First, let me thank you for all the support all these years. I didn't want to have to say this, but I just can't continue Yoki's Story anymore. I'm terribly sorry, I hope you will forgive me about this. There's a few reasons behind this choice, but most of them are related to sprite movies.

As you see, I don't like sprite movies like I used to, at first it was interesting for me as the processing power and file sizes were limited. At that time you could use the post processing effects introduced in Flash 8 in realtime without any significant frame drop only with sprites, as rasterization was way too complex to do with the CPUs of that time to be done in a bitmap cache. Tale of a stupid plumber is a perfect example for this, to get a good framerate I had to reduce the resolution to 600 by 300 so I could use some blur effects on it. The use of the V-CAM didn't help for this either, as this disables lazy rendering with Flash. It was in 2008, but with Moore's law stating that the processing power of a computer doubles every 18 months you can get the same effect with vector graphics. There is also GPU acceleration available, something not offered at that time. It was also a lot easier to use sprites at that time as I couldn't draw, but as all the sprites were prebuilt I couldn't do a lot of complex things with them. Yoki was a sprite puppet so I could make him do more complex actions but for most characters I had to improvise, I had to change the script many times as I couldn't make a character do a specific action. This was also very hard to give emotions to my characters.

Surprisingly, the first movies I made were not sprite movies, they were not even made in Flash. The first animation I made was with Powerpoint on the Thinkpad of my father where a man was participating in a car race. It was not very good, but my parents were impressed.

This is not only about sprites, I am just tired of making Mario movies. I haven't made a single movie not related to video games since the beginning, and I want to do something else. I have to admit that the reason I started making movies here was because of SMBZ, I was so impressed and jealous of this action packed series I wanted to do my own. I did mine, but I wanted a story with more depth so I built my own characters and settings for it. I wanted to end Yoki's Story in 2009 with episode 5, where Yoki would have met Reswob for the last time but I didn't because I wanted to make the story last a bit longer. I don't really regret this, I'm really proud of Yoki's Story 5. I have to admit that Yoki's Story VI : part I didn't have the same reception and could have been better, but I still like it. It was hard working with a story I started in 2008 as I don't have the same views and inspirations as I used to, but it was a good challenge. It was fun, I experimented with a style, tried to add my own ideas to it and pushed the limits way farther with more complex effects.

I am now working on ROOT project, the biggest project I have ever made. I accidentally got the idea from Thierry37 (The voice behind Yoki) last summer but I only officially started it in January, just two weeks before Yoki's Story VI : part I was officially submitted. For the first time I will make the project under my real name rather than going with my nickname like I used to. I can't tell you a lot about it for the moment, but I have a 20 seconds long trailer I'm really excited to show you. All I'm waiting for is the authorization from the rest of the team. I think you will like it, the movie is mixing vector animation, hand drawn artworks, raytraced animation and maybe more if I can. For the moment here's a screenshot of complex layering used for the movie, where every layers are rendered independently to be mixed together in After Effect, with this I can make complex effects that couldn't be done in Flash like complex shadows, displacement maps, blur graphics, apply transparent effects and adding reflections to objects.

There is still a copyright problem I have to deal with for the moment, not really big, but this could mean the Newgrounds version of ROOT project might be seven seconds shorter than the original. I contacted the admin about it, as this is more a problem with the understanding of the rules of the site than with the law. I will keep you updated on it.

Thanks
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