Slime Mansion

Amoebattle is Released!

2012-04-05T21:22:20Z

Hey guys! Sorry for not updating, as you've probably guessed I've been very busy!! First, I am definitely continuing work on Directions of Destiny--it is a very precious part of me that I will never abandon, and I am constantly working on the story behind the scenes.

The reason why I have been so quiet is because for the past year and a half, among many many game projects I've been working on, I've also been acting as the Lead Artist on a Real Time Strategy game for Nintendo DSi and iPhone/iPad called Amoebattle!

I am very proud of this project because not only has it finally been released in the App Store this week, today it has just been highlighted by Apple as a Featured Game!! If you have an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch, check out the Games section of the App Store and you'll find our game :D!

I played a large part in the development of this project, including character sprites and animation, backgrounds, and UI, but I didn't do it alone! I also had the help of other extremely talented artists like Fenryk, who designed all the characters and created the environment for the final stage, and Barlee and Drunkpugs who both also helped tremendously with the environments!!

Please check it out and support the project, especially if you're into RTS games like Starcraft or even Pikmin. It's available to purchase for just $4.99! It is also coming to DSiWare and the 3DS e-Shop very soon for the same price!

Now that it's out, I can breathe a huge sigh of relief, and I see a lot more time spent on Directions of Destiny :] Thanks everyone and I'll update again soon!

Alatus Tower

2011-02-08T03:44:00Z

Another concept piece that I did last semester along with the last two watercolor pieces. :B I had sekritly put this one on my personal site a while back but I never actually put it up on here, so in case anybody missed it before, here it is!

I altered the design of Azalea's animus a little :'D Also this is Azalea circa 13 years old or something so shorter hair and no fancy council uniform yet!

Incidentally I just got hired onto a REAL GROWN-UP JOB which I'll be starting in March! The commute is pretty far (read: ridiculous) but I'm gonna be take my role in protecting our environment and ride the train there every day so I can work on this comic during the ride (as opposed to killing myself slowly suffering through four hours of car traffic everyday ha ha ha uggghhh).

Yay steady income @w@

Student Council

2011-01-23T21:47:50Z

Now that I'm graduated I've been able to dedicate more time toward writing Directions of Destiny :B This was a student council lineup that I did a couple months back. I started on some other characters too but I didn't finish them 'cause there were too many other things I had to do at the time. D':

Zephan is in his PE uniform/battle gear :B

Pixel Sprites

2011-01-21T07:15:16Z

It's been a while since I updated :'B

I've graduated! I've been working in a game studio! I've been doing freelance stuff. I've been writing my comic!!

I don't have much more to say for myself :'D

Here's some pixel sprites that I've done for some games that I've been working on over the past several months.

Fan Art!

2010-06-04T19:09:55Z

Done with finals, passed all my classes, and I just got back from a wonderful weekend at Fanime in San Jose! Now it's back to work for me :> Inbetween the Directions of Destiny stuff, I thought I'd put on the blog some of the fan art I've done over the last year that I hadn't put on the blog yet (even though they're technically on the website ha ha D:)

This is fan art of Mother 3! If you've played Earthbound on SNES, this is the sequel! Y'all should play it if you haven't D: It was an amazing game and it made me shed tears. :') I tried to put in as many elements of the game into this illustration without being too revealing.

Incidentally, the linework was originally done in pencil on paper, but then I decided to make some significant changes so I ended up redoing the linework completely in Illustrator.

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This was a class assignment where we paint a toy from our childhood into an environment. Basically I used it as an excuse to do fan art for school credit :X Does anybody remember this McDonald's toy? I don't even know where mine went D: Apparently there were other toys in this line that I didn't even know about!

For this painting I tried a technique that I saw Jeremy Vickery use in one of his speed paintings, where he basically scribbles in color and then uses a palette knife tool to blend it all together. It worked pretty well! So for this one I started doing that in Painter and then brought it into Photoshop for finishing touches.

I had put this up in a previous entry before, but since then I touched it up a bit by making the colors and characters more bright. I also tweaked the characters' faces a little because before they used to look kind of scary!

The Headmaster's Office

2010-05-16T10:29:29Z

Here's the second in the series of watercolor scenes that I'm working on :D It's the Alatus Headmaster's office!

This one was a little tricky because of all the red going on, and with watercolor different colors have different physical properties when you put it on paper. With the red, after you put it on it tends to come off really easy if you do anything on top of it, and ideally I think it should have been left for the last layer. BUT it wasn't, so once it was put on, the rest of the painting felt like walking on tightrope. D:

SO ALSO. I got a better scan of this painting than the last one! The flatbed scanner at work actually scanned my coldpress paintings without any of the coldpress texture! So that means I don't have to do anything in hot press after all ;D (my prior experience with using hot press was relatively unpleasant, so this development pleases me.)

