2021 Recap

2021 is at its end, and what a year it's been! It was my first full year living in my apartment and that really improved my mental health a lot, so I'm very grateful for that decision. As for my art and some other areas, there were some rocky parts and I'm still figuring things out, but I'll get to that later in this post.

As my tradition goes, I'll start off by showing my 2021 art summary:

So what happened in 2021? Well in January, my brother and I participated in the Global Game Jam as usual (play the game here!), but this time we had to interact virtually instead of being there together in person, so it was different. We were a bit more ambitious with a more detailed art style as well because they extended it to be a few days longer, so it was definitely a new experience.

Then in February, I made a Discord bot for me and my brother to talk with The Nays, to try and emulate mIRC. I still have to log into the bot each time I want to use it, but I switched the hosting over to repl.it at least so that either of us could load it up whenever we plan to use it.

In March I started to watch some Sketchbook tours on YouTube, so I made a few of my own. I recorded myself going through all of my old sketchbooks and edited together the first few throughout the year. I also recorded my Art Journey around that time as well while I was doing more video recordings.

I did a #SurpriseOCDrawing challenge for fun to draw other people's characters, and that was a fun little activity in the spring.

In April I spent a lot of time updating my social media platforms. I made a carrd and Art Station, and uploaded playthroughs of all of my GGJ projects to YouTube (and revamped my channel a bit).

At the end of April I teamed up with three of my closest friends to participate in CCAD's 24-Hour Animation challenge, where we collaborated on Discord to create a 30-second short film. Our team ended up winning and they showed our short film at their end of the year show that we got to all attend in May. So that was a really fun experience!

And after the 24-Hour Animation challenge, we were inspired to work on projects and talk about them together so we started the CUPdates (Creative Update Project), where we meet bi-weekly to talk about projects we're working on and present to the group. It's been really beneficial and keeping us all a lot more motivated to work on our projects. And it's a way for me to make use of this blog more too!

I worked on various projects about The Nays for short periods of time, including the Nays 2084 animation, where I made progress on a few more scenes, then overall I drew more storyboards and story sketches of a few of our Eventures. My brother and I wrote our first remote Eventure in awhile as well around that time.

Then starting in June, I got very deep into game development on Compass Nays (and came up with the actual name and logo for it!). I was super productive on this project until August, which was very different, since summer is usually my time where I don't get any projects done. This year those were my most productive months though, so I think the CUPdates definitely helped. I ended up making a lot of progress overall on the game, since previously it was just a rough battle system. But I went in and made some sprite and style tests, wrote dialogue for most of the prologue, drew the layouts of all of the maps in the prologue, did sprite sketches of all of the prologue characters, made some menu tests, and a lot more. You can check out all of my Compass Nays posts for more details, but I'm happy with how far I got in it this year!

In September I took a break from Compass Nays and completed my very first Unity game outside of work. I made Frank Hawk for my brother's birthday, so I got it done in about a month. During this time I also started to update my online presence in terms of game dev. I made a Game Jolt account, uploaded projects to RPGmaker.net, and revamped some of my itch.io pages.

Because I used up a lot of my creative energy in the summer this year, the fall was a huge lull for me. It was like ever since I came back from my vacation, I had trouble getting back into art. So I really just did inktober and Christmas presents for the rest of the year.

In November I brought back my OC trading card game and started to figure out some of the mechanics more. I printed out my prototypes and tested it. I also uploaded my Art Journey video after finishing it up. This month was mostly Christmas presents and a lot of Notion. I learned a lot about databases from work, so I revamped my entire checklist and task system to be a lot more efficient, and also ended up making a wiki for The Nays there, based on all of my Google docs and Weebly pages.

So overall this year was very different than previous years. I think overall I'm realizing that I definitely experienced burnout this year. Part of it could've been because I was using so much creative energy during summer (when I usually take a break), and then a mixture of other things. I did two weekend challenges of staying up all night with little sleep, and work has been super hectic the past year or so. So a lot has been contributing to this and I'm trying to figure out how to overcome it. Luckily in December I did start to feel better because I was creating again, and that's what really gives me a lot of energy.

