I know it's currently april, but I neglected to post for the end of march. 

Things are pushing along. I'm currently sitting on 40% done of the episode. We're moving into easier content to produce at this point so it'll probably pick up speed until I reach the final 20-15% of the episode, and i'm looking at being done sometime this summer (i'm not gonna give any exact dates!)

Hey everyone! seeing as it's the end of Feb, I thought I'd sit down and give out some more news for Toll of the Lost episode 2.

We're currently sitting at 25% done. Unfortunately not a lot of work got done these last couple months, as I think I've mentioned in previous posts. There's been moves, there's been family drama, things in general have been shit. I'm struggling and pushing through though because I want to get this done, as not only is it a great exploration of my abilities as a storyteller and artist, but I want to take as many people on that ride as I can.

To give further details, I've finished one of the 3 major scenes, and working on the second. The Climax is being storyboarded by the wonderful Chris Boe and in time I'll be able to get started on that as well! Outside of those 3 major pieces, the rest is mostly bridging scenes tying things together and shouldn't take much time.

I'm also writing episode 3 presently so that I can get that voiced and ready to go into production as soon as I finish production on episode 2, getting a headstart on it while the music and audio is being finalized (two things I have very little to do with ultimately, outside of giving direction and feedback)

I'm also going to make a concerted effort to be more present on other social media besides twitter (twitter.com/TheCaseyMobile) I tend to neglect facebook and tumblr quite a bit despite having accounts there specifically set up to post news for TotL. I'd link them here, but I want to make sure I'm actually doing something with them before sending everyone to them and wasting your time.

In the meantime, feel free to shoot any questions my way! or as always you can help support the series on Patreon at http://patreon.com/Caseymobile

Here's some eye-candy from ep2. This is a screenshot straight out of it. I feel bad that I hadn't really gotten started on work on this episode until November last year, but despite having to move, taking trips, and having an ongoing financial crisis with my family, I've managed to get a little over 20% of the entire run-time animated at this point. I apologize for the slow going, know that it's not so much because of my ambition getting the better of me or anything, everything is just moving in bursts. When I'm able to dedicate myself to the work, things move quickly, but it's just been hard to work these last couple months through a lot of drama in my personal life.

That being said, of course, progress! I started incorperating After Effects into my workflow to achieve better lighting, which I've definately done, and it's had the side benefit of allowing me to make things like that massive, tentacled ball of fire on the right. I didn't really intend the quality of the visuals to skyrocket as much as they will have between episodes, but I'm happy with the improvement. I guess thats what happens when you start learning new software.

I'll make sure to keep everyone posted as things move along, and I'll try to keep new screenshots coming!

Good googily moogily. 

I apologize to everyone i've been moving so slow. I've gotten 2 new jobs in the last couple months and also have moved. It's rather shocking that I've managed to get done what I have done at all (voice recordings, about 2/3rds of the storyboarding done and 2:30 minutes of animation out of the total 15-16 minutes)

I'm also taking a trip out of town over thanksgiving and won't be able to work without my computer, and then Christmas is coming up and who knows what will happen.

All in all I hate this time of year, it's way too busy and ontop of that I've had issues with family, and of course moving / jobs / etc. Things are still on track though and as always I just want everyone to know I'm plowing ahead!

Last i posted was august 1st, saying I had a final draft of the script ready to go. I hadn't anticipated the time it'd take to organize from there into actual animation, but I tend to be new to the process on a lot of these things. Regardless, things are in full swing and the episode is moving.

For clarity, i'm about 10% ish done after about 2 weeks of production. This puts a full episode at around 5 months of work, which isn't "terrible" but i wish it were a faster process. a lot of the slowdown right now comes from being hospitalized for a night and random family visits that have occured IN those two weeks, so I'm not really sure what the actual estimated ETA should be at this point.

On the flip side, everything is looking wonderful, and I'm excited to be in the thick of animation again! Here's a preview of one of the backgrounds I've drawn for it, a lavish office onboard a high-speed steampunk train!

