Sorry I haven’t updated in so long. I guess my only excuse is that it is a lot of work to put together a decent post describing all of the interesting things that have happened since my last post. To solve that particular problem, i’ve adopted the philosophy of ‘some is better than nothing’ so I’m going to post stuff anyway, even if I’m still missing a lot. Also, I was really bored earlier today.

So Wayne mentioned back a while ago that we had a party. It was probably pretty fun. In standard party tradition, I don’t remember a thing. Apparently, some crazy guys were there, it was someone’s birthday, and there was some injuries. What I do know for sure is that we transformed this into this. You may recall that once upon a time there was a nice big tree right in front of my house. The tree has a long story that I’ll try to summarize:

• A few years ago, the ice storm caused its trunk to crack vertically.
• About half a year ago, Wayne and I were watching TV when it finally split and half of it landed on the house. We cleaned up the broken half and left the other half.
• The remaining half started to droop suspiciously, so we cut it down and grinded it up, leaving just a stump.

Well, the penultimate chapter has recently occured – the removal of the stump. Afterwards, my front yard looked like this – it is hard to get a sense of scale, but you can trust me when I say that my entire front yard was a crater.

The best thing to come out of the Boston Bomb scare was that more people finally understood our Halloween 2006 costumes. Each Christmas we do a secret santa gift swap at work. However, the idea is to give gag gifts. This year I drew my manager. Poking fun at the pointy-haired boss is great fun when you are anonymous. I’ve uploaded some images that I had printed on the sides of a large box containing the gift: front, back, and side. Inside the box was a club with nails sticking out of it and a battered trash can lid. Maybe not as good as Cyclaholics Anonymous, but I still had a lot of fun making it. The main thing that I’ve wanted to post recently is updates on ‘Navi’, which is what I’m calling my little spaceship game project. Last time (apparently about 6 months ago) I posted some concepts and in-engine renders of early versions of the two ships. Most of the work that has been done since then has been programming (which you can’t see until I’m done) and animation (which you also can’t see without the game) so I actually don’t have too much I can show you. It looks really cool animated, but you’ll just have to take my word on that. Anyway, I’ve uploaded the following media:

• Sniper ship – still need a better name. Blue exhaust flames are probably going to go.
• Sniper ship taking damage – the lighting was a lot of fun to make; it looks cool.
• Cannon ship firing – got some nice light and fire going on
• Cannon ship taking damage – I recycled the lightning; sue me.
• In game 1 – stage is placeholder
• In game 2 – Cannonship scores a hit

There is a lot of work to be done, but it is very slowly getting done. Hopefully I’ll have a little more to show in another 6 months.