Another challenge this year has been that I haven't really had time to write The Nays. So because of that, I ended up trying to focus on Compass Nays instead, which would be a much shorter version of that story, and something I could do on my own. With my brother and I living apart, it's harder to line up our schedules to dedicate a weekend or even one night to writing an Eventure, so progress on The Nays has been pretty much halted. We only wrote 1 new Eventure this entire year. I think this is part of why I've felt disconnected in a weird way. Since I haven't really been thinking in-character as much because I'm not constantly working on the project, I have to do a lot of re-reading to figure out where I left off each time, which is a little weird. I know my goal was to work on side projects more than actually write Eventures this year, and that's what I did. But it's still weird!

Something else I realized this year was that I stopped doing daily drawings. I didn't do them last year, but I still did them more than this year. This year I drew less and less as the year went on, and I think that really hurt my abilities and motivation a lot. I made a lot less drawings overall and it's been hard to get back into it. I'll talk more about this in the next post on how I plan to bring some of that back, but I realize I'm definitely the kind of person who can't take long breaks from drawing, or it really messes with me.

Because I didn't draw much this year, I realize I didn't really improve drawing-wise as much as I would've liked to. But I did improve in a lot of other aspects of my life. Especially in game dev. I've been learning a lot of Unity at work, and some more JavaScript, so that's really been helping me understand and utilize programming a lot more, which in turn really improves my RPG Maker games and workflow a lot, which I'm thankful for. I improved a lot professionally and at work as well, and even got promoted to Senior Curriculum Developer in February this year. So I've been taking on even more responsibilities than I had been previously. We also got a lot of additional partnership courses so I've worked on courses for Google, MIT, and NYU so far. So I'm learning a lot for sure.

And then I also realized over the past year that my social life has improved a lot. Now that I'm living with my best friend, we hang out all the time. One of my friends visits and hangs out with us pretty much every weekend. There are at least 1-2 people that I meet with virtually every month to talk about art and other things. I meet bi-weekly with my friends to talk about our projects in CUPdates. And I've met up with some other friends in Columbus a few times, and one of our friends visited for a few months in the spring. So this year has had A LOT of social interaction in comparison to last year. I'm an extrovert so that energizes me and I love it, but I think that's part of where my time and energy has been dedicated to, so it really does make sense that I have less time for art and personal projects with that on top of work. And I'm not saying this is a bad thing by any means, this is a huge improvement. The fact that I accomplished as much as I did this year on top of all of this means that my mental health is just way better, because I probably couldn't have done that much in previous years. So it's just a different use of time, and it's starting to make a lot more sense.

So now that I've gone over a lot of what happened this year, I'd like to end by answering this question: Did I accomplish my 2021 goals?

I wanted this blog to be less about daily tasks and more about processes and longer posts like this one. And the CUPdates have been working really well for that. I use Notion a lot as well for personal tasks, so this blog works great as my bi-weekly showcase.

A huge goal for this year was to focus on game design and I definitely did that! I learned a lot about Unity, making Frank Hawk, and made a lot of progress on Compass Nays. I even made progress on the gameplay mechanics of the OC trading card game.

I wanted to create more storyboards and finished beat boards, which I suppose I kind of did if you count The Gek Eventure Twine that I just posted. There were a few throughout the year as well, and the last few days of the year, but I still think I could've done more overall. I did say I wanted to share The Nays story with the world through Twine, and I started that, which is fun!

And then finally I achieved a goal of wanting to meet with artists more to talk about my personal projects and simulate college art classes. This was achieved through our CUPdates project! It really helps with motivation and I'm very thankful that my friends are willing to meet so often to make this dream a reality.

So overall even though this year felt crazy and ended kind of weirdly, I still did actually accomplish most of my goals. So I'm glad about that! These posts are really helpful to reflect back and really feel that sense of accomplishment. I have some plans for what to do next to address some of the issues that came up this year, so stay tuned for my next post.

