#i didn't render out the cgs like i usually do

[gaykarstaagforever]

FREE ON YOUTUBE

...YouTube, I feel like your free animated movie recommendations have declined in quality a bit since the halcyon days of Osmosis Jones.

Yes, it is a blatant Kung Fu Panda knockoff, with an American voice cast that is clearly whoever was home at 11 am the week they called.

This is bad. Like, unfinished, I think I'm missing like half the movie, they forgot to resolve the main plot and it just stops, bad. There is a scene where the only character on screen suffers an animation error, and no one fixed it. The framerate of the movie drops every time the action picks up or the camera swings around too fast. Like...you made a computer-animated movie, and you don't have the hardware or time to do...you know...computer animation? The stones on the Chinese producers of this mess.

Not everything has to be Pixar or DreamWorks. CG is hard. I get it. But you gotta work to your strengths. In this case, the computers you are using can't even render the movie properly. Like...I don't know how you get around that. That's kind of a major issue.

Technical incompetence aside, this suffers from the usual bad CG animation problems of every character looking like they come from a different artistic universe, and most of the action is generic mocaping that doesn't take into account how any real bodies shaped like these bodies would move. And there are just things they didn't bother capturing. Like none of these dough monsters ever stands up on screen.

Shot composition is a disaster. Most scenes are a mob of creatures standing in a pack in an empty space, doing exaggerated facial reactions to someone else talking. It's like bad machinima made in the Skylanders games engine, except all of the character designs are way worse.

The plot, such as they attempted it, is supposed to be about a small, incompetent warrior who looks like Jackie Chan who gets transported to the mystical realm of Merryland by a magical jade necklace his grandfather gave him. There, he transforms into an anthropomorphic panda, for reasons that are never explained. There is a prophecy that a Panda Warrior is destined to save the realm, and our guy is apparently it, except there is a flashback to like a couple of years ago when the ultimate evil took over, and...there is ANOTHER Panda Warrior who was just there and sort of stopped it? But then didn't? Who the hell was that guy?!

Also the ultimate evil is one of the two sky-whales who guard the Dragon Ball (yes, literally) just turning evil because it absorbed too much power. Why did this happen? How are you going to stop it from happening again? Then that whale turns into a nine-headed snake after an evil mouse from the real world just...is there, and merges with the Whale. After the snake is defeated the mouse just crawls out of it and runs away, and no one says a damn thing.

Our panda warrior and his 7 legendary warrior friends kung fu fight the snake at least 3 different times, and never get close to stopping it. And the panda doesn't do anything special or lead them, he is just there, and then at the very end his necklace glows and that...helps? Somehow? The true hero here is, and I'm not joking, Jimmy Ginseng, a tiny ginseng man with an erhu who shows up whenever the warriors are losing, plays the erhu, the enemy gets soothed by the song, and then Jimmy gets tired and leaves. EVERY BATTLE ends like this, including the final one.

So...?

The panda has that cool green sword in the picture. And he does have it. It is just...a sword, thst someone randomly gives him. I think he ends up dropping it and it never comes up again.

Also all the warriors are animals, except for the one who is a talking tree stump...filled with lava. And he dies at the end by setting himself and the snake on fire. Because his master, a purple fox, told him to do that to save everyone. ...Except the SNAKE SURVIVED IT, and they had to fight it again, lose, and wait for Jimmy to show up.

The bull character also sacrifices himself, TWICE, to save everyone else, and both times that doesn't work, either.

The movie ends with Merryland being restored from the devastation of the snake...BEFORE the snake is defeated. It just...gets better, after they resuce an elf girl princess who does...something...? And then the regrown flowers shoot the snake with missiles of some kind. Which ALSO fails to defeat it.

The panda doesn't go home and become human again and nothing is explained. But during the credits there is a fight scene between the little human warrior and his general, in which they get drunk and wrestle and tons of fight animations repeat in a loop for 3 minutes. Is this part of the movie? Are these outtakes? What does this have to do with anything? If this is what happens after he got home, I don't know why or what it means.

