ScrollBoss spending December celebrating how insanely magical 1989 was for video games. The December 27th update was my favorite despite the ridiculous amount of sleep I lost working on it. I’ve never kicked out so many sprites from scratch at once and the Death Adder sprite is probably the best pixel art I’ve done yet. The updates may have looked big but no one would believe all the unfinished stuff there is for this including sprites, articles and even a theme song. I’ll save some of that for the 25th Anniversary of 1989 if I’m still working on the site by then.

Twofold month on Illmosis with a preview of the Twofold #1, Twofold’s sprite. and new logo

The Halloween update on ScrollBoss with Castlevania:SOTN sprite edits and a Alucard sprite from scratch, the Altered Beast werewolf and Rick from Splatterhouse. Plus, that Morrigan sprite edit turned out better than I thought it would.

A nice chunk of the Art Redemption List got some justice this year by drawing much better versions of things that I did a horrible job on the first time.

Art that turned out to not be crap:

The Vs. Maker Graphic Generator. It’s an experiment that has taken on a life of it’s own. It’s always fun to see people come up with team-ups and fights that I never would have thought of. Those custom mini-logos are fun to make, too.

The restart of Nutroll: the Illness that mainly got stopped (again) by the malfunctioning computer I was using. I almost literally flipped out due to all the computer freezes while trying to color the first page. Page One will be fixed before I get back to work on it in early 2010.

My favorite thing of the year is the reaction to this picture. This was just one of those crazy things that pops into my head a lot and figured it just needed to be drawn. I’d like to thank everyone who took time out to say how much they liked it because you made my 2009 a lot better than it would’ve been otherwise. As Brawn once said, “Mushy, but true.”

Alright, it’s time for me to get back to work on stuff for 2010. I’ll be working on a comic page tonight and I’ll have some announcements to make here in the coming weeks.

It was added in latest Illmosis update and it has it’s own gallery page. The ridiculous thing is that I had to set up the lighting to make it look more 2-D just so it would look right when I knocked it down to 256 colors for the site logos.

I was too wiped out from the Halloween ScrollBoss updateto start working on something big for the 5th Anniversary so I decided to dedicate the whole month to working on the site itself and to my own characters. The character profiles will go through small upgrades during the month and I’ll be adding more of my characters to it. I just finished programming the new profile gallery feature that will have artwork and sketches that aren’t in the main art galleries. There will be a lot of really old stuff on there that shows what these characters evolved from. This link has a preview of a page with the old filecards I made for my characters from about 1990 to 1992. My artwork was pure eye-horror back then but I still like to look them since this was a bit after my art teacher, the great Mr. Emil Perunko, got me into coloring my artwork. Don’t worry, there will be new and newly colored artwork, too. Before the month is over, I’ll finally be able to show you the rest of this:

Yeah, it’s going to be another busy month.

The biggest thing for me was finally making a Twofold sprite that didn’t look like complete crap. That’s not a sprite made from a pre-existing sprite but was made from scratch. Instead of just posting it to Illmosis, I added Twofold to the Vs. Maker generator. I just added a few other things like new logos for the other characters you see in the screenshot. Yes, Balrog’s logo is supposed to look a bit familiar.

Final Fight: Poison vs. Billy

There’s a new ScrollBoss:Minus World section article on how some female characters were replaced with males in some 16-bit video games. The article is called Sidbillies for reasons that get explained early on. For the record, I didn’t even notice the “wardrobe detail” in the last character mentioned until I looking at the screenshots I took for the article. Everything right before that “ellipses” crap I pulled was what I originally had before I saw… well, you’ll see it. It was also pure luck that it turned out to be all about a ninja character.

I also put up a preview of the new Vs. Mode that I’m still working on. I used the old characters (but mostly new sprite edits) of characters from the “2002 Superninjas” tournament. It was an old series of polls in which the choice with the lowest vote got removed. The version that I plan to have ready in 2010 will be like no other poll you’ve wasted your time on just because you didn’t vote for Link, Squall or Master Chief.

And that’s what I’ve been up to. Sorry for all these posts about my sites but I’m not doing much of anything else right now Sad, isn’t it?

After everything I did to try and do something special for 9/9/09 for my ninja character, Twofold, I was too tired to really tell anyone after it was all finished and uploaded. I didn’t even get around to making a post here. The main thing was a preview version of the upcoming “Twofold #1″ page 2. Yes, page 2. Why? Because this was almost page one. I kept flip-flopping back and forth over whether or not I should start with this or have a page that almost explains why there’s a ninja battle going on in the woods. Forcing myself to get a preview page done on the 9th was a way of forcing myself to “s*** or get off the pot” with this story that I’ve been messing with for about three years. The good thing is that I finally came up with a done-in-one story that will give you nearly all the info you need for liking Twofold and Master Hsu. Master Hsu, along with supporting character Dr. Wu, appear on page 1 which leads into him semi-narrating the page through smack talk with his captors. Another reason the page you see now is a prototype is because some of that dialogue will be on pages 1 and 3 in the final version. Other new thangs added to the Twofold section include an early version of the new and improved Twofold logo. I scanned it in and made a quick mouse-vectored and CG’ed version of it right after finishing the comic when I should’ve been sleeping. It’s been added to the Twofold pages but a better one will done at a later date. I did a quick profile pic of Amy Mao from the Five Eyes school but didn’t have time to start coloring it yet. Finally, I added the first full-sized (11 x 17 inches) color comic pic I drew of Twofold and a sketch page that has Twofold, Passion Tanaka, characters from the Five Eyes school and some characters outside of the Twofold book like Nutroll.

