s going to walk into a shower and get chopped up by a murderer is I.

O woe, woe to the world indeed.

Dream

Dreams have an interesting way to twist the simple happenings of daily life into wierd but nonetheless fantastic things. Because my alarm clock is broken, my sleep schedule has gone to the abyss. Henceforth I’ve been able to record dreams more often because now I wake up at the worst of times, like 3:30 in the morning.

The story began as I was being invited to a birthday party of sorts. We were all standing in the middle of a dance hall, but the lights are fully on and there was no music. Everyone anticipated as the birthday girl and her friends walked onto the stage. First surprise: they spoke in Cantonese, when obviously more than half of the crowd can’t understand a word. Confusion and discontent spread as the girl continue to make her birthday address entirely in Cantonese.

Finally, blaring music started. Whatever it was, it made the crowd very unhappy, and they started to leave the hall first in ones and twos, then the stream of people who walked out grew larger until everyone but me and the five girls were left in the hall. The birthday girl broke down into tears. A friend tried to comfort her, and another approached me and asked in Cantonese, “How could this have happened? We have so many things planned for them, and this is how they treated us?”

And so after a moment of thought, I replied, “Sometimes, just because we planned for others doesn’t mean that others will have the act the way we planned them to act. I’m sorry for this, but you can still go out and have a meal (because I don’t know the time) with her. You can still make this a good birthday for her.”

I left the party afterwards. The rest was a blur and it wasn’t long before I woke up.

I wanted to record this because I have not recorded dreams in a while, and there were good ones that were left unrecorded. The story also marks several events that I want to remember, but I don’t want them to be a direct record either for the parties involved in real life. Finally, because this dream had been sewn together by several different facts, don’t take offense in this, George. We all loved the birthday party and this definitely was not some subconscious way for me to backstab you for whatever reason you can think of; of all people, you should have a better idea of what this dream records than the rest who are reading this entry right now.

Underworld

I went to see it this afternoon.

Simply put, you’ll enjoy it if you enjoyed the Blade series… nothing more, nothing less. While it does feel like there’s a bit of RPG class timeline/history, and a bit of Matrix slickness, it’s basically a bunch of people killing each other… and once again, like Blade, in gory fashions.

Down The Memory Lane Pt. 1: Rare Warriors II Card!

What, you haven’t heard this trading card game before? Where have you been for the last 10 years, anywhere except my backyard?

Alright, the jig’s up. The “Warriors” card series was a project of mine for a long, long time in the past. The first edition dates all the way back to my grade school days. I was reading a book about games one day and found out that dices can roll things other than a D6… I was especially excited about the D100, and this facination along with some rural knowledge about a card game called Magic: The Gathering compelled me to make my own trading card game out of back covers of notebooks.

The first set of trading card games are based on the various famous weapons used during the Dynasty Warriors period, believe it or not, so weapons like the Twin Dragon (Liu Bei) or the Moon Cresent (Lu Bu) were all there in the first edition of Warriors. Since there’s no store that sell D10 dices anywhere, we have to replace the rolls with two draws from a deck of hard using 1-10 of two different suits.

The set that you are looking right now were done during my high school years. Every card had the same identical background created by tracing an image… but because this is done on index cards, the tracing process has to be done by first placing the index card below the original picture, then trace heavily with a pencil… that leaves a groove that I can retrace on the index card with a pencil. It was hard, tiring work, but I really enjoyed how professional it looked as a result of the hard work.

The basic mechanics of the game is even easier than MtG. Every player starts with a 100 life points and a deck of 7 cards from the card pile. During each turn, you declare an attack by throwing down a weapon card, and the defender throws down a weapon or a shield to defend the attack. The attacker then makes a D100 roll. If the roll is less than or equal to the difference between the two card’s attributes, then the attack is successful and the defender subtracts the dice roll number from his life. There’s some variations like spells and enhancement cards that stacks onto attack/defend cards, but it doesn’t deviate much from the luck based dice rolling basis of the game.

