Sorry for those waiting for the art tutorial, but it's still coming!

I've been on vacation the past week with my good friend Arhkma, which has been an absolute treat. Here are a few pictures of my time there, and some relaxing music accompanies them. We went to Anna Marie Island for a few days, which was amazing! The scenery was beautiful, and the food was overall great. The place was hotter than I'm used to, but we got through it all. The house was kinda awkward, as there were a lot of stairs to climb, with separate small homes to the main one. The alarm system sucked as well, it was always enabled, and you had to press a "Bypass" button to not sound the alarm. The alarm didn't call the cops or anything; it was just a loud buzzer and really annoying.

The street situation was weird since many homes were built on the main roads, which made traffic kinda a pain to go through, along with, generally speaking, having smaller roads, making things a lot tighter to get around.

I'm very thankful for Arhkma for inviting me, it was the first vacation I've had since Battle at the Border in Az, and it was just so much fun, and words can not describe how thankful I've been for being invited. We got a few recording sessions, finished "River City Girls," and started the second game. It was a very fun beat 'em up, great music, and fun gameplay, even if it was a bit stiff with combos, and exploring felt boring after getting close to the game. Keep an eye out on Arhkma's YouTube for this release, along with many more to come with us!

Did you make a post to flex?

No! I actually have some great news as well. The other reason I haven't worked on my art tutorial yet is because I've been working on my project. Some people may remember me posting about it a while ago on the blog/hearing me talk about it, but after nearly 2 years (like a year and 3 months), the 1.0 is finally released!

If you're interested, please check it out here: Lupin III Translation Project

Some insight/timeline

Since it's my blog, I've added some personal insight to the project overall. Lots of reading ahead.

When the project started, the tools were absolutely awful. It could have taken an afternoon to even finish half a scene, and the lack of any compiler errors just made the whole process worse. When we got a handful of translators, they were going through the spreadsheet like it was nothing, but I could barely get halfway through chapter 1 after months - it was honestly miserable, and it felt bad.

When NewGBAXL showed me PWtr's new tool, it was like a whole new world opened up. What would have taken me a few days could have been done in a few hours, and the amount of work/repetition required for the whole project was reduced immensely. I could catch up to where the translators were, which was chapter 5.

A big issue surrounding the whole project was just getting translations done. I didn't want to rely just on DeepL/Google Translate, and I wanted the project to be fully translated by people with experience. However, most of the translators we could get were mostly college students, meaning their time was limited outside of summer. Jebbi could translate most of the game by herself, which was amazing. She said she had a lot of fun doing it. However, she moved to a new country, job, and life. So she was unable to continue translating past chapter 5.

Cindi and Bingokemski could not stay on the project either, which left the project in a very awkward spot. Because of how effective the new tools were, I was able to catch up from chapter 1 to chapter 6 in about 2 weeks (!), but now with nobody to actually translate the project itself, there was very little to actually do.

During this downtime, a person named aldi_09 joined up; they had an illustration degree and were very proficient with Photoshop. With their help, they were able to get the title screen re-done in English, along with the save banners, and around this time, NewGBAXL was able to insert new menu translation graphics.