I’ve been working on bits of ScrollBoss and there will be an update either this week or next week. One of those things may be a preview of the new Vs. Mode section. I had to put a modified poll script together along with data scripts for displaying info about the fights whether or not they’re still active. I can finish enough to get the “after the battle” section working to recreate the ending of the 2002 Superninja tournament that Final Fight’s Guy won back in 2002. There are some crazy RPG-style elements I need to finish for the new version so it’ll be a while before I can start the fights again. No one really reads this blog so I don’t have to rush like people are looking forward to this.

Some of my Saturday was spent getting a few more things set up on my computer only to discover that the new version of Image-Line’s site instantly recognized my old registration for FL Studio. Being able to save music files again means that I can get back to work on the background music for various projects. I’m no Hoyt Curtin or Johnny Douglas but it’s nice to have that program music program working for me again.

I’m still going through different programs to see what still works normally. One surprise is that WinKawaks somehow manages to work at full speed even when the screen is swarming with Xenomorphs in Alien vs. Predator by Capcom. That’s some seriously efficient programming.

This is just a heads up for anyone who visits Illmosis and ScrollBoss and also gets bored enough to read this blog. I planned to color the Green Lantern – Hal Jordan pic this week but that’s not possible now. I’ll try to do some B&W art to make sure there’s still an update this week. The ScrollBoss update is still on. In fact, I may work more on it since I can’t color anything right now.

The worst part was finally renaming and reformatting the last batch of sprites, over 100 files, from the old naming format. Before 2005 or so, I used to put files in the same folder so graphic file names started with “sprite” or “anim” for easy sorting. I’ve been converting 100′s files to the superior “sourcegame-platform_character_whatitdo.png” style off and on for years until I finished it Tuesday night. This also includes saving static stuff as PNG files. Then I had to (try and) find every page where I used those old sprites and fix the IMG tags. If reading that bored you, imagine living it. That’s some of the unseen behind-the-scenes crap I talk about in certain updates. The crazy part was finding sprites that I never added to the galleries like Drokmar’s “I have magics” jazz-hands pose and some stuff from Undercover Cops.

Next update’s ETA: March 6th. Kung Fu Master finally gets a graphic gallery while other random galleries get some additions. Magic Sword gallery gets a few new animations that I took for reference some reason. I want to kick in at least one sprite edit, but no promises.

Beans vs. Cornbread: I signed up to Twitter and I’m testing two different widgets in the sidebar. One has a ton of features but updates a bit more slowly than the second widget that’s just a simple script from the main site. My Twitter page is here so add me to your follow list. I may throw in links to preview and test stuff on there for quick feedback.

Illmosis: Continues to roll on. Just scanned B&W profile pic of an “earlier age” hero but I plan to have more than that this weekend. No new character profiles yet. Custom Lego Batmobile update IF I remember to get batteries.

1.) The main thing is a group of commissioned artwork that I keep bringing up. For some weird reason, I’m having trouble drawing one pose that I’d sketched weeks earlier. I’m slowly battling it and may be able to get it right soon or I’ll switch to another character.

2.) I’m still putting my first two ‘universe’ comic stories together in my head. I’m hoping that the first one is enough to give people a basic gist of the universe’s feel and past without resorting to info dump. Plus, it’ll be interesting to see if people get (or care) about one of the big things that I hint towards in the first one. The first story has no real action (except for single shot of people kicking butt) while the second one starts off like the end of a story and ends with the beginning of almost every story that happens after that.

3.) I’m finally toying around with a program that I should’ve been checking out long ago. It’s caused me to have tons of new, random ideas that I’ll never get around to fleshing out, but I plan to have some fun on the side with it. Besides, if I get good with it, ScrollBoss will have some interesting new content. No, I’m not telling you what it is yet, but I will when I get some screenshots (or more) together.

4.) Website sections still being worked on (but not much right now) include Illmosis’ Character Profiles (if you refresh the one that I linked to, you’ll see the random profile pic script at work) and ScrollBoss’ Game Index. I need to update MugenBoss’ item system before I start asking people if they want me to host their stuff.

Besides current problems with sound and my scanner, nearly everything else works. One big thing is adjusting to Windows XP after years of using Windows ME. Just about everything I installed worked nicely and I can now run stuff that wouldn’t work for W-ME. The first one that I ran to was the Lego Digital Designer and I’ll probably get that Amazon.com MP3 Album thing once I can hear things on this system. I’ll have to set up DosBox to use a lot of my favorite programs (M.U.G.E.N. tools) and emulators (Genecyst and NESticle for graphic-extracting purposes).

My sites won’t have any big updates until I get the data off the old computer. There isn’t much of a reason to update Illmosis until I can scan artwork again and there are a lot of bits on ScrollBoss that were only on my old hard drive. Plus, I want to wait until everything is stable before installing the Apache and PHP programs that let me test out all those funky PHP features. Of course, all Works-in-progress are on hold until I can pull them off the old PC. The irony is that I finally started making data backups but started with unnecessary stuff so I could delete it to make room for raw video captures. S-M-R-T.

Anyway, I apologize to anyone that I’m doing work for and I’ll try to get things back on track as soon as possible.