Even though I recovered a good sum of these cards, the deck that I have is too small to actually play a game. Maybe someday, when I once again have the time and energy to do this again, I’ll make a new generation of “Weapons” card and sell it to Wizard of the Coast…. or something like that.

Yo Listen Up, There’s a Story About A Little Guy That Lives In A Blue World…

I officially declare the walls in my room BLUE. After roughly a week of moving things around and painting, all of my walls are now sky blue. I would have painted it royal blue, which is my favorite color, but I agreed with my father that it would make the room too dark and gloomy, so I make do with what I can.

In the process of cleaning up I’ve found some rather memorable items, some of which I will share after I put everything into their new rightful place. Out of the items that I probably will not want, there’s a BIG, chunky subwolfer that I hardly ever use, a stereo system where the CD player and the right speaker seems broken. However, the speaker could be fixed, I’m just not sure how. There’s also a TI-89 for sale (no menu, but I’ll throw in a serial TI link cable for good measure), and an old, old original GameBoy for anyone who is interested.

I need to find a hobby that someone else can enjoy with.

because all the things that I do right now are basically solitary hobbies and it’s not very productive to my social career. Here’s the things I do/don’t do right now.

– I don’t play any type of sports. I do not excel in any type, I do not feel pleasure in playing (for the most part), and as much as I’d like it to be, DDR is not a type of sport.

– Reading and collecting trivial knowledge. This is a recent hobby, but other than being able to show off some rare knowlege and beat the contestants while watching Jeopardy, not very useful either.

– Drawing. Not really something to be shared. If you meet another artist, you either get envious or critical. There’s no middle ground, I swear on (all three of) my grandmothers’ grave(s).

– Game programming. This has to be the thing that I’m most proud of and least useful in life. Now that a career of it is out of question, I’d really have to ask why the fuck I’m still doing this, despite the increase in audience that I now enjoy.

– As for games, I play FPS exclusively now… never was much of a fan for console titles, and FF7 was the only SquareSoft title I bothered to play and finish… never owned a SNES, and the old NES classics that I enjoyed were made by a now defunct Japanese comapny.

I don’t enjoy playing traditional RPGs as much as I used to… every single modern RPG and their mother uses a real time system that requires more reflex than strategy, which I abhor… the last great ones that I’ve played would have to be Fallout 1 and 2, but they’re not coming back again, ever. MMORPGS destroys life and is completely out of question.

I’ve pledged to stay away from RTS games. I used to be okay with the idea, but I’ve grown to detest anything real time, including RTS. I found simulation games purposeless and boring after the first hour of gameplay, so that’s out of question for me too.

– Ever since I was forbidden from reading works of fiction since 13, I haven’t been touching a single fiction book except for the DragonLance series – and for some reason, nobody that I know had even read the series, much less become a fan of it. I’ve made a hobby out of reading technical texts and RPG rulebooks, but that’s hardly something you can talk about over a cup of coffee.

– Oh, I don’t drink coffee, either.

Random Entries

For the heck of it, since I’m cleaning up my closet, I’ve been reading my physical journal and decided that I’m going to post some interesting ones here, in no particular order. Depending on how much I told you about my past, you might or might not recognize the time and place when these things happened… but I hope that it’ll be a fun read.

May 12, 1998
Well, the entry had to start somewhere. I know that I’m a man who’ll never get things done, but we’ll see how that works out…

May 13, 1998
AP Test tomorrow. Didn’t study. Prepared to die. Shoot. (NOTE: I got a 3/5 on this AP Physics test)

November 7, 1998
(NOTE: this one is freaky, but true) A few days ago I picked up Anna’s headband again. The scent of her is gone. Something that has to do with her changed… she is not the girl I saw opening locker 68 [the locker directly next to mine when I was studying in LQHS] anymore. She’ll never be the same.

