The Sad But True Story Of Ray Mingus, The Lumberjack Of Bulk Rock City, And His Never Slacking Strive To Exploit The So Far Undiscovered Areas Of The Intention To Bodily Intercourse From The Opposite Species Of His Kind, During Intake Of All The Mental Conditions That Could Be Derived From Fermentation

This week has been a week of, if not actual toil, one of heavy emotional strife, having to contend with the grueling graphical scars that befalls upon one’s creations when one scale them up because apparently even though they were made first, since they don’t fit the furniture we have they have to be enlarged, leaving this poor worker, this mere servant, to watch the fruits of his figurative loins grow up in all the wrong ways.

Because with the end of the tunnel looming ever closer, the matters of time and space conspire to steal any hope of gently guiding these poor lost souls to achieve the greatness that they so deserve, doing touch ups here, slimming down lines there, enhancing them so that they can become proper adults with proper careers, maybe even finding and settling down other sprite-sheets.

But no, instead we get this, these dregs of society, drunkards and junkies not fit to shine a pimp’s shoes.

Blurry, discoloured and utterly unwholesome.

I mean, just look at them, look at them and despair!

Because the scale tool is never generous, never benevolent. Especially when scaling something up.

While some tools give with one hand and takes with the other, the scale tool truly takes with both, takes and destroys with fiery hate and chilling malice.

It shudders the mind when one thinks about this process, this evil of evils, and one ask himself, would it hurt, being transformed to something like that?

Do they still cry themselves to bed every night?

I know I do.

But anyway yeah that’s basically what I’ve been doing this week, adding scaled-up variations of the sprite-sheets and fiddling with some txt’s so that their frames (hopefully) work properly.

Since the furniture debacle, it was decided that both versions of 120 pixels and 144 were needed, and hopefully the powers that be will be able to pick one of them so that we can move on from this dreadful scaling up business.

Yes, it’s really been that simple, open a sprite-sheet, press the scale tool, put in the proper amount of pixels, press scale, cry internally at how the scale tool ruins the few good parts left in the images, repeat. Always repeat. Except when you shouldn’t.

But I guess this week’s general complete opposite of busyness has been a blessing in disguise, bringing some much-needed time from the front lines to throw at that gorram 2d-report.

Sorrow Throughout The Nine Worlds

It seems like the guard in the wheelchair mentioned in last week’s blog was sadly laid off shortly before our main character decided to embark on his glorious and not at all sneaky mission to the land of freedom fries and liberty cabbage.

For a number of reasons, mostly of the chronological variety, with everybody’s hated Grandfather Time biting at our proverbial ankles every step of the way, it was decided that instead of adding a whole new guard version.

It would simply be better to polish the ones we had, and as such that has been what I’ve been doing.

More specifically, I have been refining and more importantly centring Guard#1’s various animations in order to make switching feel less abrupt and weird, so now instead of having his hat fly all over the place it’ll be more or less in the same standardised position, so that our producer won’t have an aneurysm.

Also I reckon the experience will be somewhat improved for the viewing pleasure of the players.

But really it’s mostly to keep the producer from rupturing a blood vessel because of overexposure and dying a horrible, horrible death.

The actual work process has mainly been a lot of measuring, lots and lots of measuring, and some moving, the occasional cutting and pasting, some more measuring, bit of erasing and re-drawing where necessary, and after that, you guessed it, more measuring.

‘Course with all this thrice-damned measuring I somehow accidentally forgot to take notes, meaning that I’d have to re-do that whole process twice more for the other guard variations, which is a less than ideal situation to find oneself in.

And of course since one cannot just walk into Mordor, meaning in this case that if the other guards don’t exactly match pixel by pixel the standards and measurements set by Guard#1, I would be the one having the aneurysm, if you pardon the pun.

A public and not at all secret lead artist’s meeting was held, where 100% of the people present voted Aye for of simply re-colouring Guard#1 and adding the different hats, what with the fancy and way too subtle stuff done on #2 and #3 had been too vague to actually be noticed, which is a bit of a shame, but oh well, live and learn.

With that decided, a small measure of peace can be found in this wretched mind, because while the workload went slightly to the upwards direction, at least it’ll be guaranteed to be nice and symmetric, confined to the templates set for the sake of one’s continued mental health.

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Running Guard

This time around, I present you with the grand première of nameless guard #2, although I guess he would be more of an agent than a regular guard.

At any rate he’s got a fancy fedora and a differently coloured jacked showing a minor attempt at highlights, ‘course those highlights proved to be way too subtle for this resolution, but still being rather inexperienced with sprite sheets I didn’t really want to risk going too strong and having to spend hours fine-tuning them so that they won’t clash to much with their neighbouring frames.

The process has been a rather simple one, with mainly selecting and re-colouring the jacket on all sheets and copy-pasting the fedora over the guard caps, although some re-drawing proved necessary, not to mention having to do some final fine-tuning on both guard#1 and guard#2’s running animation, since their arm motions were a bit wonky and they somehow had ended up looking like they were limping.

Now I don’t want to be accused of being able-ist or something, but I would rather prefer to have these particular security guards and agents being able run without limping. Granted a wheel-chaired guard could be relatively easy to depict, with his flash light directly mounted on the frame, leaving at least one hand free for such things as acceleration so that he’d still be able to pursue our main character, guns blazing.

Although the knocked-out animation would be bothersome, especially if it meant that the wheelchair tipped over, which would make the following “no longer unconscious” animation even harder to make, I mean, how strong would his arms have to be to un-tip himself?

Then again, while Joe Swanson is a cartoon character I’m sure there are plenty of wheelchair-bound people with damn strong arms.

‘Sides this is the FBI we are talking about, (or are we?), I’m sure the handicapped people they hire for night-time guarding are mighty enough for such things.

In fact, I’ll ask my producer right now!

But anyway that is now a future story to tell.

Now where was I?

Ah yes, the re-skinned version of guard#1.

The reason for our beloved guard#2’s existence is simple, variation is the spice of life.

Now some may say that spice is the spice of life, but they’re drunk and we shouldn’t listen to them.

Variation is key, I tell you, instead of facing hordes of light-blue-jacketed guards with flash lights we now have a god 50/50 mix of light-blue-jacketed guards and dark-blue-jacketed guards with different hats.

The third hatted version will be finished sometime later this week, and as such he’s not even worth mentioning here.

He could of course get the chance of gaining his 15 minutes of fame next week, but the look my producer gave me regarding the guard in the wheelchair tells me I’ll have something more interesting to write about by then.