Marine Transgression V: The 10

Gabe

Well, the unexpected Soft Reset hiatus continues.

This has been going on for awhile now, so I think I owe it to all of you to explain what is happening.

Down here at the office, we are preparing for a time of the year which has come to be affectionately known as "The Crunch."

I work for an organization which is, in essence "The Academy Awards" for video games. We have member companies who provide us with membership dues, and every year we hold a massive awards ceremony to recognize the best games that the industry has to offer, the people who worked tirelessly to create them, and to spread awareness about the joys and social relevance of gaming to the public. But before the ceremony can occur, the games must first be selected.

And that is where we come in.

We receive massive shipments of games every year. Crates of video games literally flood the hallways of our office, floor to ceiling, office to office. We turn around and re-box those games and send them to the judges who play, rate, and vote on which games they believe are worthy of the year's honors. There are about 20 categories available for nomination (including Best Action Game, Best Visual Engineering, Best Sound Engineering, Overall Game of the Year, etc.), and on average, between 5 and 20 games are nominated for each category.

Multiply that by the number of judges which sit on each panel, and that comes out to be a TON of games.

Right now, there is much work to be done in preparation for these voting procedures, and this often requires that I take my work home with me. The organization is great to me, and has been the perfect job ever since I began working here. And so to not let the group down in this time of high pressure, I have been curtailing a lot of my luxuries in order to get extra work done - one of those luxuries is Soft Reset.

Everyday I am planning and writing scripts, story arcs, and preparing characters for their appearances. I have enough Soft Reset scripts written in my head to finish a year's worth of content, provided I could just sit down and draw it all.

It takes me between 5 and 6 hours of uninterrupted work to finish a single strip, depending usually on the number of panels and the amount of detail therein. During this period of time at my job, such stretches of unoccupied time are scarce. But that doesn't mean I've stopped thinking, planning, writing, and breathing Soft Reset. It's just on the back-burner for a moment while I take care of work. I'm sure most of you can sympathize with that sentiment on some level.

I still receive e-mails asking where Soft Reset has gone, ranging from the pleasant and encouraging to the down-right rude and self-entitled. I promise you all that Soft Reset is still kicking, and that updates will resume when I can fit them into my schedule. I appreciate all of the attention this comic has received thus far, and I appreciate your patience during this rather unstable moment in my life when leisure time is a thing of scarcity. Just go about your lives as normal and keep checking back for updates whenever you have a moment. This comic is far from dead, and I am far from being done with it.

Thank you again to everyone who continues to read. Check back soon!