Monthly Update: September 2020
Well, it’s business as usual over here at Project Forlorn. Part II has just come out, though I’ll make a separate post about the release next week some time. I had to check my previous monthly update, because so much has happened in the last few weeks that I’ve completely forgotten what exactly was I’ve done. Throughout the past weeks I’ve accomplished all of the groundwork for Part III, and I’m now knee deep in animation for that. I built a very complex character from scratch, updated another with an improved model, and finalized the environment for the episode. Last weekend I went and filmed a lot of animation reference for a couple of specific actions that I wanted to make sure I was getting right. Me and my wife went out into a public space and filmed me jumping and running around like an idiot. Thankfully nobody was around to witness the spectacle. So with that all wrapped up it’s just animation from here on out. I estimate at this point I’m about 40%-50% done with the episode.
As I mentioned in some previous post, I usually save animation and other work that requires a lot of concentration for the weekends, but I’m quickly finding I’m running out of simple weekday work to do. Since animation started, I took the time to model and paint yet another character. I also finalized the model of another set, and am in the middle of texturing that. This leaves me with just one more character and one more set to do, and after that I’ll be forced to animate during the weekdays if I want to feel like I’m actually doing anything worthwhile. I usually find this difficult after doing similar things all day for my normal job, but we’ll see how it goes. Either way, my production pace will remain at least as steady as it is now.
Hopefully by this time next month the animation for Part III is close to being finished, if not finished completely. It’s hard to say how long it will take, as I’m dealing with some complex actions, but I can’t imagine it taking much longer than the next month. This puts the release of Part III sometime around, oh, late November maybe? Possibly early December. That thing I said about Part IV maybe being out by the end of the year? Yeah, that was way off. Still, I’m currently hitting my internal quota of one episode per quarter or so. As this project continues, I do wonder if I’ll be able to maintain that speed, as pretty soon I’ll be dealing with multiple characters per episode. And counter to how it may seem, 2 characters doesn’t mean twice as long. It means 3, maybe 4 times as long, as the characters need to both animate well individually, and animate well with each other. Still I’m looking forward to that, it should be good fun.
