Last Exile is an amazing series that came out of Gonzo studios back in the summer of 2003. I was lucky enough to catch it back when it first aired — but if you want to hear me blather on about how great it is, check out the note in the download ;) Here I’m going to talk about the work that went into creating the discs.

I created this set of discs because I wanted to introduce more people to the show. In the end, I finished two sets: one for general consumption, and one made up of all the reject practice cases for myself ;)

As far as the slip cases for the discs are concerned, I owe everything to Range Murata, the visual genius behind Last Exile. I used images of his that appeared on the European DVDs to give some variety for folks that want the official set. All I really did was come up with a design for the cases that I could fold, arranged a layout for the back, selected images for each episode, photoshopped a clock for the label, and repeated it for each disc in the set ;) And of course there was the box to hold the discs, the time spent burning CDs, gluing all of the cases together, etc, etc. Overall, a very interesting crafts project :D

Designing the program that comes up when you insert the disc was also an interesting challenge. I decided to refrain from any .NET machinations, as making you install the whole bloody framework for a cheap splash screen seemed like overkill to me. Luckily, I had just taken a course on MFC which gave me a good refresher on how I could write this program in good ol’ C++.

Originally, I had had visions of little animated previews of the episodes, a bit of the opening music playing in the background, and perhaps an animated opening sequence similar to a DVD menu. Once I came to my senses and started trying to actually implement this stuff, however, about the farthest I got was allowing you to move the previously fixed-in-place dialog around the screen ;)

Getting the background to display correctly took a little doing. For one, the dialog resource can only be resized in rather large increments due to font issues, so the button positions and sizes I saw while creating the dialog were only approximates. Then I had to figure out how to draw the buttons myself, since you can’t have a transparent background on a button. This is where I stumbled onto the shadow text, which I use for highlighting and looks pretty cute, I think :)

Then, as I was finishing up (you know, adding little details like making the buttons actually do something ;), the part that I thought would take the most time actually turned out to be the easiest. Opening the movie files, the note, the installer . . . all of them are handled by a single operating system call.

Of course, the real challenge was making this work for all nine discs. In the end, I whittled down the disc dependencies to two items: a constant value for the disc number (from which I could calculate the episode names on the disc, the name of the note file, etc), and the positions of the dialog buttons (which depend on the background for their placement).

So, all in all, I think it turned out pretty well ;D