...My guess is that the first panda warrior we see was supposed to be his grandfather, as a panda? That was probably the idea? But no one ever says that. The movie doesn't remember to explain that.

This was translated from Chinese. Perhaps the translation is terrible. Or they did a massive reedit of this for the US release. That could explain some of this. ...But then why didn't they cut out the glitch scene, or some of the shots with the bad framerate? There are literal 10 second sequences in this movie where there is no dialogue or music, just a camera sleeping over a scenery to ambient nature sounds. Who reedits a movie for the foreign market and cuts out vital plot scenes, but leaves in shit like that?

...Unless all those vital plot scenes had even worse technical problems. Jesus. That's a terrifying thought.

One positive here. While nearly all of the voice work is as boring and bored as you'd expect, the immortal Tom Kenny is good, with what very little he is given to do, here. The man is a professional.

And here is the weirdest thing: Rob Schneider is really good here as the panda man and Jimmy Ginseng. Like, shockingly good. Like, this is without exaggeration the best performances of this man's miserable life. He is funny, charming, nuanced, he feels like he is reacting properly during what were probably one-sided conversations recorded on different days in different places. It is shocking how good he is in this awful, stupid movie. My only guess is that he was somehow involved in bringing this over and it was going to serve as an audition piece to get him more voice work. In which case, like, fair enough, dude. You nailed it. He is genuinely very good in this very bad movie.

What an odd artifact from 2012. What a waste of time. Why did YouTube recommend this? What do any of us gain from being shown this? I am just flabbergasted.

You're on time out with these movie suggestions, Google.

Also there is a pig who flies who looks like this:

Those aren't ears, they are just gross misshapen tendrils that bob around as she moves. It's like someone was playing with a stretch tool and then...stopped.

I was gonna end with "Now let's have Jimmy Ginseng play us out," but I can only find this one bad picture of him, and it doesn't show his erhu:

Here is some nice erhu music from someone else. Something redeeming in this godforsaken post:

[crescencestudio]

๋࣭⭑ Devlog #43 | 7.30.24 ๋࣭⭑

tis the season of crescence x fenir

It's peak hot girl summer time. Not sure how many of you saw the sunburnt art trend going around on twitter, but of course I had to take part in it with the other hot girl in the Alaris cast, Druk.

look at those 34DD's

I drew this early this month, but I am still thinking about it. Let us take a moment to appreciate this gift together.

Alright, now that that's out of the way, let's get into the devlog!

I've been jumping around a lot between different routes this month, but it's been fun since I definitely enjoy the polishing/editing part of writing more than the drafting part. This past month, I got my hands into Fenir, Druk, Etza, and Kuna'a's routes LMAO.

For Fenir's route, I actually have bittersweet, but exciting news! OG Alaris followers may remember I had Vi (of @nextinline-if fame) helping me with line editing. She did an amazing job with Kayn's route, but unfortunately she isn't able to continue working on Alaris due to personal/professional obligations. I, of course, support her and wish her all the best in all her future conquests and am super grateful to have gotten the chance to work with someone as talented and kind as her <3

Stepping in to help is close friend, Allie Vera! Allie helped me with intertwine, and hails from besties' Lost in Limbo and Blooming Panic fame (amongst many other cracked VNs). I'm very excited to get to work with Allie again, and they are already knocking it out of the park with Fenir edits! Everyone please welcome Allie to the Alaris team ^^

On my end, I've been doing my own line editing for Fenir and Druk's routes now that I'm able to revisit the scripts with fresh eyes. As usual, Etza developmental edits continue forward, and we're getting into the last stretch. We've added in a lot of cute moments and really fleshed out the romance more so Etza's romantic side can shine <3

With Kuna'a's route, I'm doing the same-old, same-old. Fleshing out scenes, ironing out plot details, etc. Because I was bouncing between so many routes this month, I didn't have as much time to sit down and really Write Kuna'a's route. But I will say I'm already pretty happy with the script. I've added a couple more emotional beats and, in general, have been connecting plot points that already make the route feel stronger, so I'm excited for you all to eventually see it!

