Greetings, loyal TLT followers! Let's face it, you have to be a loyal follower to still be visiting the TLT site after this progress drought. As always we apologize for the slow pace but as we say to our volunteer staff, do what you can when you can, and that goes for Blyka and myself as well. And lately, what we can and when we can hasn't amounted to much.

Whenever I do manage to grab a bit of time, I'm putting it toward a pretty major element--Tuttle himself. I've been working on him off and on ever since we announced that we'd be changing the look to a dynamic cel-shaded style. As I've mentioned in the past, the Tuttle model was the first thing created for this project, which means my modeling ability still had a ways to go, and so did our entire vision for the game. We knew there'd eventually be changes, and now we're making them.

Beyond the obvious necessities that go hand-in-hand with the change in shading style (new textures and model smoothing to make sure it looks good when light hits it), we're using this opportunity to revisit every aspect of the design. If you look at Megaman in Legends 1, 2, and 3, he's different in each one. Stands to reason that Tuttle would look a bit different after a year since his Misadventures of Tron Bonne appearance, yes?

Here are some of the considerations that have popped up as we've been developing the game:
- As cool as Tuttle is, to be a hero, it wouldn't hurt for him to generally be more kick-ass.
- The full length trenchcoat limits mobility and is hell to work with from a modeling and animation perspective.
- His cane is his main weapon, so it needs to be more impressive and powerful looking.
- He's going to be able to acquire jet skates, so his footwear needs to work with that.

With those thoughts in mind, we have revamped Tuttle's design with essential changes, while carefully making sure to keep the essence of the character intact. We feel we have succeeded, and we're very excited about the new look. We had intended on waiting until the new model was all up and running before sharing it, but since it's taking so long here's just a tiny preview of how things are shaping up. I know it's not much to look at, but let us know what you think.