I accomplished quite a bit yesterday during my little zennning. I finished some SFM rendering, and compiled a few image sequences. I’ve put them all together tonight — all that’s left to do now is to play with the audio… and I’ll have a video for Saturday!!!
I’m not sure if I’ll start on another Broforce video, or return to finishing the end of my Yakuza video. Heck, I might even look at a different set of game footage if I’m up for it.
After two days of zen I think I’m ready for five days of pain. I made it a zen repeat of yesterday, minus the gaming. It was another day of tea drinking, tea ordering, and hot white chocolate matcha to give my evening a sweet finish. I didn’t realize how low I was on my puerh teas, those (and black tea) are super important for my morning commutes. I don’t do coffee, and puerh has the right amount of caffeine to kick start the hyperactive part of me.
Yesterday I was in 80’s Japan, and today I spent most of my gaming time in Painted Feudal Japan looking for cat statues, treasure, and animals that haven’t been fed yet.
It was a nice contrast to a sleepy grey day. I also made a homemade noodle bowl for breakfast, and have been enjoying tea ranging from matcha to sencha. I even mixed some matcha with some raspberry white hot chocolate I recently bought. When mixed together it looks like a green tea latte with sakura petals! The matcha pairs well with the sweetness of the white chocolate and the tartness of raspberry. I would have snapped a picture, but the lighting was all wrong, and I want to snap a pic in drinkware better fit for a photo shoot. All in all it was a calm day, well deserved.
After a rough week I wanted to return to 80’s Kamurocho to release a little stress through my digital fists, but got distracted by numerous rounds of Pool… I didn’t win a single match, but I came close on most of them. The damn AI was always the one to beat me to the damned 8Ball. One of my Yakuza work friends was telling me the other day that he couldn’t get into any of the mini-games, and I’m not sure why. It’s kinda cool to have games within games, it adds more depth to the game and it makes you feel like you’re just out for a fun night on the town!
Meanwhile… I’ve been slowly testing model swaps on other characters, like replacing Bob’s model with Ronald at the local shrine. He’s gonna set me up with allllll of the happy meals. I’ve been sharing some of my screencaps with my work friends, and their reactions range from amused to questioning my well being. Heh, if anything, escaping to these other worlds is helping me cope with all the terrible shit that’s been going on lately.
I’m not in much of a writing mood tonight, so here’s a thing to laugh at.
Open Thread n shit.
It’s officially the season of the watermelon! I’m thinking of buying something watermelon related this weekend to celebrate my first weekend of summer. The weather has been pretty comfortable these last couple of days, perfect iced tea sippin’ weather, and not hot enough to put off video progress! I haven’t decided if I’ll cram some video work in over the weekend or not… I did get quite a bit done in tonight’s sitting, the clip I’m currently working on is going to be about 25 seconds long. I think it’ll depend on how much I can complete tomorrow. Sadly this project has no watermelons in it, but it will have explosives!
It cooled off just enough to get this small piece finished up! We even had a small recording session! I’ll tear back into it in a day or two, when the weather isn’t roasting, much like this picture. I’m not sure if I’ll have the video done by the 4th or not., especially with these heated delays. But I’m sure it’ll see the light of day sometime in July.
Yesterday I started back up again on my Broforce video, and managed to export one scene! Now I’m going all Michael Bay on this map while waiting to do some script writing/recording. Unfortunately, it was too hot for me to work on it today. I had to suffer with boba tea instead! 😛 I think that is going to be my new summer drinking ritual. I brewed some ginger peach tea for a peach boba tomorrow, it’s supposed to be warm again and I like the idea of tea AND a snack.
I spent my final day of peace doing a little online shopping, animating (more on that tomorrow!), and trying some of the teas I ordered! I recently purchased a raspberry mojito and a mango strawberry tea. Both equally delicious. I’m even planning ahead and brewing some royal milk tea for some after work boba tea tomorrow! Then of course I also have a couple pints ginger peach tea for my work commute tomorrow… There was a lot of tea today. I’m drinking the raspberry mojito one right now, it’s an herbal tea — it offers a nice, refreshing tropical taste on a nice summer evening. It’s looking like it’ll be another one of those tomorrow, good thing I have plans to stay hydrated! 😛
My adventures in modding Yakuza games has been sated for now. I have a better understanding of how to play with the game files. Unfortunately it’s looking like I can’t swap models over just any character, well… I can, but it can break different aspects of the game. For example: I had to revert Nishiki back to vanilla, otherwise the Karaoke game mode would crash the game. Kuze didn’t seem to like having his model changed either (to Eggman at least). I’ll need to set some time aside to play with these files more, and see if it’s possible to swap models out with a little less crashing.
I also learned that Yakuza 0 and Yakuza Kiwami mods can be swapped around since they share the same game engine! Making things like, 100% times more interesting! Perhaps if I come up with an interesting enough ensemble of characters I might livestream one of these… after I remember how to livestream. 😛
I’m going to jump back into my animation project tomorrow, that’ll give the blog a break from any Yakuza related posts. 😛 But it was nice to not only play a game, but learn a little more about the game internals.