BronzeRaptor

Four years ago, after the result of a breakup, I chose to make a hasty cosplay for a convention. However, I worked ont he costume for the wrong reasons and with the wrong motivations, so the project became one of poor effort, and little to no technical skill or planning. I want to revisit Lord recluse however, and do it right! This time around, I'm not leaving it for 2 weeks before the convention, and I actually have much more experience with better materials now after working on the Fury, and learning a lot about how to carve insulation foam and seal that. The only thing I wise I had for this project was access to a Lathe. It would make life so much easier for making the spider arm sections ._.

Anyways, that's my plan as of now. Next convention is anime boston in March 2014. If I finish lord recluse before halloween, I will also start putting together a grave lord nite costume using all the skeletons I can get on clearance after the holiday ends ^^

After using solaire for both anime boston and Connecticon and enjoying the result, I decided however it's time for something new. Or rather, something old to be revisited. Four years ago, I attempted a Lord Recluse cosplay from City of villains... This was right after a breakup, so it was more a distraction to keep my mind occupied. Needless to say, I didn't put any real effort into the costume, and the result was something... less than stellar. This time around, I'm going to do it right.

I've built the initial frame for the spider arms, and cut out some blocks of insulation foam to put around them to give some thickness and the possibility of carved details. The biggest flaws I had last time I did this was in the materials I used. I went for the bare minimum, just barely good enough to get the concept across, and the appearance suffered. I used regular pants and a shirt, when I should have used a tighter, form fitting suit. I used cardboard and ductape, when we all know that falls apart after a couple hours due to sweat, and just a lack of durability.

Anyways, I'm going to start showing build pictures on Wednesday when I have something a little bit more along than just the back plate of the spider-pack, and the first arm joints roughly blocked out.

I need to stop fooling around with other people's games and get on to designing my own stuff. I have several ideas I could run with, but all of them pretty much require extensive coding ability due to their format and deviation away from the first person shooter style that Unreal comes standard with. In the very least, I can get the game LOOKING like what I want it to, right?

Ideas:

Final boss: A game in which the player engages in a multi-tiered, boss fight. The entire fight would be designed to take up to 5 hours, and no less than 1 hour, and have no save feature in between. Death results in a reset of the game. High endurance gameplay only.

platformer: Any style platforming game. A platforming game is the smallest deviation away from a first person shooter, assuming there was no involved melee combat.

First person RPG: some kind of fantasy RPG would allow exploration into character and creature design, and only require slight coding with weapon modifications to enable certain ranged vs melee deviations.
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Suggestions? Votes? Advice?

I'm looking forward to Anime Boston as it nears closer and closer. I'm picking up my badge on Thursday to minimize the hustle on Friday, but a new issue has come to mind. I reminded myself that weather is a big factor for Berserk Fury. As it stands now, the ten day forecast is putting rain on Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.  There's no rain predicted for Thursday, so I can hope that there will be showers Wednesday, a clear day Thursday, and then rain on Friday AFTERNOON so Fury doesn't get wet rushing it inside in the morning. Why is this a big deal? Fury doesn't have a plastic or fiberglass type finish. Something I need to look at for the future revisions...

Anyways, eyes on the sky. Here's hoping the rain clears away. Worst case scenario, I have to saran wrap the fury before bringing it, and take an extra 15 minutes getting the wrapping off at the con and assembling.

So I showed Fury off to a couple friends and we shot a couple quick videos of the thing in motion. A little bit of walking, a little bit of turning, a little bit of tail swooshing... All went well. I can get in and out easily enough with some assistance with the support posts. I can bear the weight for a good amount of time. I found a couple things to tweak. All was going well, but then I took the Fury off, and wasn't careful where I put it. I put Fury down on a slanted section of my driveway. It balanced just fine but then a gust of wind came and knocked fury over. Fury fell, and luckily, he only sustained damage to the fragile pieces that I knew would likely break. Luckily, his armor actually held together, and acted like armor... Good to know Fury's main body is sturdy enough to take a significant amount of abuse.

So I had to push back the photoshoot to Thursday so I can have time to make repairs:
-patch scraped paint spots where ever they may be
-straighten some creases out of the armor
-Mend Fury Boosters
-Replace thrice-snapped Fury blade.

Here's a vid via youtube
youtu.be/9hCIK74qaUE