September 8, 1999
Finally, finally, I get to talk to someone – a girl – for the – well, at least engaged in normal converation – first – time! … she’s the shoulder lengthed hair girl with my dicussion group at my Phil 100 class. Out of the three cantonese [girls in the class] I got to talk to the cutest! Yes! Great Leap Forward…

January 25, 2000
I’m feeling awfully guilty the last few days… we started drawing from live in our drawing classing… it’s a live model.. all right, nude model. Female nude model… I mean, a real person… and THAT close! At least I tried to look like I’m not thinking about something else. I looked so naive in the class – but soon I found out that the others aren’t doing much better either (thank God).

August 15, 2000
It felt strange to me that when I was with her, everything seems so blury… so much unlike that clear understand I was looking for in an ideal relationship… why didn’t I ask about her past when I was with her? Strange, that I blocked myself from asking questions as simple as “what does your father do…” I’m I feel that I’m so shallow in trying to understand her…

Septermber 11, 2001
Perhaps to me, New York was still a hundred miles away; numbers becomes statistics… what struck me was that how many days we do have until the end of the world.

I suppose the most painful thing about a world shattering event is that painfully, everyone will need to move on… the rest of the world do not stop for us to mourn.

June 16, 2002
Japan is an incredible place. Just by walking around and breathing the air, you can already sense the difference between this place and other spots in the world that I’ve been to. English is close to being useless here, so it looks like I’ll have to pull out whatever Japanese phrases that I know for all it’s worth… (NOTE: this is before I started rigoriously watching anime or took Japanese classes)

and finally,

January 5, 2003
Today I’ve made a rather huge turning point in life. For the first time, I’ve considered someone important enough that I’ve put my own desires aside to accomodate them…

TOA Chronology

Yesterday I’ve mentioned TOA (Tide Of Avalance, in case you didn’t figure out) all of a sudden. For anyone who don’t know anything about it (*sigh* that is EVERYONE… well, except maybe Justin, since I did talk about it for 5 seconds during a casual lunch talk) I think I owe everyone an explaination of what this doo-do is and why I make such a fuss about it.

I’ve probably never mentioned it since for the last school year, I’ve basically put myself in “severe depression” mode, which effectively supress any knowledge I have about this old webcomic of mine. Now that I’m in “enamored” mode again (albeit only for a short while, I wager), TOA seems to be the first natural thing to come out of my head again.

Ahh, I should talk about the picture first~

Vonica, JS Comical! Character Page, 1997
This is obviously a composite picture of the same character from four different time periods. The first one was my first rendition of Vonica (as she was known back then), dated all the way back to… 1997! I was off by a year in my memory, but file update times do not lie. Like I said, although I obviously sucked at drawing back then, the internet was such a contained community that it’s actually possible to find my page via Yahoo! or other major search engines (I actually bothered to subscribe to them).

I had the longest run of this comic back then, as I had plenty of free time and naive enough to believe that I’m actually a “good” artist. I’m also empowered by the fact that I had a drawing tablet, so the comics came out weekly for a run of about 26 pages, 3 chapters worth of comics. Then I don’t know, must have been school or something, I’ve basically stopped all of a sudden.

I also mentioned this sometime (IRL) before, but originally Vonica was the main character’s (known as John back then) love interest. Because she was absent in the comic for a good two chapters, natural love sort of grew between Rose and John, who spent the next two chapters together… sadly, that makes Rose my favorite character over Vonica. In certain aspects she’s such a deeper character, both in terms of story content and personality.

Vonica, “ISLAM” Character Page, 1999
Years later, I reestablished my home at a free and ad free hosting service, redrival.com. I tried to revive the comic, and since there’s only one comic (unlike my original vision of running several comics on the same site), the entire site was aptly renamed “ISLAM” (which had nothing to do with the Islamic religion… I wasn’t even aware that such a religion existed back then. Actually, I’m frightful that people found my page in the past because they search for stuff related to the Islamic religion.. now that would be funny)

All in all, I redone the interface, rebuilt the story and character page, and had a run for a total of… about 6 strips? I tried to continue the storyline that I already had, but by this time my fear for lack of perfection is already sinking in. I started comparing myself to the few webcomics that I know, and found myself direly lacking in terms of quality (art and story)… so fearing that my 1997 strips are terribly outdated, I couldn’t bear to go on with the newer strips, so I simply dropped the matter and let it die.