That being said, I rescanned the dorm room picture and changed up the scene a bit. :>

This would be a year prior to the start of the story, with Zephan and Ryan both incoming freshman to the Alatus high school. Ryan, having been a student of the Alatus middle school, is showing Alatus new arrival Zephan around the dormitories.

I'm almost done with the next two paintings so I'll post them up within the next week ;D (which happens to be FINALS WEEK BTW alfksdfjsa;dfaj)

Dorm Room

2010-05-09T05:20:07Z

This is the first in a series of watercolor background paintings that I'm working on. :> Unlike the previous environment thumbnails which include places outside the school, these paintings will be exclusively of various areas within the campus of the Alatus Institute.

I stuck Zephan in there to see how it looks, but I'm kind of indifferent about it, because the tooth texture of the watercolor paper stands out a little too much :

Incidentally, even though Zephan's standing here, this isn't actually his room. D: It's just a showcase dorm, so maybe he's just checking it out on a tour or something D:

Alatus Environments

2010-05-04T08:51:34Z

The school semester is coming to a close in the coming weeks :D I thought I'd use this chance to post a few thumbnails of some environments I'd been working on for Directions of Destiny.

Some of these locations you might recognize from the comic, others have yet to be mentioned at all. But it's been very fun working on these concepts, and I'll be sure to put up the full finished paintings when I'm done!!

King Zephaniah

2010-04-22T07:05:42Z

I feel like I have all these Internet outlets at my disposal, yet I've failed to make effective use of any of them. D: I guess I rarely feel like I have things worth saying, but with Facebook and Twitter and this whole brave new world beyond LiveJournal these days, I feel like it's such a waste to not use them!! SO, now I'm trying to update my presence on the Internet more?

Anyway, a long long time ago I did this picture, and so finally this past summer I gave it a partner illustration :D This was already posted in some other outlets, including as part of the main art gallery on this site, but I thought I'd make a blog entry about it anyway Dx

Truth be told, I had actually put a piece of tracing paper over the original Queen Azalea illustration to do a lot of the detail work in this one, but I tried to give this one a more earthy feel, and where places in the Queen Azalea one were more clean, I tried to mess it up just a bit in this Zephan version.Their color schemes, red and green, are complements too.

I plan on using this image as the cover of chapter 2.7 when I finally get around to doing the actual comic again, but who knows, maybe I'll change my mind about what to put there when that time comes, ha ha Dx

I'm saying it here, I'm going to try to update at least once a week from now on!!

New layout!

2010-03-28T06:23:42Z

It's been a while since I updated but I thought it was about high time that I did something about the layout of this site D: I was getting sick of the blue, and the site organization was getting in my nerves too. I hope with this layout everything is more accessible and easier in the eyes :D

Also you may notice that I now have art categories specifically for visual development and vector graphics now! Between classes and my job on Graphic Services on campus, I've been doing a lot more of these kinds of art lately, so I figured they deserve their own categories now!

I think most sections work properly, although I still have to put up a lot of my old art back up on the art gallery, and the store is still not up at all, and I haven't finished my profile at all ha ha Dx. I'm also still planning on fixing up a lot of the current art here though so check back every now and then to see if anything is new :'D

The Alatus Gift Shop

2010-02-04T09:07:18Z

It's been a little longer since the last entry than I had hoped for, but I'm back for some more site updates! A lot of things have been going on in the backend lately, including a server change that should speed things up a bit, and a slightly updated layout! I had quickly grown tired of the duller colors of the original new layout, so I adjusted the color scheme to have more contrast, and I decreased the size of the header a little too so that it's less overpowering.

Also, the three weeks before the new semester started I'd been working on figuring out a new shopping cart script for this site, because previously I had used this other program (Zen Cart) that was kind of ghetto!! It did its job but it was a major pain in the butt to use, and it was lacking a certain level of customization.

Namely how I wanted two stores to share the same product IDs and database and cart, but have different layouts with only certain products appearing in each store. If you ever tried to use the Shop link here, you may have been a little jarred by the fact that it takes you to a separate website with a separate layout and everything--I didn't want that! :O I want Directions of Destiny to be its own site and I wanted visitors have a more streamlined experience when they browse this site.

Long story short, I managed to find Magento, the perfect open-source shopping cart script that does everything I want, and after weeks of burrowing myself deep in code and support forums, I've finally finished the New Alatus Gift Shop!

Annnd the feature item right now is the new Section 2.1 book for only $4! :O! This was something I printed back in the summer to try to promote my comic at the summer conventions, and I've finally gotten around to making it available online. For those of you who were around back then, it is similar to the first mini-book I released back in 2005 for Sections 1.1 and 1.2, but this time it's just one chapter, but with lots of extra content! Notably, I've included a full breakdown of my comic-making process in the book, and there are a few new minicomic strips as well as some sketches and other stuff!

