Went through my Google Documents, and found some more stuff. Thus, five new documents today! Well, six, I noticed I had forgotten to upload Maverickhunter tales.doc yesterday.

Individual documents here, compressed archive here.

Three miscellaneous documents:
evolution666.doc was supposed to be the first in a series of articles, I had hoped for more people to write about their characters, but I never finished it and looking at it now I don’t really like how it was coming out. So I’m sharing it here instead.
NE-Stats.xls (that’s right, a spreadsheet) was a thing that was done, trying to give the Next Era characters stats, using the Fallout stat system… because at the time I was playing a pen & paper RPG that used those stats. It didn’t work well when applied to these characters, so it was temporary amusement and then forgotten.
Storys.xls was a listing of stories, and why or why not they were good candidates for being made into comics. And not much more.

Also, two story drafts:
Christmas.doc didn’t actually have any name, but it was supposed to be a story of a Christmas party. Eventually, I came to dislike the idea, but some concepts in it aren’t terrible. Notably, the short segment at the end includes a mention of Pallette, who here has a vastly different characterization than I would later give her, and before I had the idea of making her and Shiva a couple, but I believe this is where I first came up with the idea of putting the two of them together in some way. This story in particular provides some support for the 666/Shiva pairing, but as I eventually decided for that pairing to never have been this strong, there’s little to nothing in this story that could be found canon. Well, maybe Shiva borrowing clothes from Silver.

Rank was a very early thing where I utterly wanted to write a story without 666. I had some initial ideas, and I knew how it would end, but I could never progress with it, so it died off. Bonus: Discussion about things related to the story by me and Silver. In Swedish.

Got one or two story drafts I’m not sure if I want to try to actually do something with. If I decide I’m not going to, I’ll upload them too.

WordPress now updated. I’m not a huge fan of the top bar I get when logged in.

Wait. An update? On the page?

Yes indeed.

Thing is, I was going through an old backup… and came across some stuffs.

Some old Next Era related things. From the time before it was even named Next Era, from the time we only called the entire project “Maverickhunters”. A bunch of documents. Documents, most of which were never released in any form. Documents that have in the past been seen by at most one other person.

Today, I’m releasing them. I’ve uploaded them all, here. You can browse and download what you want, or get them all in a compressed archive here.

They come in two folders, misc and stories. And now, I get to talk a bit about these documents!

misc holds… well, the documents that aren’t stories. Mostly related to 666.
666.odt is a presentation of sorts I wrote about 666 once. Mainly, it’s a listing of his attacks. The attack listing is from a time when I was high on One Piece, many of the attacks having direct inspiration from there. Some of the attacks were kept, but most have been discarded completely. At the very least, most of the attack names have been discarded completely, as they suck.
666boxlol.doc and Maverickhunters descript.doc are two variations on the same thing, the character presentation box that was used at the birth of Next Era back on Lunarstorm. The very earliest version is definitely gone for good, and that’s a good thing.
Maverickhunters.doc is in Swedish. Sucks to be all one of you who read this page and don’t speak Swedish. It’s the introduction test from the same period as above, and even earlier. Questions written by Silver and Flex were sent to people who wanted to join. These are my answers.

stories is of course the meat of this update. It’s a folder full of discarded drafts for stories I was writing once upon a time, as well as a list. This is what they were.

Angels is just a few lines, I hardly even started writing it. It was supposed to be a story that was written by both me and Silver, in that we had already written the story by acting it out over MSN – it was a duel between 666 and Silver. 666 ultimately won, but not by much. It was in this story Raiden and the Venom Fuse were introduced, as well as the Razor Angel fusion. Is it still canon? Doubt it. Raiden was retconned out, so this story would have to be pretty massively modified, too. If I ever find the logs of that MSN conversation, as well as other MSN conversations we had, I’m uploading them.

Blade is 100% a One Piece inspired story. And by that, I mean 90% of it is ripped from the Alabasta arc. The title of the story is actually Routine, and was supposed to have sub-chapters, with the name of the opponent. The basic story was that 666 and Silver were going on a mission, which turned out to be a trap. Silver was captured, 666 battled five guys, and then ran into a trap himself. The opponent in this piece of the story had a diamond coating, but could control the form of the coal, so it could turn into graphite too… whatever that was good for. (amusingly enough, just last year I reached the part in One Piece where there is a character who can turn his body into diamond… and he blocked a sword slash from the greatest swordsman in the world with that.) The entire secquence is almost identical to the Zoro vs. Mr 1 battle, and Soul Dance is a carbon copy of Zoro’s Lion Song. The Soul Dance was preserved for later use, and I believe was first ever actually shown in Love. Canon? Maybe parts of it, but definitely not as it was written here.