Veronica, Tide Of Avalance Story Description Page, 2000
A year later I started college at OCC, and I also took my first life drawing class. Seeing that drawing the comic would greatly improve my drawing abilities (I also rebuilt some confidence in drawing), I’ve decided to renew the interface of the page, AGAIN. Now that I’m a little bit more knowledgable about the world (this is around the time when I started scouring the four corners of the internet for useless trivia info), the first order of business was to rename ISLAM into Tide of Avalance. I wanted the title to carry the feeling of being “far away”, but didn’t want the religious ties, so after watching Prince of Tides, I chose the name naturally.

In order to cover up the lack of quality in the early pages, I refurbished the rest of the site so there’s some updated recap for the earlier chapters in case anyone wanted to skip (because it does look really bad) and just read the newer pages. This scene, where the sun is setting in the prison camp and Veronica kissed John (still named John then) before the two parted ways to their end of destiny. Despite best photoshop efforts, I didn’t like how the picture turned out; for some reason the two looked like Disney characters…

Obviously, this run doesn’t go for long either. Not so much a fear of quality, but the fact that now I have more requirement to be filled on my pages, I found my layout skill lacking and so it usually takes more than a week just to get one page done. So the schedule slipped, from weekly to bi-weekly to the infamous id quote “It’s done when it’s done”, which means it’s basically never done.

Veronica, Keenspace Tide Of Avalance Main Menu Background, 2002
Shortly after I transferred to UCI, I was having plenty of free time and my enamored mode struck again, so I’ve decided to give it one more try on Keenspace, since that means I will have a regular audience and maybe that’ll push me to get works done weekly. I also redesigned a lot of characters at this time, since now I started collecting artbooks and changed my philosopy from “not reading other comics to keep my imagination ‘pure'” to “read everything you can find to boarden your base knowledge”. Unfortunately, I’ve made two fatal mistakes: 1) that the page will be shaded with digital cels, which takes FOREVER, and 2) that I’ll restart the story, which makes me lose all momentum since I feel like repeating myself again when I draw, so well, that lasted for 2 pages, no more. But I’m really, really happy with the results… those are like, quality that I can always go back and be happy with. Oh well.

I’m tempted to get it started AGAIN…

Picture Journal Entry


I’m sort of excited about these picture journal entries, so I’ll do one early today.

What began as a drawing of Ayu turned into a full fledged rendering of all the characters in my old, old (in fact, my first!) webcomic, Tide of Avalance. These are characters that lived in my head for a long, long time; it dates all the way back to my second year in High School when I get my first dial-up internet connection. Back then, the internet was so new that people found my webcomic just by using the search engine… those were the good old days.

From left to right: Ayu (from Kanon), Veronica (Top), Kaorin (Bottom), Thomas, Mona, Rose, and Samantha.

This is also a fine example of the terrible things that can happen when you don’t plan your picture ahead. Their footings are all different, some of their body part overlaps anonymously, and Tomas’s scale is just plain wrong (this is due to not paying attention when drawing on a flat surface, so things farther from the edge of the table looks smaller to the eye). I love everything on Rose though. The new armor layout looks reasonable and beautiful; the new face mask looks just right. I’ll need to think about how to work that curly hair but it’s fine for now.

As you can see, I’m not a very patient man… by the time I start working on the last two characters (Verionica and Kaorin), I slurred everything in order to just get it done. Veronica is behind Kaorin and yet she looks larger than the rest… *sigh*.

Tieing this to my daily life, ever since I cleared the upper bunk out of my bed, The wall on the bed side looks awfully lonely, so I’m going to work on a series of movie-poster like drawings in order to fill the space. Currently, I’m definitly going to do one on Tide of Avalance. I’m still undecided whether to reuse the T-Shirt picture or redraw one for the CAE mascots. The other two will most likely be posters for my other games: Ronin, GunBlaze, Dragon Saga… oooh, I should probably do one for my two personal mascot too. I’m also planning to paint the room light blue… yum.