Hello all! By now, you probably all have guessed that I'm hard at work on the next episode of Sonic Ignition. Things have been going relatively smoothly aside from yours truly having to battle a wicked chest cold for the better part of the week. Oh, I'm still a little flegmmy, but I'm nearly all better now...but Wednesday and Thursday? I had to fight myself to keep working! I know I probably should have just rested, but I've gotta keep my momentum up...or else you'd be seeing the next episode sometime 2 years from now instead of sometime in the next 4 to 5 weeks.

My health ramblings aside, I've been working on expanding the sprite sheets I'm currently using to make them a little more "camera ready." I've been doing this by supplementing them with poses and animations from Advance and Battle sprite sheets from sites like Mystical Forest Zone and The Shyguy Kingdom. Don't get me wrong, I'm not shifting midstream from Genesis style sprites to Advance/Battle style sprites, nor will you get instances where the characters suddenly get a drastic makeover for a few frames. Instead, I'm using Photoshop Elements to rework the Advance/Battle sprites into Genesis style sprites, one by one, as needed. This allows me to get more "acting" out of each character without having to abandon one style for another or sloppifying the series with constant, obvious style shifts. Thank my freakish perfectionism, kids!

I've also been working on acquiring sound effects for the series...but, unfortunately, it's a slow and arduous process. For one, I'm kind of a perfectionist (see above statement about the sprites), so I'm extremely picky about which sound effects are just right for any given moment in the cartoon. This wouldn't be so bad if I wasn't also broke, and therefore unable to purchase a good sound effects CD. Filesize is also a factor. I'm trying to find good sounds with as tiny a filesize as possible so that the sound and music don't make me have to overflow things into 5 and 6 acts for each nearly 30 minute episode (Just adding music wound up drastically increasing the file sizes last time. Compare the file sizes for the parts from episode 1 to the ones from episode 2 if you don't believe me!)...everyone hates commercial breaks. So, I've been having kind of a hard time with that, even with searching sites like findsounds.com. Will the next episode have sound effects? If I find enough good ones in time, sure. If not, probably the episode after that...but I will get sound effects in there!!

So, that about wraps things up for this update. And remember, grinding on rails with skates or a board works in real life and games, but grinding in just your sneakers...is one of those things that only works in video games...