Two.. months.. left..

Well, it's officially crunch time. I developed a somewhat casual pace of progress alongside recreation, work, and sleep, but with less than two months remaining, it's time to light the last few boilers and push this engine full steam ahead. I truly don't have too much of this animation remaining, but the big epic finale has me somewhat nervous. Music is pretty much all taken care of, and I'm happy to say that DotM: Overtime's soundtrack will be a mix of both original music created for the animation, and music from right here on NG! I wish I wasn't a dumb 12 year old and had some sense not to use copyrighted music back then for the previous episodes.. hnnnggg.

I don't really have too much else to say. Work has been strange as our business hours have changed drastically due to a Covid scare with some of the other staff, so my sleep cycle is now almost completely unhinged. I've gotten sick twice since January, but otherwise, I've been doing fine. With DotM: OT, I feel it's added a sense of discipline to some aspects of my life. For example, I haven't drank any alcohol in over four months. There were a few times in the past where I danced around the textbook definition of an alcoholic- out of enjoyment, habit, and the worst coping method for depression ever. At this point, I just kinda figured I didn't have time to be drinking, didn't have time for the hangovers, and something about the idea of drinking and working on something so huge and important to me just doesn't sit right.

I'm also taking a break from video games and the rare instances of social interaction I do sometimes have. Basically, I'm holding my breath on a lot of things until this big bad boy is pushed through and polished.

Well, this is sure to bring some unwanted attention…

Front page posts will resume next week at midnight (mountain time zone, USA) as long as I’m not into some odd sleep cycle conundrum. Madness Day is just barely over two months away, and I’m working around the clock the make sure I have this thing completely finished. I’ve requested most of September off from work for fine-tuning. 

I’m not prioritizing some things right now, like the eventual replacement of Krinkels’ sprites for hands/feet/etc, but I’m excited to start rolling those out.

On that note, I’m hoping to upload some type of teaser trailer in a few weeks, perhaps next month, but it’s not something I want to take too much time away from animating to do. I’d probably opt for it to be simple regardless, but we’ll see how comfortable I’m feeling when I choose to drop a trailer. 

Back to work..

Good news, everyone! 

If you read my previous post, I was experiencing some frustration with DotM: Overtime’s .fla file. It was damaged, but thankfully not fully corrupt and still salvageable. I should have been creating different .fla files for each scene as I went along, but I waited far too long and after about 305 MB, my .fla file became hardly even usable. Isolating each individual scene into its own .fla file was much more difficult than I anticipated, and it was very exhausting on many levels with a heavy blow to my anxiety. I could only isolate bits and pieces at a time, and Flash would frequently crash on me when attempting to do so. That, coupled with whenever I would miss a few frames or a layer proved to be a very difficult test of my patience. 

Anyway, that’s all in the past now. It took THREE DAYS of hell to get everything reorganized and separated, but there are so many wonderful benefits. For one thing, saving now only takes seconds as opposed to several minutes. Because I’m working in smaller .fla files and releasing this as a video file, I can take the art to higher levels than I originally planned. 

Yes, I will be replacing Krinkels' old MC4-era sprites with my own, and possibly some additional art from some other cool cats.

Despite a vastly improved workflow, all of that truly was exhausting and a bit of a blow to my mental health. With just a little over two months till release date, I’m feeling the pressure. The continued support remains a constant inspiration that helps me push through so I always appreciate that.

Next week’s post won’t be front-paged. It’ll likely be at around midnight (mountain time) just so I can reset the ability to post earlier in the day to keep the Wednesday trend. 

Till then, take care!

Screenshot before the wall of text:

(the intestines are animated frame-by-frame!)

Well, can't say I didn't see this one coming. My .fla for DotM: Overtime has reached an almost unworkable level of corruption. I had plans to finish the rest of the animation in a new .fla and merely combine each scene together into a video file anyway, but I was hoping to be done with the current scene I'm working on. Oh well! The corruption started out as an error box that would pop up each time I attempted to save my progress. The error box suggested I try saving as a different file name and/or to a different location, and that it was otherwise unable to save. Despite this, it would save every single time and be completely workable with no issues for the past few scenes I've worked on.

The newer issue that popped up a week ago is that Flash CS6 will crash if I attempt to cut/copy something from the stage. The item will still be copied to my clipboard, but I'll have to go through the hell of reopening that big ass 300+ mb file which can take several minutes sometimes constantly.

