It was a cityscape that I picked up somewhere from the wilds of the internet. I found it a few years ago while hunting for props that I thought I might eventually use.

R1665

Yeah, I'm all about integrating photo backgrounds with sprite midgrounds and foregrounds. I also use textures from PC games.

R1665

Actually, your kill count is off.

The real total at this time is seven. That does not include four of your assumed kills. As with the last episode, there is a sub-plot unfolding within the world that is being visited. The Special Forces were slaughtered before the fighters got there.

I'm only counting kills that are made by my chosen fighters.

R1665

More blood? Hell, you're only seeing the center of the arena. There's a LOT more destruction that you aren't seeing here...

I'll put it this way: the gore factor here makes the end of Episode 2 look like clean, wholesome family programming.

R1665

I write stories that have main plots on top of sub-plots. I sometimes even have backstory in my mind that has an effect on the current plot line, but is never written out or referenced by the characters. That is mostly because there is entirely too damn much to go over.

Besides, the story of a world doesn't begin when the Exiles show up. It's already in progress. Exiles can't always take the time to be brought up to speed. They have a job to do. That often means dealing with each world's peculiarities without a thorough history lesson.

The fact is that storytelling without much dialogue or type can only work for relatively simple plot lines. The very nature of my series prevents simplicity of plot.

R1665

It didn't take as long as you might think.

One advantage to using only custom arenas since the third of Ep. 0 is that I'm getting pretty damn good at making them. That ability became necessary since my custom arenas meet custom requirements. As long as I know what I want going in, the arena-building process is fairly quick.

For example, this arena was designed with several requirements in mind. The first was recognition. Obviously, it is meant to look like the Bank level from MK3. However, it is different from the original, thus emphasizing the "alternate reality" nature of my series. Secondly, it is built to be much bigger than the original bank stage in both height and width. This is important because my choreographic style requires a lot of room. Thirdly... well... that's a secret.

When I build a stage, I get EXACTLY what I want. That is the most important requirement of all.

R1665

I use photoshop to make custom sprites and arenas, not effects.

One handy tip I can give is not to limit yourself to character-specific effects. I often take effects from several characters spanning several games to get the exact combination of effects I want.

...It also helps to have an animating nature that borders on being obsessive-compulsive...

R1665

I can offer tips here and there, but I am no teacher.

R1665

I don't use sprite sheets anymore. They are much too inefficient. All of the sprites I use now come from MUGEN characters.

The evil laugh you are referring to is from Doom 3.

The issue with your slow-down can most likely be fixed by adjusting your audio. If your animation is slowing down, that means that you are using either event sounds, or no sounds at all. If you have a music track running the length of your animation, set it to "stream". That will fix your slow-down issue.

Having a stream sound forces the video to keep pace with the audio.

R1665

Mortis5000 has a very detailed explanation of the process on his blog:

http://mortis5000.blogspot.com/

It assumes that you have the older (and better) version of Fighter Factory. Avoid Fighter Factory Ultimate. It sucks ass.

R1665

Actually, I am now concerned that I may have overdone the brutality. The ground is now littered with corpses. This is especially true of the area where my MK fighter started their killing spree.

They have become a tripping hazard. Seriously.

Oh, well. I'm not going back to change it. My fighters will just have to cope.

R1665

One of the more interesting aspects of the Marvel Exiles was that the characters were not subject to "comic book death". "Comic book death" refers to the death, and later return of popular and long-running characters.

Once a character from the Marvel Exiles was killed, they stayed dead. The writers could afford to do that considering the alternate-reality nature of the series. With there being conceptually infinite alternate versions of any single character, the law of supply and demand would negate any need to resurrect a fallen character as they had been known.

My series follows the same directive. Any character can be killed at any time according to my whims and will never be brought back. Sonya is a perfect example. The version of Sonya seen in Episode 1 is permanently dead. That's not to say that another version won't appear (like the corpse in the above screenshot), but it means that "Sonya-Zero" of Earth 7695-890 is lost forever.

If the Marvel Exiles taught me anything, it's that ANY character can become a staple and EVERY character is expendable. That was the nature of the Exiles.

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As for the complicated nature of the story, that's just how it rolls in the multiverse. Each world has its own thing going and the Exiles never linger for very long. It is a revolving door of plot.

I will say now that you haven't seen the last of Cage and Talbain. I still have a lot of story to tell between those two.

R1665

I have no plans on doing any prequels. Even though the back story is a bit involved, I wrote it that way so that I wouldn't have to start the series at square one and waste a bunch of time explaining everything.

The point of the ambush that I wrote about was to wipe out the "previous team" and let the survivors build a new one without having to go into the origins of the group as a whole.

The rest of the series will be about the building of the new team and the hunting down of those responsible for the destruction of the old team. That's why I will never show the ambush in sprite form or give details of what characters were involved. Those are surprises that I don't want to reveal until you see the individuals in their feature fight.

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I take great pride in the variety of my match-ups. When I first started flashing, it seemed impossible to go two days without seeing some repetitive Shoto vs. Shoto sprite fight enter the portal. Since then, I have been very vocal regarding my dislike of what was then the status quo of sprite fighting.

Over the last several months, I've noticed that these kinds of repetitive match-ups seem to be tapering off. I'm not seeing a whole lot of Ryu/Ken/Akuma vs. Ryu/Ken/Akuma matches anymore.

I like to think that I might have had something to do with that. (Is my ego showing yet?)

R1665