Here’s my take on the tower from Rapunzel:

Hi Internet, sorry I haven’t written to you lately. I’ve been busy with many things, including this:

I’ll post a new comic on Wednesday night. There will be robots!

Here’s an image that I made ON REAL PAPER as a part of the class that I’m taking (click for a big version).

It feels weird to work in the physical world. . .

I’m sorry to say that there isn’t going to be a comic this week – but I have a good excuse! I’ve mentioned before in the blog that at my day job I’m a game programmer. This past week was GDC, which I had the privilege of attending. There were lots of cool technical talks and parties to attend, and it was nice to catch up on what’s going on in the field. The company that I work for, Klei Entertainment, used the conference as an occasion to announce the project that I’ve been working on for the last few months: SHANK!

Shank is going to be a 2d platforming beat-em-up game like they used to make ‘back in the day’, but made with modern technology. As the project’s AI/gameplay/animation/etc programmer, I’ve been working like mad lately to build the prototype. I’m not going to bore you with the geeky details here, but I will be posting about some of the technical bits on the dev blog in the coming weeks. It should be interesting if you like that kind of thing. It’s also interesting from the production side of things. Most game projects are super-secretive. I’ve worked on games that weren’t officially announced until they were into the Beta testing phase. It’s very refreshing to be a part of a production that is so open!

As an aside, are any of you involved with iPhone development? I just recently got my credentials, and I’m thinking about kicking out a small game project. I’m curious about what people are using to render their sprites. I can roll my own sprite engine using OpenGL, but I’d prefer not to have to

ALSO: I have another book coming out this week!

Cloudscape comics is releasing it’s third book, called “Funday Sunnies”, for which I’ve contributed a couple of SCP strips. There’s a preview available here. We get the actual physical books delivered on Wednesday, so I’ll post more about it then. You’ll be able to buy copies online through the Cloudscape store, or in person from me if you live in Vancouver. We’ll also be having a launch party some time soon – I’ll post more when I have the details.

FINALLY: I’ve taking an art class! It’s about pen and ink illustration techniques, and I hope that it will improve my inking. I’ve got an idea for a longer story that I’m hashing out right now, and I want to do it in B&W, so this should come in handy. I’ve got a homework assignment to illustrate some fables, so I’ll post the results of that some time mid week. I’m also thinking of blogging the process of writing this longer work. Would any of you be interested in reading that? I’d be posting the script, concept sketches, and WIP pages as they are produced, but I’m worried that that might ruin the end result for people. I guess I could keep spoilers behind a click-though.

Again, sorry for the delay – the normal SCP schedule will resume this coming weekend!

There’s another potential SCP Digg about to happen here. These things do wonders to grow the site’s audience – I really appreciate it when you guys help them happen!