Production update 2022-04-21

Hello!

I am back. In the past few weeks, I've been away for all sorts of reasons, so I'll make a quick list: 

• Took a small break as motivation was low after falling behind schedule
• Went out of town for my great aunt's 80th birthday but that got cancelled the day before when she caught COVID (thankfully she pulled through!)
• I helped out with the DK64 Randomizer development, mostly making suggestions and doing some low-skill definition work for logic purposes (I'm not a programmer)
• My girlfriend is in the final stretch for her final film in her Bachelor's degree and she's having a really rough time, so I'm taking up a bigger share of the daily chores like making meals, shopping, cleaning, etc.
• I dedicated 4 days to help make and edit her credits. In short, it was ~160 frames from a childhood home video that she printed out and ripped to make an oval shape. I scanned them all, cleaned them up, color keyed them ("green screen"), and lined them up one by one, as close as possible, to the original video. The result looks great, but I can't really share it now. Maybe she'll let me when the film is done.
• Motivation was a bit slow to come back, but over the last week, it finally did.

One thing that I found hard to do was to look at my production schedule that I had disrespected so much. It was definitely a big mental barrier to go back and remake it for the rest of the production. In doing that though, I found that there is a bit less left to do than I thought.

Now, unfortunately, I did already fall a bit behind. My voice hasn't been great most days recently, so I've been sort of skipping the recording. Also, yesterday, after doing a bunch of chores and other responsibilities, I was mentally drained and didn't manage to do the editing I had set out to do. Which makes sense, because I did it today instead, and I can tell you that the parallel universes section was a monumental task.

Here's what the progress on each step of the process is going:

The hours worked is probably quite a bit off now, as I was pretty bad at keeping track when I didn't want to look at my production schedule due to how far behind I was. I tried estimating it but I could be as much as 10 hours off probably. Other than that, I'm just short of the halfway mark in the editing department, having done 21 minutes already.

Finally, I've been lazily delaying the music update because I need to do the annoying task of figuring out which one, between my desktop and my laptop, holds the most up to date MIDI file of each of my recordings so I can send them all over to my brother. As soon as I kick my own ass and get that done, I'll have updated music to use and publish.

Here are some of the things I've worked on since last time!

Expanded that jump speed graph to show the effects of hyperspeed on jump height.

A demonstration of scuttlebug transportation, with two views.

Showing how sliding speed can be preserved through pause exiting to the castle lobby.

A complex view that serves to show just how high the Secret Aquarium ledge is and how few places are high enough to let Mario grab the ledge without any vertical momentum.

Finally, the parallel universe stuff. This also revisits the misalignment with a clearer visual, and the water level overflow in WDW, since those are connected notions.

That's it for now! I am hoping to be able to do a livestream on Saturday. I will confirm that over on Discord. Thanks everyone for your patience, as always. I'm eager to get this one out finally!