Tough choice! Do you:

A) Enter the area anyway. Go to page 24.

B) Go back. Go to page 37.


Page 24
~~~~~
Your helmet falls off in the vacuum and you die. The end.
~~~~~

Page 37
~~~~~
A dark elf leaps out of the shadows and stabs you. The end.
~~~~~


Ah those old Choose Your Own Adventure books were fun. Sorta.

Oh.... I hated those books... yet I kept checking them out of the library <_<

I think I would pick B though. A doesn't seem like a very exciting way to die... ;p

EDIT: nvm. I would pick A cause now I think about it, it's funnier. It's like BAHAHAHA I'M KING OF TH---- ohhhhh...... ;p

I remember reading one.... what was the title... ah. "Your codename is Jonah", or something like that. An espionage story. I remember one choice during a mission briefing was "announce your retirment to become a marine biologist". It was so random... came out of the blue (with the exception of maybe one or two very specific paths to get to that point). I always thought of it in James Bond terms. "Sorry M. I'm not going to be able to deal with that killer satellite. I just love whales now."

Most of the ones I had were fantasy-based, sort of like Dungeons & Dragons. I'm not sure if I ever got stabbed by a dark elf, but it seems likely. They did have nice cover art, though!

A friend of mine made something very similar to those with Visual Basic a few years ago. It was pretty cool for something he did in his spare time, though not particularly complex.

Link or it didn't happen! =Ppp

What is this gray heresy?



Hm, I'll probably make the shadow on the far wall there full black in the final animation--you'll still be able to distinguish it because it'll move as the head peeps out from behind that foreground wall--but I'll keep the thin 50% shadow that's just barely visible between the head (that big shiny dome of a space helmet) and the foreground wall.

Frame from a two-stage zoom-out:



The effect is pretty cool in motion but I can't show the whole thing to you yet because it's too spoilerish. :p It's kind of interesting how Photoshop's Radial Blur filter puts some graininess in longer blurred parts, I never noticed before that it does that.

I also uploaded a shockingly (semi) abstract piece that uses a piece of art appearing right before that spoilerish zoom-out to A*'s space on deviantART.

Tomorrow I'll start putting the episode 3 art together into the actual animation. A few images from the last full day's drawing session:

This guy is on a monitor, and I wanted it to glitch or show static or something to remind the viewer that this is an image on a monitor, but I didn't want to use TV-style static, since the broadcast would be digital, so I'll just substitute a pixelated version for a split-second:





Sig and Vero: lean mean shipping machine, as you can see:



This being the last full art day, I also ended up with a few more high-res compositions that I've inserted into A* on deviantART.

And contributions are now open for episode 4, so if you'd like your name--and optionally web site--showing in episode 4's credits as a proud supporter of A*, you can get that done now on the support A* page.

You may recall that back in episode 1, when Vero was telling Mar about the trouble he and Sig ran into at Tempus 477, we saw this image of Vero and Sig in their ship's control room:



Episode 3 is a flashback to that incident, so part of it involves re-rendering that shot during the episode's larger narrative. Here's a question: if you have two guys with reflective helmets, and two active monitors, how many times can you get the warning in a single shot? Five? Seven?



Yes! Oh, I did have me some fun in this episode drawing those big ol' shiny helmets.



First thing today was finishing up a few leftover art bits for the episode, and unsurprisingly I managed to squeeze a few high-res compositions out of those, which are now up on deviantART. Those will *probably* be the last for this episode, since the art is now all done, and will in fact soon be collected in a gallery on episode 3's very own home page...once I finish the animation and sound and music editing and all that.

Ooooh... shiny.

Yeah, I'm easily pleased that way. ;D

Got the main animation work done now; I don't have the lip-synching done yet, since I'll be doing that tomorrow after I record the voices, so what can I show you for now that's done and relatively non-spoilerish? Hm...

Man, most of this stuff is spoilery. Well, how about...this dynamic airlock sequence?



Hey, at least I didn't spoil much. =P