Summer Update 2016!

Summer Update 2016!

Hello everyone! Sorry for neglecting the blog for so long. (I’ve been active on Twitter though!) Today I just wanted to bring up some life stuff that’s happening.

First let me talk about this summer. I’ve been super lazy all summer and I love it. Work has been really chill, allowing me to get some well-needed rest after last year’s shenanigans. All the rest has let me catch up on my hobbies and other projects - such as streaming, which I’ve been doing pseudo-regularly for the past two months on my Twitch channel! I’m especially proud of how that’s been going, as it’s a hobby I’ve been meaning to start for at least a year now. Besides that, I’ve worked on some silly videos, and caught up with friends. Somewhere along the way, I even picked up a bit of self-confidence, although I don’t know exactly where it came from...

Unfortunately, though, all must come to an end, and the summer is no exception. My last year of college starts next week, and having looked over the schedule, I can’t afford to make any mistakes (or risk graduating next year instead). That means I need to focus on classes... and that means I can’t be focusing on Tumblr (sorry again!), or Twitch, or anything else really. Even if I tried, college has a habit of kicking me in the teeth and draining me of my energy, so I wouldn’t be able to anyway.

I’m not about to take a hiatus, but I will say this: I’ll only do stuff whenever I feel I can. So I won’t push myself to stream every week, or work on my other projects, or update this blog if it’s been dead for... wait it was already dead. But you get the point: I’m not disappearing, but I am shifting my focus.

And when the year is over? Well, I can’t speak for that yet. I don’t know how I’ll handle whatever new job I may have or whatever life stuff comes up. I’ll cross that bridge when it comes. But hopefully - hopefully - things will loosen up around then, and I can start a new chapter of life.

Anyway, thanks for reading! You help make this all worthwhile ^_^

I swear one of these days I’ll actually start writing on this blog again.

It took long enough to nail everything down, but I think I’m finally done with my new avatar. Working on this was quite the learning experience!

WIP1: This was kind of the mockup stage. I knew the general shape I wanted, but I had no idea what specific colors to use, how to highlight the W effectively, whether the outline would work, etc.

WIP2: I changed the outline to a shadowy effect - I wanted it to look like a window into another world. This didn’t pan out so well, so I removed it in future iterations. Tried to refine the colors a bit more, but I still couldn’t figure them out.

WIP3: It was about this time that I realized I was basically going for a Material Design look, so I researched Google’s design documentation and a few tutorials on getting the shadows and colors to look right. 

WIP4: Decided to redo the geometry from scratch - some of the objects didn’t appear to be lined up quite right. I made it slightly smaller so that it could be comfortably resized to 100px. A friend suggested that the purple was too bright, so I toned it down to match the blues more closely. I also reduced the shadows because they were jumping out at me too much.

Final: I wanted the shadows to only draw along the W, so I redid the geometry again to add some shadow masks underneath the shapes. I also changed the cyan to be more blue than green, while still keeping it the same kind of relatively bright color. The results speak for themselves!

Here’s one more Super Mario Maker level for the night! This one manages to be nightmarishly difficult, but without relying on cheap tricks or enemy spam. It was originally made for Zeta with a rainbow-y effect on the castle walls, but that’s not exactly possible here.

A82A-0000-0025-67BA

good luck will were rooting for you..... willwere.... will ware... wow. www stands for will ware website

Thanks for the encouragement! Funny you should mention the web, actually; one of my big plans is to buy a couple of domain names. For, uh, reasons.

I made a level in Super Mario Maker called Duality that flips upside-down every time Mario enters a pipe. The course ID is 2FA8-0000-0030-C2AD if you want to try it out!