Earlier today, when attempting to test a scene, it seems like everything hit the fan all at once, as the .swf could not be published due to low memory (or so it says) and now the entire .fla is a fragile mine at edge of exploding and crashing any second. Thankfully, I've been backing the file up to all hell. My next solution is to isolate this specific scene into a new .fla, and then create ANOTHER new .fla to finish Overtime once and for all. I haven't landed on any solid conclusions, but my assumption is that I have some corrupt library items, probably jpgs/pngs since those are usually the culprit.

Anyway, this pretty much confirms that OT will be released in video format. This is a bridge I'm going to have to cross later on, and I'll likely be reaching out to a few friends to help out with the final export since my computer probably won't be able to handle that much epic all at once.

INFO!

The .fla was originally created in Flash 8 on a Toshiba laptop running on Windows Vista. The .fla was then transferred to my MacBook Pro, running on High Sierra. I opened the .fla in CS6 and have been working on it in CS6 for over a year now. I figured that moving the .fla not only between completely different operating systems, but also different versions of flash, may have fed into this corruption. I've got a decent network of troubleshooting methods to save this current scene that I'm working on, so I'm not trying to stress myself out about it.

(also my sleep cycle is all over the place so I've gotten bad at posting these at a consistent time in the day lololol)

No umbrellas, no forecast, no problem!

I've hit the 20 minute mark. Still a ways to go.

CHOO CHOO

It's kinda hard to find things to say here sometimes. I'm in heavy spoiler zone, which is why I haven't been streaming animation process. To think that the completion of Overtime is well within grasp is insane. I'm very anxious about the grand finale though, as it'll be putting 14 years of animation to the ultimate test. The fact that Overtime's production has been segmented throughout VASTLY different parts of my life is why I'm hoping to have enough time to not only cover planned animation fixes/pacing edits/etc, but also some reasonable updates to the art, hopefully not requiring too much individual frame editing.

I've been thinking about piecing together a short teaser, as long as it doesn't take too much time away from actually finishing this big hunker. Teaser probably wouldn't be out until next month or something though, we'll see!

On another random note..

I'm trying not too think too much of the future when there's so much right in front of me.. But hell. I've been thinking, would it be interesting to see how exactly the island outpost from Day of the Madness collapsed? Would it be interesting to see what the bikers were doing when the zombie outbreak started? Would it be interesting to look further into GenMorto and Connor's role in the company?

Being back at work has put a slight hindrance on progress, but I've drastically cut my hours while I can [somewhat] afford to do so for the next few months, being as frugal as I can. Overtime is my #1 priority. All painting projects/commissions and anything else have been postponed until after its September 22 release.

Also, I have passed the 19 minute mark.

Edit: Forgot to mention that I've made a full recovery from whatever the hell was going on last week. Now I'm just being ravaged by the usual seasonal allergies.

So this one's actually a bit of a retcon. I updated the front entrance of GenMorto.

New:

Old:

There are a lot of crazy things going on, and in the midst of everything, I've come down with a sickness. (oo-wa-a-a-a) Not jumping to any conclusions quite yet, but I'm continuing to monitor my health.

Everyone, stay safe out there.

I think Mike needs some ibuprofen. It started with vacation and sick time being canceled, but since things have gotten worse, they're keeping us locked within this building until we're able to figure something out. They say we're "essential" and that our work here could bring this whole thing to a close, but I can't help but think this is more of a prison than anything else. We're not even allowed to reach out to our families or loved ones.. I hope my wife is okay.. Jim, from one of the lower research departments, was shot and killed during a recent mutiny in which several of us tried to escape. They keep telling us that it was a suicide, but that's not true. I can't believe Jim committed suicide. I cannot believe that Jim committed suicide. How could Jim have committed suicide? We're stuck here. More and more of us seem to be falling ill, and our efforts to reverse this are backfiring. God help us all.

Normally these weekly shindigs would be posted to the front page, but I can only do that exactly a week after the previous post. Exactly a week, down to the time. I guess I spaced one of these weeks and posted after 6PM (mountain time) so I figured I'd just keep this one off the front page and reset the time at which I can make the posts so that they're much earlier in the day. Anyway who cares? Screenshot time!

Also as a bonus, I've mentioned before that Nick's neighborhood in Dawn of the Madness was based on my own neighborhood that I was living in at the time. I found one of my old SD cards that has this reference image I used for the view of Justin's back yard. The interior of Nick's house was also based on our house at the time.