I have a confession to make. A while back my wife and I were flipping channels and we stopped on this weird-looking cartoon. We were trying to figure out what it was; obviously it was an anime of some sort but it was funny trying to figure out what the heck was going on. After about ten minutes we actually got kind of interested in the story, so I looked it up to see what it was and when it would be on again. It turned out to be Dragon Ball Z.

Well, my feelings about anime aside, I was sufficiently piqued to take a second look at the show, so when it was on again we decided to watch the next episode. The intriguing thing about this series, I soon realized, is that like any good soap opera it draws you into a complex web of story arcs. Except it was like the good parts of the soap opera, like back when Days of Our Lives was cool and Sami was barely a character. Most readers won't remember back in the '80s when the main characters of Days were trying to transport a glowing jewel to safety in cold storage lest it blow up the entire town. It dawned on me while watching that DBZ has this same kind of energy, the same quirky but intense plot that you can't help but get invested in. So that second episode turned into a third, and fourth, and pretty soon we were watching episodes online to get the feel for the whole series.

I have to be honest; after getting sucked into the story, the big eyes and the weird mouths and the frame rate hardly matter to me anymore. They almost kind of add a touch of comic relief.

After becoming an addict of the series, I finally decided it was time to get involved in some of the BYOND games built around it to see what they're all about. I fired up an alternate key and hopped into a few of the games. It was actually a pleasant surprise to see how much attention to detail had been paid to putting some of them together, and I found myself enjoying the subtle references to little things from the series, even running gags and in-jokes. I love a good running gag.

But all that said, I feel like we can do better. Now that SotS II is nearing completion, I feel like I can take on a new project. I was thinking of starting up a Roguelike, but it occurred to me that the elements of a Roguelike could be made to fit very nicely within a universe like the one from the series.

Fortunately I won't need to start totally from scratch, since my time is limited after all. I have access to the complete source code and icons from three major BYOND DBZ games, as well as a Naruto game that has a few elements that could be easily massaged to fit the concept. I feel quite confident that I can splice together significant chunks of these games as pieces of a much better, more comprehensive game, and add even more references to locales in the series, more inside jokes, and more variety in the type of character you can play and how you interact with the world. Best of all, I'll be able to do real cleanup on some of the code involved and make it really bulletproof and optimized for speed. In a way it's the perfect project for me.

Anyway, I don't want to give away too many details yet, but I think you can expect to see the game in early testing by the end of the month. Just don't give me too much grief about being a hypocrite for changing my mind about anime, okay?