Cutscenes. We haz dem.

Geo asked me to talk about how we do the cutscenes, so here we go…

Five days ago, Geo handed me a script.  A really awesome script for the next part of Chapter 1's finale, which we are releasing right now. Reading through it, I thought to myself "Dude.. we really need to make this one kick butt with both feet".  So, I got to work animating it.. and by early afternoon I knew this was going to be pretty danged epic. We've got such a great team, and sometimes you just know it's all going to come together perfectly. So.. I got out my guitar and cranked my amp and laid down the music you'll hear during tonight's release. After it was recorded, we asked Warlic to master the song to give it a really polished sound. That song… has been looping in my iTunes for a solid week. I find it helps me really get into the cutscene if I animate it along with the music that will be playing.. and so off I went animating the days away quickly losing all sense of time. 

Somewhere around Thursday, I had much of the cutscenes beginning to come together, and so I dug out my wacom.* I use it for all the frame-by-frame effects animations you've been seeing lately.(Like those shadowscythe symbols that morphed in and out during the Seppy boss fight). As I've only owned it for a few months**, I've been slowly getting better and quicker at using it.. Well, this week I went nuts with it. 

Just one frame of some FX we've used. 

Combining that with the epic script, insane functionality, and years of watching way too many movies, I'm pretty sure that the cutscenes tonight will be some of the best we've seen yet. We couldn't do this without you guys, and we are all very proud to produce an increasingly better game for you. Here's to many many more years of Dragonfable! And without further ado, please enjoy tonight's release. 

*An artistic device that lets you draw on your screen with a special pencil and pad, instead of a mouse.. which makes certain artistic things really fluid, where they could never be with a mouse. 

**omgosh, how did I survive without it?! <3