Abyss ChroniclesHi everyone. I'm alive. I just thought I'd give you an update.

I've been being progressive this summer. I beat Heavenly Sword finally, and I beat God of War Chains Of Olympus. So I'm pretty happy about having two games done for the summer. I'm working on Okami for the Wii. I'm ten hours in and about one fourth of the way done. I'm trying to get everything. So far that's working out for me. I'm about 200 pages into my first book of the summer. Yeah I should be further, but I've been busy with other things too.

My goal is to get five books read for the summer. I'm reading Diablo: The Sin War Trilogy, and I'm 200 pages into Birthright. It's only 325 page books so I'm close to the end. I'm not sure what books to read after the trilogy, but I have plenty to choose from.

Been working on a new website also. I'm really liking it so far. It's my first fan site (that I'm going to publish), and I think I'll actually be able to publish this one, unlike the Twisted Metal one. I'm pushing my graphical ability to the limits with this one. Don't believe me? Well I have 44 concept peices for just the design of the website, and I'm using 3 different image editing software. Yeah. When I say pieces for the design of the site, I mean like borders, and backgrounds. Banners also. So far I've implemented 10 of those peices into the site. No you aren't crazy, I'm spelling "pieces" in various ways. I figure I'll be correct some of the time that way.

The site isn't only going to be beautiful, but powerful also. Powerful meaning that the programming behind it is going to be the most I've done. So far I've just used HTML, but I could see CSS, Javascript, and PHP being implemented. Not to mention some third party creations.

Now you may ask me, "Roy, is all that really necessary?" Well to answer your question, the PHP and third party creations are definitely going to be necessary. The awesome lookingness of the site is just something I want to push myself to do. I pushed myself with this site (from the green colored one to the black/blue lightning one). If You don't remember the green one, It looked alright, and was simple. It was a good design philosophy.

But I like the look of this one. I won't reveal what I'm doing a fansite of or the design yet. In fact the most you will probably before the official announcement from me is the third party software because I have to play around with them. The forum will be easy one, but there's one more third party software that I haven't tested. Anyways enough about that.

Exciting news on the Hellgate London front. Patch 2.0, also known as the "Abyss Chronicles" was released into the Test Center servers yesterday. Really excited on this one. New area with new monsters, new items, they added rings (like from diablo 2), making it so you can stack PRDs, analyzers, essences, etc into stacks of 100 instead of stacks of 20 or 5, fixed some bugs, they redid the skills of the Templar classes, and they are giving everyone skill retainers, attribute retainers, and rank retainers. And so much more. So much more. Anyways there's a teaser trailer on the homepage of my site. That's where I put the highlights of my life if you didn't figure that out.

One thing that I think Flagship Studios is doing right, is keeping us informed. There's a guy on the Hellgate London forums, who goes by the name of Scapes, that works for Flagship, and he keeps us in the loop. He answers questions and the like. Let's us know when new patches are coming out.

Another cool thing that they just added are Developer blogs, which is where the developers can post blogs. That also keeps us in the loop. One developer, who is a graphics guy for Flagship, posted something that was very informative, then someone asked in the blog, "Why does this game, which is reated M for mature, feel like a T rated game? Where's all the blood and gore, like in Diablo 2 where the walls were bleeding!?". And he answered with this, and explained where it was: "With Hellgate London, we did a world wide release, which is hard to appease everyone. Some countries don't allow lots of blood and gore, and some countries don't even allow the killing of other people. We did what we could with the limitations we had. It just made us come up with different ideas to capture the suspence of Hellgate and I think we did a good job." By they way I didn't quote them at all. I just used the quotation marks to separate from what they said from what I'm saying.

Anyways several people respected that and a lot of people came up with this: why not make a censored and uncensored version? I mean the censored version is the current one, but the uncensored one would add more blood and gore. It wouldn't be too hard. And so many people were saying that it'd be a good idea. So the same developer comes back and says this: "Obvious this is a concern for a lot of people. I'll talk to the higher ups about it." My point is is that not only do they keep us in the loop, but they listen to us. I think it's cool.

Um I think that's all. So that's what I have been up to. Working also fits in there, along with hanging out with friends.