My little notion word tracker showing word goals (left), actual word count (center), and words left to write (right)

In the last bit of exciting news for writing, we are approaching an exciting milestone!!! I told you all when we started Kuna'a's route, we had approximately 100k left so were finally getting into the "double digits". Well, now we are approaching the last 50k!!!! All of the routes are ~50k, so 50k is my benchmark for one whole route. It's exciting to see that we are getting to the last bit AUUGGHHH

As you can see, the writing front was pretty busy this month. Because of that, I wasn't able to make much headway on art. I do have this sneak peek of a Druk CG, as I try to make progress on his beta!

licks him

Final count for CGs right now is 20, though! Out of an estimated 54. So we're slowly approaching the halfway point, which is super exciting \o/ And this doesn't include the handful of CGs I already have sketched up and just need to be rendered (sketching is the most time-consuming part for me, so once a sketch is finished, the CG is basically done in my eyes LMFALSIDJ).

Finally, this past month we've been working on Fenir's beta testing!! It was his birthday month this past month, so happy birthday to our little grumpy guy <3

Birthday piece gifted by Extremely Talented @endys that I still cry over. If you haven't played Snow White Ashes....... WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR??

Beta testing has been going well. Here's a couple of gems from feedback so far:

giggles like a madwoman

he's like a little kitten in a wet cardboard box all alone

Kayn, looking at Fenir: I want that twink Obliterated... so cute.

If you'd like to try out his beta, sign up for Hydra on my Patreon!

The beta will be running a while longer as I make progress on Druk's beta. The time span between Kayn and Fenir's beta was about a month, but honestly trying to get the beta out in that amount of time while balancing the rest of dev kinda killed me. So Fenir's beta will be running for a bit longer than a month. I'll let you all know when Druk's beta will go up so that you can hop in on Fenir's before it ends if you want. But just remember, each beta route only runs for that period of time, so get access to it while you can!

For market research this month, I played a couple of games but unfortunately haven't really had time in the way of fanart <\3 I'd like to get back into doing that since I feel like it helps me with art progress in general, so we'll see ;(

I do want to highlight a game that just dropped its demo this month and is currently running its Kickstarter! I'm sure many of you have heard/seen Save the Villainess on your timeline, and I hope you all check out the demo!! The art is stunning, as many people have said, and the premise is super interesting, inspired by many villainess manhuas.

If you're into darker stories, meta-commentary, and murder mysteries, please consider checking out and supporting the devs (@bestlaidplansproductions) as they've worked incredibly hard on this game!

As you can see, a lot of this month was spent on writing. With where the routes are at right now, I'm thinking I'll be able to focus more solely on Kuna'a's route this upcoming month and finally get that knocked out of the park. I also hope to make progress on the CG front! Wish me luck there... LOL.

That's all for this month! Hope you're all doing well (and surviving the many heat waves hitting the world), and I'll see you all next month <3

[pallisia]

I was so busy this weekend that I didn't get to play your game until today, because I really wanted to give it my full attention! And I'm so glad I did because every moment was so amazing. In general I feel like I learn something new anytime I look at your art but your artwork in the game especially so! It was so cool seeing what parts you decided to render and what details you decided to hold back and keep ambiguous. I'm curious, for a lot of the more 'sketchy' cg moments, did you always intend for that to be the form those images would take, or was there any point where they were more or less detailed before you settled on a look for them? I love how warm and alive every image looks and I think that style is a big part of it.

Sorry, I'm going on and on about the art but as usual your writing was lovely too! There were so many really cool lines and I loved the lore, and it was neat being able to see the rhythm/speed of the dialogue as it appeared.

Thanks for showing us something so cool! I can't wait to read the full thing!

thanks so much. the sketchier style started mostly for efficiency. originally, i did want to do more fully-rendered art, but i thought that setting the bar for "finish" relatively low early on would help me in the long run, both in actually getting all the art assets done and in making the bigger moments stand out. i'm glad it was successful!

thanks for your comments on the writing too. i always appreciate dialogue-heavy games that include conversational pauses when printing text, even if it's just after every comma or period. it makes it a lot easier to process, at least for me.

[tsuru-yo]

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