For the time being my store on my personal website is closed, but the cool thing is that when I get around to putting it back up I'll be able to have both that and the Alatus Gift Shop share the same shopping cart and everything ahhh I'm so excited Dx! Anyway, I think that pretty much fully wraps up all the site-maintenance stuff for Directions of Destiny, so from here on out I should be putting up much more comic-related content :D Check back soon!

New layout

2010-01-05T14:43:00Z

As you may have noticed, I've managed to put up a new layout for this site like I said I would in the last entry! I hope that it makes it much easier to get around and more visually appealing for you. :D Also like I said, with this big ol' blog space on the front page, I plan to update more often throughout this year with various sketches and art and stuff related to the comic as I flesh out the script for the rest of the story. Please check back every now and then if you're interested!

As a bonus, here's the line-art for the two header character art I've done so far. Instead of using a pen to ink the line-art, I drew the sketch in blue pencil and "inked" it with pencil, and so I like the nice softer effect it leaves? I plan to add header art for the rest of the characcters too in my spare time.

A lot of things were going a little haywire in the background over the last few days as I was putting this up, but I think most things should be working properly now? If you find anything that doesn't work, please comment in this entry to let me know about it, or if you have any suggestions you should leave a note as well :>

Status Update

2009-12-08T09:09:44Z

I have come to give you a report! I-it's not good news, but it's not bad news either really. It's...okay news?

After years of on-and-off hiatuses, I think I've finally come to realize that I'm probably just not built to tackle school and regularly update an on-going comic at once. D: That said, I have one year left and I'm graduating next December if everything goes as planned!! (I-if it seems like I've been in college forever, that's pretty much been the case.) BUT that doesn't necessarily mean that I won't update the comic at all until then!!

I started this comic out in a really haphazard manner, and even after so long, sometimes I would go straight into drawing after only scripting out a few pages in advance. It worked in getting me to just DRAW, and my comic-drawing skills have improved a lot from when I first began, but now I really want the story and the concept to hold up with the art!

Over the past several months I've been developing the Alatus Institute further, working out the details to the building exteriors and interiors, adding more structures to the campus, and fleshing out the surrounding landscapes and towns around the school and stuff. I've also been taking out two birds with one stone by making many of my school projects directly correlate with my plans for the comic, and lately I've been really into drawing environments, so what I hope this leads to is an Alatus Institute that is much more REAL.

Another idea I've been entertaining is turning alatusinstitute.com into an official school website, where information about the school can be posted along with other fun things, like blogs for each of the student council members, and regularly updated minicomics! Although minicomics aren't substitutes for real comic pages that progress the main story, they ARE a lot easier to draw inbetween classes and don't require any planning. I really want to go through with this idea soon so that I can at least share the fun I'm having with my characters before the real comic pages continue updating.

Finally, I've been thinking much more about storycrafting and plot structure over the past year. I've been reading a lot of books on writing, and from there I've been further solidifying my story--laying out all the scenes in the entire comic from here until the end and making sure every scene is constantly driving towards the finale and no panels are wasted on boring things that make a story drag! I've been making a lot of notes on the rest of the story that will get organized and polished into full scripted thumbnails which I plan to show my friends so that I can get some good feedback before drawing them out and publishing it online. I'm really pumped about taking writing more seriously!! :D

With all these things going on in the background, I really don't want to keep it all to myself! In two weeks winter break will come, and the first thing on my agenda is to redesign this website. It'll feature a more accessible and streamlined layout that is more blog-friendly so big-ol' written entries like this won't feel so cramped. I also want to post a lot of the concept art I've been doing, plus random sketches of the characters, and maybe occasionally story thumbnails and things like that to get reader feedback! It'll make things much more interactive around here, and by constantly updating with what's going on and getting lots of input, I hope that it'll make the comic even better!

I hope to have the new site done in January 2010, so check back often :D Until then, if you have anything you'd like to see in the new Directions of Destiny website and/or the Alatus website, or if you have any issues with or comments on the current layout, comment back and let me know!!

Koopa Armada

2009-06-10T08:51:26Z

I've always had a soft spot for Bowser ever since Super Mario RPG :B This was something I worked on during the semester that I managed to finish in time to sell as a print at Fanime. Unlike many of my past illustrations, this one incorporated heavy use of layers, now that I actually know how to use them more effectively thanks to my Digital Illustration class this past semester @w@

Azalea!

2009-06-08T07:00:00Z

I sketch Azalea a lot when I'm bored :B These were some from last year.

Another sketch from last year for somebody who donated money to me *_*

And some sketches of Magnolia too :D