The Shining Source

As you know, Demo 4 is going to be released in just over three weeks, and to celebrate we’re hosting an official Shining Online Fan Art competition!

All you have to do is draw and submit your own piece of SOnline fanart and email it to me here. All art will be displayed on the website in a special fan art gallery, and the best piece will be picked by Ty, Hannah [she’ll be here :P] and myself on April 25th, with the winner getting a very special, as-yet unnamed prize. How mysterious!

Rules and regulations.

Please, try to keep pictures small. Ideally, we’d like artwork to be in PNG format, but for anyone who can’t do that, save your work as a BMP file and use WinZip to compress it, then send it along to me.

Feel free to use any available tools, but you Photoshoppers will be marked down for using lens flares without good cause :P

Please, be original! Use your imagination when thinking of situations, landscapes and even characters – we don’t just want a dozen pictures of Cody standing still, put some action in there! Art is as much about imagination as ability.

The decision of the judges is final, but bribes are welcome :P

Finally, have fun, and good luck!

The winner will be picked on April the 25th, 2003. You have until then to email your work to me, so get drawing!

27th of April (2003 :P).

In a bid to encourage me to work, Dev has threatened to release the demo 4 beta I sent him a while back if I don’t release something first. Isn’t he kind :P

You will get something, and it will be worth waiting for. Hopefully taking time off to do demo 4 won’t affect my university grade (much) ;)

Expect many more updates in the coming weeks, as I race to beat the maniacal Devlyn and his army of robot bratwurst…

The second phase of the Shiny Sword: Cloudslayer project will be mostly a plot development phase, although I’m going to improve and optimize SMEE as well in this phase, due to popular demand :).

More info can be found on the progress page.

Djobi programmed an exceedingly neat Shining Force version of Pong! Unlike Penn Pong 1, PP2 features different characters and also obstacles on the field!

Feel free to check it out in the Off-Topic section. I’m sure you’ll love it :D.

After the success of a similarly-named topic at Ye Olde Blah, Ty and I have decided to produce an article on the development process of Demo 4, and how SO has evolved since the release of Demo 3 at the end of 2001. Expect to see screenshots, developmental sketches, more screenshots and lots of other nice stuff :)

I hope you can consider your SO appetite well and truly whetted :P