My fiancee Weena, who’s a beautiful Thai woman by the way, showed me these. It’s a commercial for a Thai optometrist and a tea company.

I shat bricks of laughter.

Seriously, if they played these during the super bowl, I might consider watching it.

The line art for all minor enemies in MageQuest is complete (Click on the thumbnail to preview). I even included some test artwork of some of the smoke particles I plan to implement. Now I can toy around with coloring and composition if I need to. So far, the game has four levels planned. The backdrops for these levels are A. a burning town, B. an ice cave, C. A volcanic spire, D. A castle. You can kinda tell which enemies belong in what level based on their costumes. From this point, I can begin animating the state-based animations for each character (e.g. running, jumping, attacking, reacting to a hit, etc). One of the things I LOVE about flash is that all of this artwork only takes up 14 Kb. In fact, all the animation for just one character will probably only consume around 50Kb – 75Kb, depending on how detailed the art and number of frames.

All designs are based off of the original sketches in MageQuest’s design document (something I’ll show all of you when the project is complete). There are still three boss characters that need to be fleshed out, but I’ll hold off on those until I have the engine worked out. By then, I’ll know what sort of limitations that the boss characters will be under.

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Dear God, amidst all of my moping about I almost forgot…

NEW ZERO PUNCTUATION!

This week, Uncharted: Drakes Fortune. BONUS! You actually get to see what Yahtzee looks like.

Look at this. Not even a month old and my Dell monitor short circuited today. Literally. When I turn it on, I hear a small hissing noise and the light behind the LCD array flickers before shutting off completely. Oh, and trying to convince Dell tech support that it’s a hardware problem and not a driver issue is an adventure in itself.

This is the last thing I need at this point. It’s very aggravating to adapt your workstation and work style to a dual monitor system like this only to have it blow up it your face after three weeks. Now I have to wait another 10 days for Dell to ship the replacement.

I’m not a happy person, lately. Everything is cluster-fucking for some reason. My classes at school are stressing me out because of the difficulty of the curriculum and the lack of support from my TA’s and fellow students. Google Adsense dropped my account for reasons that I can’t verify (they don’t give you a solid reason in order to protect their trade secrets in online advertising). I’m falling behind on MageQuest’s development. My financial aid deadline is looming, but I have issues with my taxes because one of my previous clients sent my 1099s to an old address. My roommate just left for a four day vacation leaving 2 weeks of dog shit in the back yard.

And now this?

I don’t mean to sound like some emo middleschool MySpace addict but can I get a fucking break already!?

I’m taking a break from the code. My school projects are taking presidence over MageQuest’s AS 3.0 engine development , and quite frankly the past C++ and Prolog homework assignments make me want to burn something if I see syntax of any sort.

So, as a treat to myself, I’ve decided to start into the artwork for MageQuest. It’s something I’d planned to begin later on in development, but I really can’t afford to waste much time. Gotta keep up the momentum after the past week of next to no development at all. Here are a couple of the baddies: a goblin soldier and a troll archer. I’ve allowed you to see how I’ve adapted the rough artwork from the game’s design document into the Flash line artwork. I have a long way to go. There’s about a total of a dozen enemies in this game.

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