So, first off: My entry to the NATA novice round is complete, and you can watch it here. I'm proud of how it turned out, but long story short, there's a lot of stuff I tried that I probably won't continue with any more.

1: 3D. I found that, although working with 3d is fun, it doesn't mix that well with my style of 2d. Specifically, things animated in 3D that are part of the foreground just look out of place. So, I won't be doing much of that again. However, I found that 3D in the background worked somewhat well. If I make a full 3D model of a set I'm going to use, I can render out various angles of it using a toon shader and it looks surprisingly like the way I do backgrounds normally. Of course, this only works for geometric things like offices and trains (what I used 3D backgrounds for in my entry.) Trees and clouds and stuff I'll add in drawings for.

2: Limited colour schemes. I used them for a video or two, and that was fun, but now they seem boring to work with. For the sake of keeping me interested in what I do, I'm moving on from them.

3: Vignettes. I thought I'd try to put a subtle vignette over (almost) every scene. It did add a bit of visual interest, but I can't help but notice how static it looks. I originally tried having a different sort of texture of vignette for each scene, but it just looked weird. Next time I think I'm just going to let the visuals in the animation do the talking on their own.

Anyway, in terms of other stuff I've been up to, school is drawing to a close and I just finished my computer science final, which is a game written in C++ with the Allegro library. It's sort of crappy, but you can download it here if you want to try it out. It's sort of inspired by games like the Jumper series, which frustrate you an awful lot, but not quite enough so that you don't lose interest. I hope to accomplish something similar.

Some things to note about it:
1. It's a beta version made for this class and the deadline the project has. I will most likely continue to work on this, so feedback is welcome.
2. Some features exist pretty much only so it fits with the rubric that it's being graded with. For instance, high scores and save files are saved to an unencrypted text file, which is incredibly easily editable. In the final version, either the local copies will be harder to edit, or the high scores will be stored on a server.
3. The music is definitely not final. It's just that the game needed sound to get full marks, so I quickly threw on a soundtrack I had lying around. It doesn't exactly fit.
4. The boss is really only there because we needed to have nested structs/classes for something and a boss made up of a bunch of particles is the only thing I could come up with in time. He may or may not stay for the final version, but if he does, his levels won't be the last ones (there's more to come.)

And then I made another quick little flash game for a friend's birthday. You can play it here. Since my friend hates wall jumping, I made a game where the objective appears to be all about wall jumping. In reality, it's about NOT wall jumping in creative ways. Sort of.

I won't be doing a whole lot else from now on (except for possibly the next round of NATA if I happen to make it through. It will be close.) I somehow managed to get a summer job, so I'm both excited about that and freaked out. It's great because I'll be teaching at a computer science summer camp, which is fun and awesome, and it's scary because OH MY GOODNESS IT'S LIKE I'M SORT OF AN ADULT NOW AND OH MY GOD I CAN LEGALLY GET A DRIVER'S LICENCE AHHHH EXISTENTIAL CRISIS

so tl;dr I've been busy recently and I will continue to be for a while.

Bye!
-Dave