I recently got into your Halo fanfics and they’re honestly the best ones i’ve found so far. Do you ever plan on making more? I love how you wrote the dynamic between the Arbiter and Master Chief.
Thank you, but I'm afraid I don't really have any more ideas for that particular series. It was a lot of fun to write while I still had ideas at least!
I have hopes to one day figure out how to get my thoughts on a Halo/Transformers crossover into a short fic, but other than that it's up in the air if I'll find something in Halo to inspire me again.
A speed draw of my Dark Souls boss name (from Brian David Gilbert's: https://youtu.be/Zb4CxTTFDfA?t=892 and inspired by Drawfee's: https://youtu.be/Z11HmnF_OAE).
This is partially a test-run, so I know how fiddly it’ll be to do for CG speed draws. Hopefully this will be a chance to show my process when making VN art in the future.
So, I said I had an update on another VN project and here it is!
Based on BDG’s Unraveled youtube series, this VN was put together to answer the most pressing of questions: who would be the best F-Zero character to date?
It’s pretty short and was mostly a way to remind myself what I can do with VNs, since I’ve been flagging a bit on the Transformers one that’s my current main project. I’m hoping this’ll give me a bit of a kick to keep writing.
I like visual novels. I like picross. I love games that combine the two.
Murder By Numbers (for Switch or Steam) is a game that lies somewhere between Ace Attorney and Professor Layton. You play the role of TV actress Honor and an amnesiac robot called SCOUT. The two of them team up to clear Honor's name after her boss is killed and to find out who built SCOUT and why. The story unfolds over 4 cases, each more complex than the last.
The picross element is portrayed in-game as SCOUT's object recognition abilities. He will scan an area then the player will complete a picross to see what he's found (for example a book or a footprint). It fits pretty well and is definitely more fun than generic point-and-click.
I really enjoyed it and anyone looking for some quality VN content can certainly do far worse! I’ve put some for and against reasons for playing below the cut.
Reasons to play the game:
The writing's good. It probably won't make you laugh out loud, but I thought it was generally amusing and it handles its characters well.
The characters are well-drawn and expressive. They've done a good job of using a limited number of sprites and the space they've got to make it feel like much more is happening than just a sprite moving back and forth - it’s given me a higher bar to aim for in my VNs.
The third case happens in and around a drag bar, but there's never any forced gender reveals (looking at you Ace Attorney: Dual Destinies).
They usually had me guessing as to who the murderer was for most of the cases and still made it all come together at the end.
It combines picross with visual novel murder mystery - what's not to like?
Reasons not to play the game:
If you don't like either picross or detective mysteries, the other part won't make it worth it. You need to like both to really appreciate the game.
It's basically linear and not super long.
The characters are quite trope-y. They usually gain more depth as the game progresses, but there's still a lot of 'bratty actress', 'gay best friend', and 'grizzled old detective' surrounding those deeper moments.
One of the characters is Honor's emotionally abusive ex-husband. Honor is thankfully in a much better place during the game timeline and she trusts her own judgement over his, but conversations with him can be nasty and gaslight-y in places - which I know is unappealing for a lot of people.
So I’m reading the Complete Independence Day omnibus and came across this sentence:
“He’d (Dr. Okun) even managed to arrange a security clearance for one of the world’s leading cryptographers, Dr D. Jackson, who had once spent three frustrating weeks trying to figure out the markings out before being called away to another government project.”
Stargate Confirmed to be in the same universe as Independence Day!!!!!! (well the Stargate Movie and book series. SG1/SGA/SGU are based on the movie and might not be involoved)
I know they’re both series are written by Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich but not all series are in the same universe when written by the same authors. Of course by this stage in the book Cheyenne Mountain has been destroyed... Hopefully Daniel’s still on Abydos when that happened.
