Well, as is pretty typical with us, things just happened this week, throwing us into a tailspin. We had a hack on one of our other sites, and then a very sick baby who kept us up all night…and slowed our work on the computer. We actually had the Booyah ready on time, but then at the last minute forgot one of the items! We had done the WiiMiis nearly a month ago. When we were gathering the pieces for the Booyah, we stumbled upon the images and did one of these: And that meant a lot of running around, trying to get it together for the Booyah. The thing that stymied us the most is that Jim really wanted to get screenshots of the actual Check Mii Out Channel. Problem is, while you can download certain content onto a memory card from the Wii, you can’t save WiiMiis. To do so, you need to patch in a DVD Recorder into your television. Well, we have a DVD recorder we had never set up, so Jim decided to use that. Now, if you have ever read about any “easy” project we embark on, you can totally guess what happened next. This comic pretty much sums it up. Getting the images to pipe into the DVD player was not the problem, it was getting the player to write to the disc properly. Quite seriously, it took 3 hours and a half dozen discs, and it STILL didn’t write right correctly. It saved the data, but not a menu, so we couldn’t access the pictures. So, that meant Jim spending several more hours on the internet, trying to find software that could repair and/or read the disc. After that, there was the matter of ripping the screen, creating graphics, putting together the tutorial, and… Well, you get the idea. Anyhow, the neat thing is if you are a fan of the site and have a Wii, you can use Bitmap World characters in your games! How cool is that?I am also super excited about the Comment graphics. There are over 100 different graphics. Literally, this took me a huge amount of time to do. If you are familiar with doing glitter graphics, you know that to make one, you need to create 3 different images, then merge/animate them. So, literally I had to create over 300 images. It was a challenge. But the good thing is that during the process I learned a TON about Paint Shop Pro, as well as getting some techniques that will help me considerably in doing the comic. In fact, some of the shortcuts I used for the current strips, and they went a lot faster than those I did even a week ago!Oh, and speaking of the Comments, we reported earlier that the Booyah was initially delayed a bit because of some programming. That was actually for the comment graphics. I did not want to hardcode pages with the graphics and the links–it would have taken me days. We did consider going with some fancy gallery program to display them, but that turned out to be overkill. Eventually we found a so-so program that we could drop into the directory and it would list the graphics. Jim modified it so it would automatically generate the link codes. It worked up great! Took time, but hey, it will help us loads in the future.

I’ll let everyone get into all the goodies of the Booyah. At the current rate, it looks like we’ll be tying up the current storyline on Tuesday. I’ll post another blog entry there with my comments on the most recent strips.