I've made and posted a fair few songs these past few months, and I just wanted to highlight some of my favs for in case you missed them. This playlist is the rough outline of what an eventual album could look like. Keen to know what you think.

Turns out having terrible headphones with no bass has not helped with having good mastering, so I may have to go back and rework a lot of these en-mass. But I was going through bouts of 'done is better than perfect', and they never would have made it here if I held the bar too high. Still really proud of what I've been able to get out, and I want to give a big thanks to Tom and Newgrounds for welcoming these songs despite the many imperfections.

Let me know which one is your favourite. Being a bit of a people pleaser, I might make a spiritual successor inspired by your preference

how are you going with your creative projects?

After missing the first round of the animation tournament, I decided that, given my animation also included robots, I could just finish it up in time for robot day, and give it a bit more polish.

That was going well until my graphics card caught fire. Literally. It actually caught fire. Things were going really well before then

I don't even have any screen shots or anything, so you'll just have to believe me when I say it had a slow motion explosion in a city made of crystals during a sunshower. And everything is all rainbow spectrummy 'n' shit like the film of bubbles.

it was dope. Hope you'll get to see it soon still. Will need to source a new card.

or maybe I could just sit on it until next year's robot day...?

*moreso; name changer.

My username was 'Nightbreaker' and now it's 'Fate'.

I'm glad to finally move away from the Martin Sheen/Emilio Estevez movie.

For the past 2 years, I have participated in, and won, Robot Day.  

This year, however, I will be focusing on the Power of Four.  So far, I believe I am a part of a very strong team, which includes myself doing character animation/foreground art/producing, maestrorage doing music and hopefully kamikaye doing some delicious background art.  

But we are in need of a programmer.  I'll be working with Flash CC, so it'll be AS3 or HTML.

If you're someone with visible experience (i.e. has a well functioning game here on NG) and are prepared to commit to a rather innovative beast, I'd love to hear from you.

The game will be a side-scroller set in space, where the main focus is on the experience of the journey.  Music and visuals will meet to create a truly immersive experience that I'm really exited about.  There'll be a lot of circular-based dynamics, with orbiting, shadows and rotation on the Z-plane, so relevant experience will definitely be embraced.

I'm really hoping we can get someone really worthwhile on board, as our team so far has been well tailored for what this game will require.

But seriously, if you're a willing programmer, please message me or leave a comment below.

>>> Free Fall <<<

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

So I apparently need to start finishing my animations before I post them. I always find myself pulling two or three all-nighters in the lead-up to an event like Robot Day, and I'm always so close.
Like last year, I have posted with one or two incomplete shots still left in the animation, concerned for the time bracket of the Robot Day competition.

Having seen the other entries this year though, I don't think I have a snowball's chance in hell at winning anything, so I may have been better off finishing it off properly and posting it when everything is as polished as I would have liked.

Everything should be resolved before Monday, however, so keep an eye out, as it'll be perfect very soon.
I have mixed emotions about the lower initial score, too. I get frustrated some times that my series, that have taken hundreds of hours of my life away, have managed nothing better than a Daily 4th, but I also like the appeal of this series being kinda tucked away and unappreciated.
I LOVE feedback, and people watching my stuff, and being interested in when the next installment comes out, but I also know that the next installment is always so far away, and having people waiting on me feels awful.
Maybe when Chapter 5 is out, I'll be okay with some form of recognition.

As for some Chapter 5 news, its current run time is 23 whopping minutes, as I'm making it a self contained movie (i.e. it includes the previous 4 chapters) so that I can enter it into film festivals, etc.
WHICH MEANS I GET TO ANIMATE THE FIRST CHAPTER FOR THE THIRD TIME OH YAY.

But I'm constantly growing, as an animator, and the Planetoid series has always been me pushing my skills to the max with as much as I can, and Chapter 5 will be no different. It's going to have a very similar visual style to Free Fall, with the no outlines and textures, but there's a lot more movement from the characters, and a lot more diverse backgrounds, so it's going to be a lot of work.

Also, Free Fall obviously doesn't fall into the Planetoid timeline, though it clearly contains the same character(s) and locations, so I'll let you decide whether it happens before or after the events of the Planetoid Saga.

And maybe, if you've made it this far, you can help me out. Since this last chapter is all encompassing, should I call it 'Planetoid - Chapter 5', or just 'Planetoid', as it has all of them? I'm having a REALLY hard time deciding.
Also, it won't void the previous four chapters. Them being included in the last chapter is like a 'Last time, on Planetoid' thing, and robs a lot of emotions from the events that happen, like the birds in chapter 3.