See you in 2022!

CUPdate 15: Christmas Presents and the Last CUPdate of 2021

This is the last CUPdate post of the year! Our last meeting actually happened the other week, but because I spent the majority of my past few weeks working on Christmas presents, I didn't want to actually post publicly about them until after Christmas. So now you can all see what I've been working on in my secret projects over the past couple of months!

The main project I've been working on is a Twine interactive story of the very first Eventure of The Nays: The Gek Eventure! We wrote this a few years back in 2017 and I've been working on the comic for it, but I've never actually shared the beginning of this story with anyone besides my brother, so this is a big step! I'm hoping in the future I can make more of these chronologically since I know in the past the few I did upload were way later in the story.

Read the story here!

The beginning portion of this story has drawings from my comic (and some of those are just lineart currently, but I plan to update them at some point), and then there are a few videos/images that my brother drew a few years back as a gift for me. But other than that, the rest of the drawings were done new for this project! So it took me around 100+ hours to draw, but I'm happy with how the overall presentation came out.

This is the story that we've been working on ever since we were kids. It's gone through multiple title changes (The Guy Who Talks Like This, The Kids, The Worlds, and eventually The Nays!). 

When we officially called it TGWTLT or The Kids and made it its own story was back in 2002, so we're coming up on the 20-year anniversary! And then in 2012, we rebranded it to The Nays and the direction changed a lot, meaning it's now the 10-year anniversary of that as well. I figured this would be a great time to finally share the start of what we've been working on for all of that time. You can check out The Nays website if you want to learn more about the characters.

Though this Twine project has been the main thing I've been working on, I also did a few other mini-gifts. One of them was creating a website for all of the presents that my brother and I made for each other for holidays over the years! This goes back to 2006 when I made an AMV with inside jokes in it for my brother's birthday, then they started to get more customized over the years. Some of these are super old versions of our characters and the story when we used to just include actual characters from other series in our story, so please keep that in mind if you end up viewing this site! lol Anything 2013 and after should be more applicable though.

And then another present for my brother was that I created one of his characters (Yaro) on Hero Forge and then commissioned Sandro on Etsy to 3D print it and paint it! It turned out super small, but it's still really cool that we now have a 3D-printed model of one of our characters.

And then lastly, not really CUPdate-related, but I made a custom cookbook for my parents that includes all of our custom recipes. I used Blurb to print it, just like I used for the Spoon Bath Eventure book that I printed for my brother last year. Most of them are from my brother and I, and our friends, because we've been cooking a lot more since we moved out of my parents' house last year.

And that's it for now! I'm planning to make my usual end of the year/start of the year posts as usual, so those will still happen before the next CUPdate. I'm glad I got to finally share these projects with all of you, since it feels like this has been all I've been working on the past few months.

CUPdate 14: Notion Pages, OC Cards, & Art Journey Video

I'm now back from Thanksgiving break, and I ended up getting a lot done! Some of which I still can't show yet, but overall, the projects I was able to get some work done on that I'll be showcasing here include: Notion pages to organize projects, prototypes of OC Cards printed (and played), a Twine story uploaded, and my Art Journey video finally finished.

I've been working on a lot of mini-projects, some of which I'll show once they're finished, but for now, I've been organizing a lot of this into Notion pages, which has really helped me refocus and start to see what needs to get done. So while there's not a lot of art to show for this time, there is a lot of Notion progress that I can share here!

So I started off by organizing some Notion pages. I made pages for each of my OC cards so that I could store the inspiration images that I wanted to reference for the style, as well as the current card that I have. I figured this would be a good way to keep all of this in the same place!

Then I realized that a big blocker for me when drawing is having to stop and look for references. So I decided to make a Notion page for The Nays. I know... I have a massive Google Drive of documents, but I think a Notion page to keep track of a few things will really help. So I started by making a Characters page, and from there, creating a Gallery where I have a page for each character. I already have my Weebly and Google Sheets to store a lot of those specifics, but I wanted one massive list that I can just quickly Ctrl+F the page to find a character and see their most recent design/image without having to click through a bunch of pages. And then I have links to the Weebly and Deviant Art searches if I end up wanting more. I think this will help me be more productive and able to draw without the dread of having to search around a lot for references.

