Today's comic is based on a rather obscure SNES game by Enix called Robotrek (called Slapstick in Japan). I unfortunately can't really say much about the story due to not having played it in years, but I remember it was definitely cool and interesting enough to make me curious about what was going to happen next. You take on the role of a young inventor who makes a robot companion and is thrown into an adventure to save the world from the dark "hacker" organization which eventually escalates into something involving aliens, and time and space manipulation too. How can you say TIME AND SPACE stuff isn't cool?! XD

The game's art style is very colorful, cartoony, and visually pleasing. =) The music for the most part I think is pretty good, but I think you end up hearing some tracks a little too often, especially the battle music. o_< -and the final boss music is just so... uuuugh. >.<

A large part of the game is in item crafting, customizing, and outfitting your robot companions (you can make up to three). XD Every time your robots level, you are given ten points to allocate to various stats which you have the freedom to re-allocate any time you're given access to the "terminal." There's a huge variety of different gear with different functions you can outfit your robots with which can make it rather fun. Not only do you create items and gear for your robot, but you make tools for use on maps too like a drill that lets you break through secret passages or something that lets you talk to animals.

Robotrek is a turn-based RPG for the most part. You see enemies on the field and switch to a battle screen when you touch them like countless other RPG's, but the battle floor is a movement grid and you control to attack with your appendages using the R, L, and X buttons. Depending on what action you take, the cool down time till your next action varies. Battles are ALWAYS the enemy team versus ONE of your robots which you have the freedom to switch out for a different robot on your active turn. In the robot customization "terminal," you are able to "program" special moves into a list using different combinations of R, L, and X. Depending on the type of gear the robot is wearing, he'll sometimes do a different special move. You can make your robot do some pretty cool stuff like shooting twice then dashing in to make a melee slash or teleporting to slash all enemies on the front lines. Just thinking about it is getting me excited to play the game again! XD

Robotrek is a rather cool game and something I'd probably recommend checking out if you're hungering to try out an interesting turn-based JRPG from the SNES era. XD

Oh hello there, Internet. I see you found our new website just fine. That's great! Come in, take off your shoes and get comfy in our swank new digs. There is a bit of sawdust still around here and there, so don't mind the mess. Once we get a fresh stock of bananas and Red Bull, our code monkeys can get back to finishing off the last bits and pieces... Word of advice though friends...hang on to your coats, they tend to disappear when you least expect them to.

As you can no doubt tell, one reason for the short break was to polish off this site re-design. It has been on the backburner for a very long time, but at our current rate of comic-making, we would not have been able to get around to it in a timely manner. We wanted to have this done for a number of reasons, but suffice it to say it was worth taking the time off to do this.

Now, I shall indulge and nerd-out on you with sweet site statistics and factoids!

• This new design is a complete overhaul; over 450 pages of code were re-created, lovingly, by hand.
• The comics now appear after the associated blog posts, so you don't have to navigate to separate pages, simply scroll down or hop in a warp pipe. Want comics a la carte? www.lifeinaggro.com/comic has them in a gallery-like fashion.
• Social site plug-ins are now associated with every comic entry, allowing readers to share comics quickly and easily with friends (because sharing is caring *wink wink, nudge nudge* lol)
• The page will finally look right on all browsers; in other words not FUBAR. I'm still optimizing this, but it's nearly complete.
• The site is finally completely dynamic. I can modify a few parent files to quickly and easily propagate content to the entire site.
• Compression is now enabled, and load times should be pretty speedy in comparison.
• All PNG images were switched to JPEG. We got rid of the transparent borders to save on file space (usually around 20% an image).
• All old URLs were scrapped in favor of a very simple scheme for persistent locations. Blog posts can be found at lifeinaggro.com/yyyy/mm/dd and comics can be found at lifeinaggro.com/comic/yyyy/mm/dd. This is for having short, persistent, URIs (Symantic Web). Of course, all old URLs are re-directed to the new locations so there should be no broken links.
• Search Engine Optimization is mostly complete with most important links appearing higher up in the code (regardless of placement on page).
• All content is divorced from page design and the framework has been laid to allow me to code in really cool things in the future, such as tagged posts and search queries, among others.
• Although it lags the site a bit (a couple hundred milliseconds), I added in a Facebook backend that allows me to host live chat streams for special occasions. This same backend also allows FB users to send comics to friends and post to their walls without having to navigate away from the site.
• Where available, the social tie-ins are setup to make it as close to one-click shares as possible. If you are logged into Reddit, for example, the comic address, title and subreddit category of gaming will popup. Sadly, because of the new URI's, old page rankings are lost. We recently found out we had ONE HUNDRED FB likes for Hang in There, Baby, which was really freaking awesome to see! Thanks guys!!
• A Google Font is being used that works on nearly every browser to give the site some style that is not reliant on people having the font local or on us using images to have awesome looking typeface.
• I started this code work off of a Photoshop design I finalized just prior to posting the Nocturne comic. It took roughly two weeks to build, 1 week of learning and planning and 1 more of coding.

Well, that's just about it! I had a lot of fun working on this and I hope you guys like it. If you happen to see little question marks in our posts, don't fret - I'm working on getting rid of those little bugs and hope to have them terminated soon. Have a great weekend all.

I wanted to make a side post about how we are going to be going back to a once a week schedule. The holidays are upon us and things are getting very busy. Though Pie and I absolutely love doing two comics a week, it is a bit too demanding for us at the time being, a lot more so than we imagined, even thought we had the practice with the bonus stages earlier this year.

Talking it over with her, we both believe that two comics per week is the most ideal; it feels very empowering and exciting for us but we are simply not quite at the capacity to handle the load flawlessly. So we are going to go back to our hidden mountain cave to train more until we can rock your world with twice weekly updates, delivered like clockwork and without exception. We both really look forward to getting back to that point as soon as we are able!

Hi Everyone. I hate to say this, but there will be no Friday LiA comic this week. Bear and I've been working hard on getting this important project up and done so that we can continue bringing you your weekly doses of Aggro! As Bear mentioned in this week's Wednesday post, we really hate the idea of missing comic posts and wouldn't do it unless we've decided that it's for the best. For now though, here's a picture for you all to reflect on. Thank you very much all for your continued readership, patience, and support.

** Just a quick comment to tail on what Pie said - thank you all for your patience this week. We were going to try to finish this project on the side while maintaining the comic schedule, but that would have delayed some cool stuff by a significant margin; we decided that knocking it out of the park so we could get back on track was for the best. Thanks again! **
-Bear

Hey all, just a quick update today. We will not have your normally scheduled Wednesday comic, as Pie and I are busy working on a side project. If you've followed our blog posts with any regularity, you know we hate missing updates, and to date have only actually missed one.

However, whereas that one missed comic entry was due to failure, this time it is simply because we are hard at work on something cool. We can't share with you what that is right now, but you will know soon enough.

As always, have a great week!