I was playing Super Smash Bros. Brawl online last night and was playing Team Battle With Anyone. I mostly played as Zero Suit Samus, but sometimes switched to Peach, Pikachu, Ness, or Lucas. Anyways, there were two other people that never left after the matches. One was a person who only used Link and the other person mostly used Ganondorf and Wolf.

I played matches with these two guys (and a random 4th player that was never constant until the very end) for around 3-4 hours straight. I was paired with the Link player the most, but that's kinda irrelevant. I thought the matches were pretty fun and even, though Wolf is a hassle to deal with for me (I consider myself average at Smash).

Toward the end of this online binge, after a disappointing defeat at Hyrule Temple (from a "running away from me the entire match after I lost the first life" 4th player), I just felt like I was cheated against and wanted to exact my vengeance on the 4th player. I was Pikachu, by the way.

When the next match started, I was paired with the Link player and we were against Ganondorf and the 4th player who chose Kirby this time. By this point, I think the Link player, Ganondorf player, and myself were feeling pretty mellow. I'm not sure how it started, but Link began attacking Kirby with arrows and the boomerang and I stood still and kind of assessed the start of the battle and noticed that Kirby wasn't really doing anything against the onslaught. The Link player then knocked Kirby toward the right edge of the stage (the battle was on Final Destination), which was where I was and did a simple headbutt and Kirby fell off the edge and didn't attempt to recover. Ganondorf was hanging on the right ledge and had been taunting up to that point. I think I might have knocked him off the edge with the headbutts I was doing. I think the Kirby player was away from the controller or something so I thought to myself "Man, this isn't fair to the Ganondorf player..." So while Link was just shooting arrows at the stationary Kirby, I did a fully charged skull bash to end Kirby's second life. Immediately after that it was like we all just suddenly asked ourselves "Why are we fighting?" And just started spam taunting and doing other silly things the rest of the match, we didn't attack each other or anything.

I don't why that happened, but it just tickled me as it was happening. We did this spam taunting, fooling around for like 5 or 6 straight matches (the 4th player was still away from the controller during this whole duration until the very end of a match at Shadow Moses where it was a Sudden Death. As usual, us three were just spam taunting waiting for the bombs to start falling to see who would survive last. When out of nowhere Kirby comes back to life and hammers Ganondorf and KO's him exactly when the first bomb spawns right next to Kirby and KO's him second. Link and I are still spam taunting when all that went down, but I was the third to go and finally Link immediately after me.

I saved the replays of four of those matches since it was something that was just so unexpected for me and because of some things that I consider highlights, which include:

Final Destination:
-nothing really of note other than this is the match that started it all
-Ganondorf spamming Warlock Punch and me spamming Thunder simultaneously

Bridge of Eldin:
-breaking our own shields
-throwing ourselves into the pit of the bridge like lemmings towards the end of the match

Shadow Moses:
-blowing ourselves up with blast boxes (Ganondorf and me)
-running continuously into a bumper that was on the side of a tower (Ganondorf and me)
-just focusing solely on breaking down the towers
-the sudden death I explained above

Anyways, I wish I knew who those two players were because I'd like to play a game with them again.

...Yeah, useless post isn't it?

Sorry for the late update. I knew I said I would update in one or two days after my latest update, but I just didn't know what to write at the time. I have been working on phase 3 since Saturday though.

As I said in the previous update, phase 3 is sound insertion which includes sound effects and music. I've already hit an obstacle in the sound effect department. I need the sound effect from Chrono Trigger that plays in the intro during the scene transitions. The one where that tattered-on-the-edges black screen whooshes by. I tried recording it by turning off the music channels, but the sound effect gets messed up if I do that. So right now I had to skip inputting that sound and continue on. I'm still not sure what I'm going to do about that sound effect though... I might have to replace it, but I don't really want to.

Another thing that has me thinking is whether or not I should use Tales of music for this episode. Right now none really seem to fit any situation in the episode, but since this episode is themed on the Tales of series I think it would be weird to not have some music from the series in there to add to the theme. At the moment I thinking of maybe using a battle theme from Tales of Symphonia for the goblin action scene, I have three in mind which include:
-Full Force
-Like a Glint of Light
-Keen-edged Blade
Since the scene is kind of desperate, "Like a Glint of Light" sounds too positive and hyped up for the emotion I'm trying to portray. "Keen-edged Blade" sounds like it could fit, but the first half of the song is kind of slow. As for "Full Force," it's the one that could fit the most, but there's something that I don't like about using it for this particular scene, like it could used to a better effect somewhere else. Anyways, I'll still think about it some more, since I have a little while before I start adding the music to the episode.

It's already Thursday and I wanted to release episode 8 before Super Smash Bros. Brawl came out because I will be playing that game to death when it comes out, but it looks like episode 8 won't meet that deadline. If episode 8 isn't released by Saturday, it will definitely be out sometime next week. So hold on until then, just a little longer!

Animation of ludas animans episode 8 is complete. Mostly, anyways. I don't animate the menus and credits until the very end of production. So, I'm now on the second phase of production. This includes touch up of animation and text. Basically making sure everything about the episode is as good as can be. I'm currently proofreading and revising the text where I feel it's not up to snuff in its current state. After that I'm going to be adding "advance text" icons to the text boxes because there's a mix of automatic text and button text in this episode, and it could be difficult to tell which is which.

Once all that is done, I'll start the third phase which would be sound insertion. I'll talk more about that in the next blog update, which will hopefully be in one or two days.

Till next time.

Production of ludas animans Ep. 8 began a few weeks after the release of episode 7. It was pretty much right after I dealt with the problem episode 7 was having with loading for some users.

For episode 8, I wanted to tell a little side story not totally related to the overall plot. I mean what's the point of making a flash series about video games without actually showing the main character interact with main characters of other games? So far the one of the only main characters Chris has interacted with was X. Lou is a main character from his game, but he's a solid ally for Chris and is seen in every episode with no real threat of him leaving the group any time soon. Other main characters that Chris will interact with will most likely be guest characters that will join him in a few episodes.

The guest characters for episode 8 up until this story arc's finale will be "Tales of" characters. If you didn't know, I'm a huge Tales fan and I've been dying to use them in some way. I was thinking about doing this episode since the production of episode 7, and maybe had fleeting thoughts about it even before then. So finally being able to animate some of my favorite tales characters in ludas animans is like a dream come true.

I breezed through the dialog scenes like it was nothing. In fact, I think I may have finished the dialog scenes in the first couple of months of this year. Of course, I was hindered on one particular scene I was trying to convey. It was a flashback scene, and it took me forever to think of how to do it. I eventually did, but I'm still not too satisfied with it.

Episode 8's guest characters are Frio and Kyaro from Tales of the World: Narikiri Dungeon 3, and Presea from Tales of Symphonia. You won't see much of Kyaro until episode 9 though. The premise of the episode is that Kyaro was kidnapped by goblins. Chris and company help Frio try to save her, and they seek Presea's help along the way.

Dialog scene screen shots in upcoming posts. Also, make sure you view these posts backwards, as in this post is the first post, but is actually numbered 16, so the next post would be 15 then 14 and so on.

Recap time.

Will Mikagami and Harpuia get involved in the monster horde event?

What's going on?

After hearing a scuffle somewhere down below, Chris rushes to see what's up.

Coming in the nick of time

About to heal Frio's wounds