#lekonua

[csleko]

WOAH.

Bet you never thought you'd see Old BIONICLE Leko again eh?

Probably because you've never heard of him, and thus had no reason until just now to think anything about him at all. BUT THAT IS BESIDE POINT I AM MAKING.

WHICH IS...

Uh...

RIGHT.

I am going ahead with that idea I had a million years ago to make another blog to act as an archive for all my old stuff that got wiped out when DeviantART died.

(Yes, DeviantART IS in fact dead. Its corpse may still be moving around, but it's an empty and lifeless husk.)

SO. With that in mind, feel free to check out

Leko's Library!

Like I said, I'm just gonna dig through all my old crap, post something here every once in a while and talk a bit about what was going through my head while making it.

And I made this render of Old BIONICLE Leko because I needed a unique avatar for the blog, and thought it would be fun to use my old face for it. I'm actually quite happy with how it came out considering it was pretty much a rush job.

[leko-library]

"Danger T.V." (2006)

I ALREADY REGRET STARTING THIS BLOG. I WAS UNPREPARED FOR THE CRINGE.

Okay. Just need to fight through it and talk about THIS thing.

To the best of my knowledge, this is the only surviving comic featuring Leko as "Lekonua." Pretty much every single one of them was drawn in one school notebook or another, and I'm 90% sure they've long since been thrown away.

But even back then it was pretty rare for Leko to appear in hand-drawn form at all. I originally created him to be my author avatar for the sprite comics I used to make for BZPower. And he looked like this most of the time:

Yep.

In middle school I made some new IRL friends, and we started drawing comics including each other's characters. (Which were basically just cooler versions of ourselves.) Since Lekonua was really the only character I had ever used to represent myself, he migrated into the "Comic Shorts" universe to appear alongside Dragon Master the ninja and Label Buddy the generic faceless guy whose only real purpose is to be dumb and get hurt a lot.

A LOT of our older comics were just either complaining about how boring school was, or doing "lol so random" stuff. Also references. And jokes stolen from much funnier people than us.

Like the entire concept for THIS comic! I knew "plutonium from household products" was ripped off from SOMETHING, and I had to do a bit of searching to find what exactly it came from. (And this was made slightly more difficult because I slightly misremembered the line.)

It was from Weird Al's movie, UHF, which I must have very recently seen for the first time if I was making this overt a reference to it.

Anyway. "Dragon Master" had a fairly consistent drawing style where all the characters were simplified and had large eyes, and Lekonua needed to be simplified a bit further to fit that style. The end result of that was basically the current version of Leko who looked much less like a BIONICLE character, and more like...well...just some robot.

Eventually I decided it would be a good idea to make Leko his own unique thing and significantly reduce the likelihood of getting sued by LEGO. So I adopted the simplified design, made some small adjustments over time, and settled on the current official version of Leko The Robot Who Is Entirely Unaffiliated With The LEGO Company.

Or just...

Leko.

[leko-likes-stuff]

My brain was just...not working on this one. Pull the lever, watch the ball go through, IMMEDIATELY FORGET WHAT I LITERALLY JUST WATCHED IT DO.

[csleko]

Finishing Psychonauts 2 today? Maybe? Hard to say, but I feel like there can't be more than 2-3 levels left to go through. If it turns out there's less to go than I thought, I'll just do the post game collectible sweep!

[csleko]

WOAH PSYCHONAUTS 2 IS FINALLY OUT AND I'M GONNA PLAY IT.

https://www.twitch.tv/cs_leko

EDIT: WHAT!? Did I seriously post this without the Twitch link!? Dangit!

[csleko]

Streaming? That thing I do sometimes? Where I play a game and folks can watch? I did Danganronpa 2 a little while ago? Yeah, I’m starting the 3rd one now. 

[csleko]

Proof of concept for making Sprite-O-Verse episodes with Blender.

The actual comic making part of this process is WAAAAAAY faster than Photoshop! Like, yeah, I spent hours making the set and it’s still not totally done, but moving the characters and camera around, rendering out each panel, throwing it into Photoshop and slapping some speech bubbles on it? Like an hour? Maybe?

I’m seriously considering committing to this style change. Besides looking 1000x better in general, you might actually see more than 1-2 episodes a year from me!

[csleko]

I just learned Yesterday that 8/10 is BIONICLE Day, so instead of “Metroidvania Monday” this week I’ll make it “Mata Nui Monday” and you can join me as I nostalgically rave throughout the old Mata Nui Online Game, a point-and-click Flash game that used to be on the BIONICLE section of the LEGO website! 

[csleko]

It’s over! Good guys win! Hooray! 

But...WHAT IF....there was an alternate timeline where Kyle was a murderous psychopath who killed pretty much everyone he met, turned to the Dark Side and tried to take the phenomenal cosmic power of the Valley of the Jedi for himself?

That’d be pretty freakin’ crazy, right? 

Heh...right?

[csleko]

Missed a couple Mondays back there, but I’m back with more of The Messenger! 

[csleko]

MONDAY MEANS MORE MESSENGER METROIDVANIA MADNESS.

[csleko]

It’s time to start a new Metroidvania! On this Monday! Because that’s the thing I do now! 

The wheel has chosen The Messenger, a game that starts out like Ninja Gaiden I think? And then gets around to being more Metroidvania...y...

[csleko]

“Hello, and welcome to Blaster Blocking School!”

“Aaaand you fail.”

[csleko]

Remember that guy who single handedly stole the Death Star plans, beat the crap out of Boba Fett, blew up an Imperial murderbot factory,  and THEN became a freakin’ Jedi?

Well we get to play as him again. Except he got bored of being a Jedi and decided to just be a normal badass for a while.  

[csleko]

If y’all didn’t even know I had a Twitch channel, I don’t blame you. And this is why. I have more fun making stuff for it than I do actually using it.

Also....something about spending half an hour on this meme when I could’ve done it in 2 minutes just using the template.

[csleko]

Metroidvania Monday continues! Last week, I finished CHASM and the wheel chose Ori and the Blind Forest for me to play next! BUT....it didn’t occur to me to actually install the game, so I played (and 100%’d) Gato Roboto instead.

So NOW I can play Ori!