Toll of the Lost episode2 has begun momentum. I had wanted to have the script finished completely before ep1 was ever launched, but it was a much more complex script than I had anticipated and took a bit longer to pull together. However, I'm sitting on the finalist draft I can be sitting on and things are starting to roll forward.

This is always an odd part of these sorts of things, the transition from pre-production into production. Really it's the same for any transition in the process, suddenly after a period of nothing much happening, everything happens all at once.

Anyway, just wanted to say that I'll be streaming production on my youtube channel (Youtube.com/Caseymobile) for anyone interested who doesn't mind spoilers! Stay tuned.

I guess I should write another post here considering it's been.. FIVE YEARS!? HOLY CRAP.

Whatever. I"m working on things. There should be new episodes of Toll of the Lost to come in the future, along with streams on youtube (Youtube.com/Caseymobile) and clips and stuff. I tend to keep updates on my twitter as well (@thecaseymobile as always) So basically just keep an eye out!

As always, you can support me on Patreon (it's always appreciated and needed) Patreon.com/Caseymobile

That's right Newgrounds, I'm still here. Though I guess that's obvious if you've been following Toonwerks, but whatever. I'm still working on a few projects of my own, including the Canthos game (Slow but steady progress there. It's unfortunately taking a back seat to other projects, but I try to get a few things done every week. Fortunately all the coding is finished and that's probably the biggest thing to do next to art, and art is practically my specialty, so... go me?)

I'll make updates as I go, don't worry!

So an update on the game.

Recently my computer fried. Well, was overrun by an army of viruses is more accurate. I'm not sure where they came from but to be honest, I saw the disaster coming and just kept putting off actually doing anything about it.
I've never been in a situation were I need to back things up on an external hard drive or anything, so I didn't.

Long story short, I lost the game entirely.

That's the bad news.
Believe it or not there's a strong upside to this.

Right away I was devastated, but than I knew that the game was inherently flawed in a lot of ways. When I had designed the engine, I knew nothing about game design. I didn't know how to debug things properly, and wasn't aware of a lot of things in AS that really make things better. For example, I didn't use arrays or functions and pretty much used hit tests for everything (there were hit tests inside of hit tests O_O)

So, I took a walk and when I got home I realized that I basically owed it to all my fans to not only pick myself up and finish this thing anyway, but to take this chance to remake it 100x better than before, and that's exactly what I'm doing.

I've already finished recoding the physics engine with some help from experienced coders.
Collisions are much more accurate now, the controls are way more responsive, the game flows incredibly nicely, and it feels more like an actual plat-former more than it ever did before.

Besides physics, I also changed Canthos' size on the screen to be much smaller, so you can see more of the game world around him. This wasn't a noticeable problem from the player's perspective as I designed the levels around that flaw before, but now I can add in another dimension of level design with jumping down onto platforms lower than himself, or puzzles involving things under the character. (not to mention that you'll know for sure now if there's something down a pit)

I also added in a smoother camera that follows the character, so it's not as jumpy, and also by holding shift you can move the camera around to see more of the level.

Enemy AI has also been boosted and they can fall off ledges now, have variable reaction speeds, and interact with the game world.

Another change is i've decided to release it 3 levels at a time to get it out to the public faster.

All in all, it sounds horrible, but work is still moving right along and i think we can expect to see something in the next couple months

Recently, Toonwerks announced a project it's had in the works for a little while along side 'Legends of the Black Book'.

This one's set in space! And takes place on a cruise liner that travels the universe, daring to relax where no man has relaxed before.

This time the members of Toonwerks split the writing process 3 ways, each tackling the characters we're best at working with, as well as applying our artistic sides towards what we do best as well. For me, this is again background art and set design.

I had the idea for this as a full length film some years ago but never had the ability to really get it off the ground. After discussing things with Toonwerks, we saw it for the true potential it was, as more of a sit-com style series with multiple episodes that dwell on different characters or aspects of the ship. Each episode will only be about half the length of Legends part 1 (about 3-4 minutes) so that we can focus more on art and delivery. We're drawing inspiration from a lot of sources on this one. If it's sci-fi, we've probably got an idea for a way to produce it in this universe.

That's all I'll say for now without spoiling to much, we'll have more updates soon!