Finally, I think I'll just add that I look forward to the day where people will start to question some of the decisions I've made in the series. Like.. pyramids, birds, MOTHAFLIPPING PLANETOIDS BEING LAUNCHED FROM THE PLANET. Nobody has yet though. I hope it's because you know I'll explain it, but I fear it's because no one is interested.

As I said though, all will be explained.
This has been my rant.
Good eve.

Nightbreaker

It hath begun.

So I've just begun animation on Planetoid's fifth and final chapter, after seeing some reviews on the older installations. They've really inspired me and pushed me towards getting this behemoth of an animation done. This project is going to take me about twelve months of solid work to get done, with a run time of about 22 minutes, and is going to push the visual capabilities of flash a fair bit.

I'm going to need some real push to get me through that, and I really love reviews and seeing what people have to say about the first four chapters, and how far I've come, animation wise.
So, from here on, I will review, one-for-one, in reply to any serious, more-than-three-worded critiques on any of my animations.

We all love input, approval and circle-jerks.
So why not?

It's been so long in the making that I think I'll take you through the brief history of Planetoid - Chapter 4

2009
Originally, it was going to be heavily vectored and styled.

This got dumped pretty quick. I changed to a song by T-Free, and animated the first few shots in the style I would end up sticking to.

Then F-777 released a song at the end of 2009, that I felt was perfect, so I scrapped the T-free song, brought in a longer intro, and storyboarded some weird tentacle scene.

2010
The tree shift was horrendously ugly, so I reapproached that. Then I discovered Flash CS5's new Z-depths, but found it incompatible with the old file I was working with (or something), so I did some wierd thing that incorporated another file that I doubt I could pull off a second time, and somehow, I found myself with a pretty rockin' looking river.

I now hit this roadblock. I was kind of at this point where I needed to animate some... geometric, kinda... dancy backgrounds. Rave lights 'n' the like, so I handed it over to Tarienn for a bit, hoping he'd be able to help me out. He did some great stuff, including the purple-wire laser gate thing, but I found myself stuck with the backgrounds still, which I'll be redoing soon.

It was around this time I got my cintiq, and from then on, it was pretty much smooth sailing, except that, after I showed a few people what I had done so far, they compared the tentacle.. pick-up thing to hentaii, so I had to redo it. I'm glad I did though. It definitely works a lot better.

2011
Nothing happened.
Legit.
I hardly ever worked on this.
For a whole year.

2012

I started studying animation at Griffith Film School, going to the same classes, and being taught by the same teachers, that Tarboy's James Lee was. During the semester, I didn't get much chance to really work on this, as I had to focus on assignments a lot more.

But then semester ended.

And then the rush for RobotDay began.

I hadn't worked on it much leading up to the '1 month left' mark, so it looked pretty much like this. (still had tentacles)

2 weeks left
As you can probably guess, I was FREAKING OUT.

1 week left
Every waking moment, when I was not at work, was devoted to getting this done. I was on the cusp the whole time. I might make it, I might not.

Four days
And I'm actually lying when I say four days to complete it, because I went away on that weeks holiday two days before Robotday, and I had to have it done by then. So really, I had two days. Two days to animate everything that wasn't complete in this file.

And I was so close.
I slept very little that week. Usually about three hours a night. An all nighter the evening before I had to catch a plane at 5am. And I was two shots short. Two shots that I could've quickly rushed something out for in twenty minutes, but I had to leave for the plane then and there. So I uploaded what I had done.

That's not the exact file I originally uploaded. There were some unfortunate layer mixing issues that went wrong in the all nighter, and things got out of sync towards the end. I forgot to save a copy of it for this document before I fixed it, but this is essentially what was uploaded.

And that's it, pretty much.
I feel it would've been received a lot better had I uploaded it when it was complete, and maybe I'll still pull it down and reupload it when I'm actually happy with it.
I would have already, but I'm curious to see how well it does in the Robotday competition.

Are never going to be announced.
Far out.
Talk about suspense.

DON'T LEAVE YET
because of the obvious ploy in the title.
I have an animation that's involved in Robotday2012, and I originally uploaded it unfinished.
There was actually quite a lot wrong with it, that I didn't notice when I posted it. I then went on a week long holiday where I couldn't fix it.
But I'm back now, and it's fixed, and mostly finished.
So check it out, maybe?

I'm still going through and redoing lots of shots 'n' stuff, but at least they're all done now.
This was three long years in the (not) making, so please tell me what you think :)

okay, you can leave now if you want.