And then I took that even further to be able to sort by Eventures that they appear on. I know I already have a Google Doc for this, but being able to open up that Eventure and quickly sort to see references of every character involved on that Eventure will help me a lot, especially when I'm doing storyboards for these scenes. So far I've only done this for the first Eventure, but I plan to update this whenever I start writing a new Eventure, so I can have it open while I'm writing.

After that, I ended up getting pretty carried away and deep into Notion. I started to convert my massive Google Drive worth of documents into Notion pages to more easily link them all to each other. And through this, I found myself accidentally creating a full Wiki for The Nays, which I honestly had always been wanting to do. This will make updating data a lot easier than updating a bunch of different documents. I still have a lot of work to do in terms of adding everything from Google Drive to this Notion page, but I'm having fun doing it, and I think it'll be a great resource in the end.

I realized another area that has been making me unmotivated to work on projects is a lack of schedule. Through this, I decided to break down the tasks I want to do before the next CUPdate and scheduled them out on a calendar in Notion. This way I can have a goal for each day, or push them back if I need to. And once the day is complete, I'll either check the Complete box to mark that I did it, or move it to another day. I think this will help me stay more organized and on top of my tasks.

Another Notion discovery I made was the ability to connect Discord to Notion! Using Zapier, I was able to set up a connection so that whenever I post in a certain channel, it creates a new database on Notion. I started out by just using my channel where I write my dreams on my personal server and populating it from there, and it works out really well! I'll have to utilize this more in the future.

After all of the Notion organization, I also started to work on some of the tasks I planned out. I started by reprinting my prototype cards after doing some research and figuring out what the best method for printing is. 

I discovered that we'll want to make the text size a bit bigger on the cards themselves since they're still pretty small. Then I realized that printing PNG files are not ideal; the quality is very blurry on the text and overall not great. When I printed them as JPEG, they came out much better. And when I printed as TIFF with no compression, they turned out the best, so that's the best method to print at. 

After those print tests, I cut them out and placed them into card sleeves in front of Pokemon cards (as one of my coworkers recommended!) and that method worked out great for prototypes so I can shuffle them and they'll feel like actual cards.

I got to actually try out my prototype game with my brother when I visited my family for Thanksgiving. There were a few cards that I wanted to change mechanics for that were too overpowered, the wording was unnatural, or some cards that needed specifications when played together. But the main changes involved Support cards and how often they're drawn, since they were definitely skewing a lot of the game with how we played it. Also, I want to add more strategy by choosing what positions you play your characters on the first turn, and specifics on how to shuffle cards or refer to specific slots on the board. So overall I learned some things and I do want to try playing it again with some of the overall changes like with Support cards and strategies to see what further changes might need to be made in relation to the specific cards.

And then I finally finished my art journey video! I recorded this back in the spring of this year, but I didn't actually edit it all together until a few weeks ago. I had to record some additional footage from old art that I had at my parents' house, so I took some time to do that when I visited for Thanksgiving, and collected a lot of old folders and notebooks to bring with me for future reference. This was fun so I might end up doing more of these kinds of videos in the future to kind of change the focus of my channel.

While I was looking back on some old projects I did in the past, I realized that one of the Twine Eventures that I made never got uploaded, so I uploaded the Pubby & Lonny Reunited Eventure on itch.io here!

Also a bit unrelated, but I did want to share a discovery I came across the other week. I've been having an issue in Photoshop where I couldn't turn off Windows Ink or it would also get rid of pen pressure, but thanks to this blog post, I was able to figure out how to do that, and my line quality is SO MUCH BETTER! It's such a relief, because this Windows Ink issue has really been demotivating me to draw since it's been a struggle, but now with it all working, I'm enjoying drawing digitally again.

