Project 12: Chrono Trigger Sprites: Update

The Chrono Trigger Sprites are another project I stalled on.

One of the big concerns I ran into was figuring out what colours of perler I wanted to use. I had a sampler set of beads (which I made the test patch in the picture above from), which was a good starting point. I was able to create the original SNES Coasters out of that set, and I might have been able to start on the sprites, but there was one particularly large problem ... I can't figure out what colour (by name) each of these colours is.

So that slowed me down some, along with all the other usual distractions that lead to me not finishing a project. However I have now solved this problem, I went out (to the Internet) and bought myself ALL of the beads:

On the EK Sucess Perler site, they sell 1000 bead bags of every colour. I started to try to figure out what matched what I had already through the website, but then ended up just picking up one bag of everything they sold. Fortunately perler beads are relatively affordable and the promise of free shipping on large enough orders convinced me to just go ahead and do it. Sadly it turns out that that offer wasn't available to Canadians, but still at the end of the day a big box of perler beads appeared at my door, for not that much out of pocket. And now I know name of every colour of bead I have.

As a side note, I wanted to find a nice way to sort the beads that I had. Conveniently I found a screw sorter that happens to perfectly hold 1000 beads in each drawer and probably 3000 in the bigger drawers, which seems like a really nice way to be organized for a project.

Anyway, now that I have all the beads and I'm super organized, I'm out of good excuses not to work on the Chrono Trigger Sprites. So I'll bring the project back up and try to finish a Chrono in 20cm scale by September 30, 2014.

Projects 8, 9, 10 and 11: The Future Pack: Updates

The set of future projects that I wanted to write down but not start yet, also gets updating although I'm still not actually going to put a deadline on any of them yet.

• Project 8 - Space Station Simulation Game
• This is still on the back burner, although I have given it some more thought. I'm also thankful that SpaceBase DF-9 while similar is not exactly what I was thinking (although it may prove to be that it is what it is since it's hard to make a space station simulator the way I've imagined it.
• I'm not going to start on this project until I've taught myself Unity as an environment to work in and made a simpler game first.
• Project 9 - An Action RPG
• The Action RPG is still the game I would most like to make, but as with the Space Station Game I want to get a little more experience so that I can make something I'm happy with.
• Project 10 - A Sci-Fi Novel
• This is the future project that I'm least ready to start. Given that it's something I've been thinking about for years it's a difficult project to work on.
• Project 11 - A Fantasy Novel
• This is probably the project I'm closest to really attempting to start. At the moment I'm not sure how much time I have to dedicate to it, since there are some other things I'd like to do and there's still that pesky PhD to work on.

Project 7: A Hockey Card Game: Wrap-Up

I messed around with the mechanics for the hockey card game for a while but basically hit a point where I realized that designing a balanced and interesting card game is pretty hard. So until I get inspired to do the work to finish this, it's an abandoned project for the time being.

Project 6: 100 (days of) Sketches: Wrap-Up

Well, this is another project that's fallen off the face of the earth. It's been more than a year since I was supposed to update it and I haven't done that. I also didn't at the end of the day actually sketch on anything like a hundred days for those six months.

For now I'm going to let this project lapse, but I may revisit it when I feel like that's the direction I'd like to push my creative actions!

Project 5: SNES Coasters: Bigger, Better, Slightly Less Tippy, and Going on the Road

In my last update I finished making a set of 8 coasters using the exclamation blocks from Super Mario World.

I've now taken them out and used them in the real world and come to the conclusion that they're too small, as I suspected this in the last post. They've also suffered from a certain amount of cupping, all of which makes them a touch unstable. There has only been one major incident with spillage due to the coasters, but it still bugs me.

I've decided I want to try a couple of things, that will result in basically 3 mini-projects. 

• The first is that I want to make larger coasters, the current ones are 16 beads wide/tall and if I add an extra ring of beads they will end up being 18 beads wide/tall and that should improve the stability and make them a little more useable.
• The second is that I want to test mailing these. I'm tempted to start an Etsy shop and sell a few sets of these, although I'm not convinced that's something I really want to do. Either way a better understanding of how to mail these things around would be nice, so I'll make a second set of the larger coasters (assuming that the first batch come out right) and send them to a friend who thought they were cool.
• The third is to try a different pattern. There are some gifts I'd like give and I feel like taking a pattern from Illusion of Gaia, might be a good fit for the decor of the people to whom I'd like to give the gifts. Hopefully, I can end up with video game decor that doesn't look to video gamey.

So I'd like to finish the first batch of bigger coasters by August 31, 2014. I'll update about the other parts when I've done that.

Project 1: Fourth Season of the Blog

Happy Blog Start and End Day!

Yup, it's August 1st again and that means that the Third Season of the Blog draws to an end. It also means (as you might have guessed from the title) that it's the kick off to the Fourth Season of the Blog.

As a quick reminder this project is the Blog as a Blog part of the Blog. The Blog as a discussion of Projects part of the Blog is a separate thing, which I will post an update about shortly.

For the Blog as a Blog project, I didn't make my goal of a post every two weeks, although I've managed at least five posts a month since May, which I'm fairly happy with. I've also managed to refine my process for producing my favourite YouTube videos posts so that I can make them relatively quickly and painlessly.

I haven't done as well at other posts. I have a backlog of thoughts on video games posts that I'd like to put out there, but this season I only manage to produce two. I also haven't wanted to blog about too many other things since, I'm fairly busy and there's no shortage of opinions about things on the Internet.

Overall I'm happy to keep doing what I'm doing on the blog. For the time being (for the next year) my goal is still to put up two posts a week. Once I feel like I've worked out a system where by I can regularly put up content, then I'll think about expanding what I do.