Executioners is a massive wreck and display of something that should never have been written. Since there’s talk of “entertaining” kills and the such, this one is very, very likely to have been majorly inspired by me playing Manhunt. I just wanted to write a story in which my characters kills hundreds of people. Since enough of it wasn’t written to explain the backstory, let me specify that this actually isn’t just a random killing spree, but the “town” is a prison, and the “citizens” are all criminals that were going to be executed anyway. So they hired people to kill them for entertainment. While technically something that could happen because they’re hired mercenaries, I’m going to go ahead and utterly un-canonize this.

Instinct was an early thing I worked on after Raines and Gary had been introduced, because I needed to get Gary and 666 together for a battle. The tournament idea is taken from Dragon Ball, and I had many ideas for this story that just didn’t pan out. The ending of the story is written, but there’s a large chunk of story missing in the middle, and it’s not written well at all. But it’s ten pages. Well, nine and a half. That’s right. Nine and a half pages discarded. It kind of pains me, but on rereading I’m kinda glad I dropped it. Definitely not canon. Particularly not the part where 666′s claws are detached. They can be shut off so they can’t be activated, but they’re not removeable.

Time was supposed to be the formal introduction of the Order of the Pentagram and its members, and the story of that one year 666 was away from the Maverickhunters. A mission in Norway. The story of when Razie died, and stuff. Note that I already back at this point had Shiva’s nickname for 666 decided, and she’d stick with “sixboy” for the rest of forever. One of the few stories I wrote in first person, and I believe Hate is the only one I ever wrote like that that ended up being released to the world. This one is technically canon, in that the one year did happen, the mission in Norway did happen, and it was there Razie died. What this was going to become, had I written it to the end at the time, would probably not be the way it happened, though. The campaign probably didn’t take a year, but I assume 666 spent some time after it on his own before returning.

Maverickhunter tales is just a list of stories I planned to write. Time started being written, as you saw above, but of the ones in the list the only one I remember anything about is Prison. It was going to be a story about 666 spending some time in prison at the headquarters, for… some reason, and Silver pretty much being the only one who were visiting him.

Meeting isn’t new. It’s the original version of the story, that was written like complete crap, before I replaced it with the version that didn’t have grammar with MPD. Here for your reading displeasure.

So that’s some history, and some stuff you almost were subjected to. Enjoy.

WordPress is telling me to update. I’ll do that tomorrow.

And it’s not the greatest pleasure, because it’s been two years, and you know what that means – that’s right, it’s time to cough up the cash to keep this site afloat for another two years. So, that’s $190.80, to be paid… well, as soon as possible.

As the hosting is being used for other things, we’re not going to take the full force of this, though. I’m going to have my brother pay at least half of that, since he’s the other one using the hosting the most, but that still leaves $95.40 for us to take care of. And this is right after I spent the extra money I had, and I have no real income at the moment. Fun times! Well, there’s three of us, so that’d be $32 each. That’s what I’m counting on. At least the dollar is pretty cheap at the moment, $32 is JUST above 200 SEK. Actually, since it’s not EXACTLY $32 each, but rather a smidgen below, a nice round 200 SEK each covers our half. It actually covers it EXACTLY, as that adds up to $95.40! Well, at current exchange rates, and there’s minor fluctuations day-to-day. But still.

And of course, donations are always welcome. The Paypal button is right there.

Yes, yesterday’s blog post was my April Fool’s update. And some of you correctly identified it as such.

Only the joke’s on you. Or, should I say, one layer of it was. Because it was a two-layered joke.

Obviously, I’m not developing any new, shiny game. But it wasn’t all porkies.

Some of you did know what I was actually doing already.

You might want to reread yesterday’s update – with the knowledge that it’s actually a Starcraft map I’m working on.

I just described it in far too many words to make it sound like something it really isn’t.

Happy April Fool’s, suckers.

At least, that’s the working title.

