Well, I'm finally back from the US, and again, a Happy 2020 to everyone! But since I promised this update I better get to the point for the above title.
You might be wondering why despite my usual promises there was almost no update on The Crossroad throughout the holiday. Well I guess this isn't unexpected of me lol. But point is, I'm beginning to wonder if I should really
use create.swf to finish The Crossroad anymore.
No I'm not planning on abandoning the story, especially not after last update's was the big climax. I have always wanted to finish this story and I intend on doing so. However, I'm debating whether or not I should finish the story in text rather than finishing them in comics. I know, this sounds kind of like a cop-out given how this was a comic series since the beginning (2012 what the heck where did the time go?), but I must confess, I've been burned out from Walfas and create.swf for a while.
Precisely because this series has gone on for so long, and I'm finding myself even busier with University, it's getting harder and harder for me to keep up making Walfas comics. I already pushed myself super hard for the last few ones, and I'm not lying, I'm super proud of them. But considering after those, everything else in the story is just gonna be the epilogue, it's making the next few comics more of a chore to put together.
Not to mention, Flash is discontinuing soon, so create.swf will go with it. Granted, I
have been using the downloaded create.swf, so theoretically even when Flash goes kaput, I would still be able to use the program. But that has brought other problems.
I hadn't mentioned this before, but I got a new laptop since I started University back in Fall of 2018. And ever since then create.swf has been
extremely uncooperative. It would periodically delete all my data and restart as if I'd opened the program for the first time. And often it would do this without warning. I could be saving a whole bunch of scenes and then when I close it and re-open, poof, it all just resets. I tried to get around this since then by constantly making backups of the flash data itself, which I would copy to somewhere else constantly. For the most part, this worked, but
boy was it a pain. The huge comics I uploaded last year in July were especially irritating to get done because almost each comic the data would disappear, and if backing up the data didn't work, I'd have to make do recreating everything from screenshots. There was one point I had to fish data back up from my
old laptop. It's honestly a miracle I got those comics done and turned out as well as they did, because the constant deletes were driving me insane.
Right now, create.swf has mysteriously stopped doing this constant deleting, but why I'm not so sure. I can only assume after the last few deletes the space on my create.swf data isn't that big (which makes no sense considering I ALWAYS set create.swf to accept unlimited storage), but now it's made another glitch. That being if I leave create.swf open for just a couple minutes and have it be idle, it will randomly close. So once again, this has made saving my data incredibly irritating because I would not save a scene while leaving it idle and then suddenly it closes and I lose my progress.
Long story short, what has previously blunted my comic-progress because of my procrastination has now become nearly impossible because of how often create.swf closes on me and makes me restart from square one. So on top of Uni and real life in general, I have an unstable program that seems intent on making me
not finish this story.Again, I'm not going to abandon The Crossroad. I intend to see this baby finished till the end. A lot of you might know I have a huge project planned afterwards that I've been working on, but The Crossroad is where it all begins, and I really do want to finish this work that has been really precious to me and I'm really proud of. I really do want to see this to the end. I just don't think it'd be possible to reach the end in create.swf anymore, sad as it seems.
But I want to hear what you guys think. Would you be okay if I finished the rest of this supposed-to-be comic series in prose? Perhaps I can do what I did with my old World of Monochrome series, where I'd write a text document with Walfas images inserted in-between. Although I'd still have to use Walfas, it's
far less time-consuming, and it'd allow me to keep the atmosphere still in image form. I'm leaning towards this format actually, and at this stage I'm not so keen on trying to force everything into a comic format anymore. Still, I'd like to see if you guys are comfortable with this.
Regardless, I'm super thankful for all of you who are still following this story to the end with me. I really can't thank you guys enough for being invested in this work as much as I am. And I really hope to give this story the conclusion both you and I can be happy with