Apologies to all for the delay in the Christmas event. We spent a lot of effort building a storytelling feature and we hope that you enjoyed the first glimpse of it. Moving forward, we're expanding the feature to allow for anyone to create their own stories as well as create characters of their own inside this storytelling feature. But for the time being, we're hard at work on the Valentine's day event, which will also use and expand on the storytelling feature! I hope you'll like it!
We have just resumed work on Towns 3. CodeMoney is back and helping us convert Towns into HTML5. We hope that there will be a beta version ready for testing as early as next month.
Finally have some time to continue he Gaia history:
== Part 2==
The good times 1999 - 2001The end of the century was a crazy time to be alive. The economy was in a furious boom, people were spending money left and right, Studio XD had just gotten their first contract to draw a published comic. The company I worked for had been sold to some big French telephone company and everyone was happy with more money in the bank.
In September of 1999 the whole Studio XD gang had moved into a shabby old house. We were excited to move in together, as we got along really well, and spending more time together sounded nothing less than a great time.
L0cke, Vo, CP and Saka had just formed the comic book studio named Studio XD (named after the emoji), and the studio was in full swing. The comic studio worked on their own monthly release schedule, so they can take any time off they want and make any days available for excursions. We were completely spontaneous and every week was filled with random activities. We binged anime, played games, took random road trips, took midnight jogs, or hit up Taco Bell at 3 in the morning.
There was one time L0cke just pointed at a radio tower on top of a mountain 8 miles away from home, and said "let's go there!". We then proceed to spend 14 hours walking up hill to the hill top without even look up if there's even a hiking trail to get there. When we reched the top we were completely exhausted, and everything was pitch black making it impossible to climb down the mountain. If it wasn't for a service road leading down hill we would have been stuck until dawn. Little adventures like this filled the time we spent together.
The team also decided to form a local art club where like minded artists would meet up, hang out, and draw together. The team joked about how this is a farce to meet girls in the area, and next thing we knew, L0cke met his future wife, Ling, on the art group's second meeting.
While we were having the time of our lives, we were all working hard in our own ways. The team's first comic book was a story within itself. At the beginning, we were stoked that the team could become pro and get to work on a published comic. But what we didn't know was that we partnered with a manager who chose the story writer for us. On the faithful day where we received the first draft of the story, we were just blown away from how bad the script was. The team was devastated, and L0cke bolted out of the apartment and ran laps to vent his frustration. Despite the set back, the team pressed on and the team's first comic ran for 6 months. Sales for the team's first comic was not great, and soon the team decided to start their own comic series instead of partnering with someone else. This time the team got full creative control, and I was actually the mysterious benefactor helping fund the new comic.
Meanwhile, work for me in tech was getting crazy, the company I worked for got bought by a French company, and now they need someone to fly around the world to teach everybody else how to use their new equipment. Lucky for them there's this one kid in his 20's who's still single and don't mind traveling. Next thing I knew I was spending half my time traveling. The trips started with hops to different states, then they sent me to Spain, Italy, and then Singapore, but that was just the beginning. The next big job was a 3 months evaluation contract in Columbus, Ohio. I agreed to go, but with the condition that I get to fly back to California during the weekends to hang out with my friends. I can positively say that flying 2500 miles on Friday night for the weekend, and then flying back on Sunday night to start working on Monday morning was definitely not healthy!
After 2 months into the work in Ohio, the news of the evaporating tech bubble was consuming the industry. Overnight, everyone's stock holdings shrunk by 80%. Internet start up companies were going bankrupt, and millions of jobs were lost. Not long after that, I got a call from my boss, sharing with me the bad news that our parent company had decided to shut down all their offices in the United States. Effectively everyone in my company lost our jobs. Perhaps I expected this series of events, or perhaps I was exhausted and sick of flying back and forth every weekend, but I ended up telling my boss "I'm glad I got to take a break and get some free time on my hands." What I heard in reply was something I'll never forget. My boss said "Derek, do NOT share your enthusiasm with anybody in the office!". Obviously, being away from the office, I was isolated from the sorrow and distraught from all my co-workers.
sweatdrop It was the middle of 2001.I lost a lot of my savings, I lost my job, but I gained my freedom! This year turned out to be fantastic. While the world was in sorrow and people's lives were in shambles, I was celebrating my new found freedom, and proceed to spend all my time hanging out, playing games, and having fun with the team.
2001 was interesting not only because we had a lot of fun, but that's also the year where I met Josh's close friend, Brian O Maley. He flew down from Canada to hang out with Josh for weeks at a time, and eventually he started drawing a comic series called Scott Pilgram, in which many of the stories characters and settings were based on our team and setting. The main character (Scott) and his girlfriend (Ramona) were based off L0cke and Ling. There was also a character who owns everything around the house, and I suppose that came from me throwing my tech money away.
2001 was also the year where CP introduced us to Ragnarok Online. We had no idea what an MMORPG is until we played this game, and we were completely hooked. Since I was unemployed, and the comic studio could set their own schedule, we pretty much spent 24/7 playing Ragnarok. We had a whiteboard where everyone's shifts were scheduled out. What made our addiction worse was that I found a bug really early on in the game, allowing us to level up a lot faster than anyone else. Very soon we were hoarding bosses, collecting all their rares, and being hated by the community because no one else could never find and kill the boss because of us. But the most interesting aspect that came out of our awful success was that we became so powerful that we no longer needed to spend time leveling up. Instead, we spend all our time hanging out in dungeons and chatting up with other players. Soon we realized that the most enjoyment we got out of playing an MMORPG wasn't the part about killing monsters, but it was all about meeting new people, chatting with them for hours on end, and forging friendships online.
By the middle of 2002, I had been unemployed for over a year, and I was itching to start working again.
Studio XD titles:
(Echo) https://atomicavenue.com/title/12309/Echo(Last Shot) ]https://www.mycomicshop.com/search?TID=318781