Yes, few of you know this, but I have been working on the Next Era game! It will be freely available on this very website when it’s is complete. It will be an action/adventure game, somewhat in the vein of Metroid, with nonlinear exploration and several different areas to visit. Features include:

- Play as one of six different characters with very different playstyles: Silver, Snex, 666, Shiva, Metro or Type!
- A whole new original Next Era story arc!
- Eight main maverick bosses to fight, and over 20 different enemy types!
- Very smooth keyboard and mouse controls!
- Play up to six players together on a local network or over the internet!
- Helpful advice from the three Navigators!
- Excellent isometric pixel graphics!
- A final battle with a well-known enemy!
- A number of secrets to uncover!
- And many more surprises!

I do not wish to release any screenshots yet, as the game is still in an unfinished testing state, and any screenshots would not accurately reflect the final product. As I have a lot more school work at this moment, I cannot promise any release dates, but I might have a beta out before summer. A lot of the groundwork is done, the engine is up and running, and I’m not making the graphics by myself, but many things still need to be mapped, and the bosses still require a lot of scripting to work properly.

But I felt it was high time to come with an update about something, and as this is the only really so far not publically announced project I’ve been working on, aside from some stories I haven’t mentioned yet…

Stay tuned, as there will be more updates, and eventually, screenshots. Development is slow right now, mainly due to school – but give me a few months…

I have poked with the image and the css and the background image at the wiki no longer has large black holes in it. Not the consume-things-in-space kind, but bars of black between repetitions of the actual background image (the black bars were actually a part of the image, which repeated itself several times over). The trick was also to make sure that “navigation”, “search” and “toolbox” didn’t blend into the background, which was solved by discovering via web developer Firefox extension that those elements pulled style info from a specific part of the css, and as far as I can tell those were the ONLY elements that used that, so changing just one line fixed it, plus makes it so that I can increase the size of the boxes in the sidebar and they’ll still be fine. Science.

Yep yep.

I’m doing something, at least. Even if I’m currently seemingly only being the behind the scenes guy.

Wikipedia and a bunch of other wikis are switching over to Vector for their default skin. I entertained the thought for a moment, as smithing a mhwiki-style skin out of the css probably wouldn’t be that horrible, but after further consideration, I’m finding that Vector relies too much on gradients and fading as well as borderless elements outside of the main content area in a way I do not find fits the mood I always intended to create with the green/black terminal sort of look mhwiki has. So yeah. I’m the only one who actually cares about this, but…

Nothing at all.

(insert some omnious music here)

Alright, this was something that actually took place over a month ago, but I thought some of you readers might get a chuckle out of this.

There’s this one community I’m a part of, and there, we sometimes do something called “Coral Mayhem”, which consists of looking at weird or shitty pictures and giving insightful commentary on them. Back in August and September, I hosted two of them – which were entirely about art I had personally produced in fourth, fifth and sixth grade. And the second one of them had a subject matter which is relevant to your interests. Yes, that’s right, Mega Man. I even brought in our very own Lief as a guest commentator, though he’s not part of that community.

Warning for a bit of language and horrible art you will never be able to unsee also clicking around in the Coral Mayhem subforum will make you want to stab your eyes out

(the first part is here. It’s arguably even worse.)

And this, kids, is why you shouldn’t let Kenny near… well, anything, really.

I apologize for any physical harm these images may cause you. No, wait, I don’t.

As previously mentioned, here at the Next Era Network, we keep a close eye on any developments related to the classic Mega Man franchise, because, hey, that’s what we grew up with and the reason we are what we are today.

So there was things. Granted, there was never a post about Mega Man 10, but let’s forget about that for a second.

Now, if you’re not a damn kid that should get off my lawn, you know about Doom. And if you’re on this site, you know about Mega Man.

Now mix.

And you get Mega Man 8-Bit Deathmatch. A Doom Megawad, built around Deathmatch, containing what appears to be ALL the weapons from the robot masters of the first six games in the classic series, and of course Mega Buster, plus special Blues and Forte busters, Mirror Buster, Sakugarne (or however you spell that shit), Screw Crusher and Ballade Cracker. The stages look fantastic, it’s an amazing rendition of Mega Man graphics in a 3D environment. I haven’t played it yet, but am intending to try it. Trailers are on the site. Full game’s not out yet, but a downloadable demo which can be played with a sourceport such as Skulltag (I personally prefer zDoom for normal playing, but Skulltag is better for multiplayer).

So yeah.

Doom doom doom doom doom.

Doom.

Doomy dooms of doom.

Also, doom.

Hi guys. I’ve finished another story that I wrote in two sittings and ended at a whooping four pages. Yet another part of the Legend series: Ball!

Also, remember to ask a question to a character of Your choice! (see post below)