The abyss of the darkness

With winter over and my sinuses assuring me that it is spring it thus becomes time to change the blog's theme. I've settled on colors that I can more or less tolerate. Who knows how long they'll last.

Progress has been slow and steady. It's something that got split off from Update 109 because it got so long and time intensive. I thought I should give a heads up that it won't be ready by this Sunday, April 22nd. It's not even at the proofreading stage yet.

That's just the way things roll sometimes. It will be done when it's done.

As far as starting a new LP I have given it some thought but there are some loose ends that I really should dedicate some time to finishing up. I haven't made any concrete decisions just yet though. At the moment Beyond the Beyond still has my full attention and that isn't going to change in the immediate future.

So where I'm sitting we're about to exit a cold snap (a.k.a. normal weather for winter) and become abnormally warm with temperatures more fitting for early spring. Mmmm, isn't climate change fun? That's a rhetorical question, of course.

In other news work on Beyond the Beyond's epilogue is coming along slowly. I'm not in any great rush since the story as presented in game is complete.

Well first off I hope those who have been in summer the last few months have been able to wrestle some enjoyment out of it. Personally I'm glad to be seeing the tail end even though autumn means hay fever season. I've been waiting for things to calm down and stabilize before resuming Beyond the Beyond (I'd be done with the game most likely if I hadn't stopped). I am tentatively shooting for September 3rd to post the next update.

Yes I know NaNoWriMo is coming up fast but there's not much game left and maaaaybe I can finish it before November. If not I will try to continue through NaNoWriMo.

No, I have no idea what I might do after Beyond the Beyond.

So I'm using my Surface 3 as my main machine. After some work I've been able to do a bit more recording for Beyond the Beyond but ePSXe 1.6 won't load ISOs for me. The recording I've done has been in ePSXe 2.0.5. I wish I could say it went smoothly but there have been issues with zoom (necessary to read at high resolutions on this screen) and the emulator still has a bit of stutter for no clear reason. I'm about halfway through update 90 as I type this and then comes the hard work of a dungeon crawl that I've started. Got a bit confused on one of the puzzles so I stopped recording to work on it.

It's been some time since my last update and the reason is that I didn't have an internet connection for four months. NaNoWriMo went fine. I checked in on Thanskgiving with 80k words and finished the month with 100k words. I didn't get to update my word count after Thanksgiving though. Bummer! Did I write a complete novel? Ha, ha, ha! Of course not! I never manage to do that. Then I spent a whole bunch of time working on things that never get mentioned here instead of anything for Beyond the Beyond.

I am rather behind on tasks at the moment so I'm going to take some time to try to get caught up. Updates will be sporadic. Welcome to fall northern hemisphere!

This is just a short update to note that there won't be a new installment of Beyond the Beyond on Sunday, July 3rd or Monday, July 4th. I don't actually do anything to celebrate that holiday here in the U.S. but I have been busy with Shining Force 2 and have been occupied with other matters. When Beyond the Beyond resumes it has to cover some of the last updates in Marion and Bandore then grinding before we can move on to near endgame stuff.

This is just a quick update on two games. First there will be no Beyond the Beyond installment this Sunday because I've had some other things to work on. As for Phantasy Star 4 Rune tried to fight the Profound Darkness at level 75 and made it past the first form at the low, low cost of using nearly all of his trimates. Clearly that was no winnable so I've been slowly grinding out levels in Vahal Fort as time and energy permit.

Updates have been rather slow lately haven't they? Yes they have. I've been working on episode 67 of Beyond the Beyond but work has been slow because it's another of those episodes where I do some plot filling and dialogue between smaller parts of the group so that the characters can relax, resolve plot threads, and just generally allow aspects of their personalities shine through that don't come up when they're dungeon crawling. Right at the moment that I'm typing this update I'm waiting for sundown, working on other stuff, because I have a night set to populate and there's too much glare while the sun is up. The finished update is probably going to be posted in two parts. It's already sitting at over 17k characters and Livejournal has a character limit that I think is about 20k.

As for Beyond the Beyond overall we're past the half-way point. Depending on how I pace the rest of the game we could actually be well past the halfway point. There are only 5 dungeons left in the game and one of those is optional (which means I'm definitely going to do it but we can't get there for some time). Of course one of those dungeons is the most hated in the game. If you've played Beyond the Beyond you probably know what I'm talking about.

I have given some preliminary thoughts about what the next project should be. I of course still have a mountain of tedious work left on Dark Wizard. I'll get that done one of these years. I don't have any plans for another video project. If I do another screenshot LP I'll use a shorter game. I'm not sure what that will be.

Okay so two quick updates about Beyond the Beyond.

First off I played for a good while yesterday. The team's up to 7 members now so if you want to see a particular character in action squawk now or forever hold your clucks. I am already trying to give each character screen time but the actual party configuration for the next set of dungeons is still undecided.

The second order of business is that I need to do some work on the back end. That means there might be some wonkiness and broken images. Just holler if something seems broken for too long 'cause it's easy to overlook stuff.

Oh yeah and I did finish my archive bing of Bob and George. About 3/4ths of the way through I was reminded of why time traveling didn't make me bat an eye when I was watching the first season of King Arthur & the Knights of Justice. Quite the contrary. I got a few episodes in and suddenly it dawned on me how everything could make sense. I really should get around to watching the second season one of these days. I have the show on DVD now so it's not like I have a real excuse.

EDIT

Behold the fruit of my labors (much of it probably pointless in terms of the LP but wevs)! Here are some before and afters from days of copy-pasting and organizing.


Click any of the images for the full size files.


There was one frame of Yeon I couldn't get. I'm still hoping to get more frames from the ork set and Dagoot hasn't shown up yet. Also that soldier sprite in the top right of the set has been a major pain in the butt because I've found all of one NPC with that sprite and they are of course standing partially in shadow. The nitpicky part of me would much prefer a way to get these with correct palettes directly from the game files or VRAM but going from screenshots ensures I won't have any problems using these sprites in any customized sets for the LP.

Every emulator has its quirks and ePSXe is no different. I have no intention of changing emulators or graphical plugins. For better and for worse I'll be sticking with the settings I decided on at the outset.


The third sheet started out as mostly empty space but has seen a lot of filling in. Just from casually playing the game it is easy to not notice how many frames of various sprites don't show up on screen without outright cheating.