A*'s fourth episode is out! You can view it on the A* site, collect it on deviantART, and check it out in HD on YouTube.

This episode features more animation, drama, carnage, and explosions than previous A* outings. It even answers the boxers vs briefs question! Is there anything A* episode 4 *can't* do?

Hm well it can't give me feedback, so you, noble viewer, must do that for me, or I'll never learn anything useful. Let me know what you think of this episode; if you have even the slightest nit to pick with it, or found some particular particularly nice, do let me know. And I hope that if you enjoy it, you'll share it with neighbors, family, and friends, shout it from the rooftops (minding your municipality's rooftop noise regulations), and so forth, so that A* can keep growing and eventually fulfill its destiny of swallowing our entire galaxy.


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This thread may contain

***SPOILERS*** ***SPOILERS*** ***SPOILERS***

***SPOILERS*** ***SPOILERS*** ***SPOILERS***

Great episode as always, damn i very like the beaviour of Sig, and what he think about mick help. Iappreciate too the voices in a special way the Vero shout, and the dinamicity of the full "ok mick i will give you something to wave to".

Uh something in Sal char let me think about an old good cowboy helping a friend.

Too early now to say more unless i spoil the episode to others :)

Sorry again for my english...

Great episode, best one yet! The voices have really improved... and the way the music synced up with [omitted for spoiler] was really cool.

I'll take a crack at a custom version soon.

Haha yeah I know, it seems like my voice acting range is in large part limited--or most tending toward--Western accents. I think that's probably due to a variety of causes: maybe mostly because I was born in St. Louis, raised (briefly) in Denver, and have spent the rest of my life in Washington state; possibly also because I got used to writing in a Western drawl on paleface.net, the fan site for the PC game Outlaws, a shooter set in the Old West, and maybe because I watched too much of the cartoon Galaxy Rangers (anyone else here seen this show?) at an impressionable age (so much so that I bought the series on DVD earlier this year--haven't watched 'em again yet, though, gotta finish Ranma and then probably Cowboy Bebop first!).

When it came time to record Sal's lines I spent at least an hour experimenting with different voices for him; I started sort of gravelly, and when that started having a Western twang, I thought I should try something different, since Mick already has a definite Western/Southern drawl, but nothing else that I tried sounded at all genuine to me. I'd love to be able to rattle lines off with convincing American east coast accents, or really any other cool accent from around the world, but I don't feel like I'm very good at them.

I guess one excuse I have is that people in A* have a specific single primary origin for their speech--not that I particularly intended for it to come with a particular accent, though. We'll probably get into A* speech origins at some point in the story.


Hey man, the episode's out! If people read down the episode's discussion thread before they've watched it, that's their problem! :P I suppose I could put "SPOILERS" in the title (should I?), but I thought it would be a little redundant.

Yeah, I hoped that I managed to get a *little* more emotion into the voices this time; definitely helped that there was some high drama going on.

I'm exploring more music editing, too; learning different tricks in Audacity is definitely helping me add more variety and specificity to the music tracks after getting them from incompetech. Each new episode has had more music editing on my part. The middle action section of this episode is a little over two minutes, and the track I wanted for it was a little over one minute, so I spent some time turning the first third of that into a loop (plays three times in succession, covering the time that Vero is messing with the reactor and getting into the escape pod), and then cloning and amplifying the final drumbeat of the full version that plays after the three loops.

I haven't got into sound effects yet, but I'm finding that it's pretty fun to manipulate the music into becoming its own sound effect.


Cool!

Oh wait, I know how to handle this spoiler dealio.

*adds big red spoiler notice to first post*

There!

Well, you have done again. Best episode for me so far. I nearly thought the episode was going to end at one point after the explosion. If it did I would of gone "no!" lol.

Hehe! Yeah, it's not like 2 out of three of the previous episodes have ended with an explosion or near-explosion... Oh wait, they have! ;D So I threw in a twist with an extra, post-explosion bonus scene this time. :)

Episode 4 is now up on Newgrounds, where anyone with an internet connection can check it out and vote on it once per day in Newgrounds' unique peer review process. Episode 4 is making its way through the judgment process as I write this, with hundreds if not thousands of people giving it a going-over. Will it do better than episode 3, which has been the most successful for me so far there? Aah the suspense!

Ooh, 4 isn't faring as well as 3 on Newgrounds so far, despite having more action. My even-numbered episodes have had that problem there; I wonder if it's because they've been direct continuations from the previous episode, so people who haven't seen the earlier part don't get what's going on?