And lastly, I spent a little bit of time making some Notion databases to help one of my friends organize her to-do lists. The one pictured above is a daily task tracker where you can set the visible dates and archive old tasks.

CUPdate 13: Catching Up

So it's been a while since I had anything relating to my game Compass Nays, so I've kind of decided to take a break from it until the new year. I've realized that I'm experiencing burnout, so I think in this situation, it's best to take a step back and try to change my focus so I can try and get back into things.

For this CUPdate, I mostly decided to refocus and figure out what all I want to accomplish before the end of the year. I started out by making a bunch of checklists on Notion. Some of these are mini-art projects I can do and others are as simple as starting to buy Christmas gifts for loved ones. I just really need to reorganize my life since I realize I've been in a bit of a slump the past few months due to what I think must be burnout. I had been accomplishing a lot for my game, but stress from work/life has mostly been taking a lot of energy and I think that's why I've been struggling to get back into working on my own personal art projects as much.

During the last presentation, I talked about my process on Frank Hawk from my devlog post here. I've also been making a point to post this game on other platforms (Game Jolt, RPGMaker.net, and simmer.io) since it's my first real finished personal Unity project.

I also finished Inktober! This year it didn't re-energize me as much as it usually does, unfortunately, but I did get all 31 days done. You can check out all of the individual posts on my Instagram.

Then I decided to go back to working on one of my YouTube projects, which is a 30-minute video about my art journey and how I got to where I am today. I recorded the footage for this back in March, but haven't gotten around to editing it until now. Some of the things I mention are about 2021 being the current year, so my plan is to finish this by the end of this year. I've been making great progress on editing it, and only have about 5 minutes left to finish up, so once I can grab some footage from my parents' house, I'll be able to finish it up and post it for the next CUPdate!

And after talking with some friends, I got inspired to go back and work on the trading cards for our card game we were gonna make a while back. We decided to finally make a more accurate template to get the prototypes into, so I went through and imported placeholder art for all of my cards with the information. So far I have 4 cards that are completely finished with the final art (which are the ones above), but the icons and formatting are subject to change for the actual final prints. I'm hoping this can be something I'll come back to, since making the art for these was really fun!

I printed out all of the cards last night, but I still need to work on the sizes, because some of the text came out a bit blurry in the prints. I might try to reprint them sometime soon, but for now I can at least start to try playing the game and see how balanced it is, with characters from different decks. 

There are a few other projects I'm working on that I can't post here yet, but once I'm able to, I'll add them to one of my future CUPdate posts. Until then, I'm slowly making smaller checklists to complete so I can be ready to finish a few mini-projects up before the end of the year.

Frank Hawk Devlog

So you may have noticed my lack of CUPdates recently relating to Compass Nays. That's because I took a sidetrack onto creating an endless runner game in Unity for my brother's birthday! Now that I can finally post about it, this will be a mini-blog post before the next CUPdate that showcases my process on this project.

Ever since December of last year, I've been teaching myself Unity for work. So I decided to finally create my own project outside of work in Unity for fun! This was a short project that I finished in under a month, so I didn't have a whole lot of time to dedicate to it.

This game is called Frank Hawk. It's an endless runner skateboarding game where you get to eat tacos.

Backstory

The idea behind this game came from an arc early in The Nays where they visit Frank Lady World, which is a World full of skate parks and skateboarders. And Frank Lady's specialty is making tacos.

The idea of this World was inspired by Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3, since I used to play that game all the time as a kid (and that's why the music you'll hear are midi versions of the songs from that game). It started out with The Nays just creating characters and levels in the game and eventually turned into a full World where they would skateboard in real life and compete in competitions.

In this game, you play as Chozu, who's a huge fan of this World, as you race through levels created by friends, both current and old, and the ultimate goal is to collect the taco at the end of each level. Each level increases in difficulty and new obstacles show up along the way.

Development

I started out by brainstorming some ideas for a short game that would be fun to make in Unity. Since I've already made a platformer game in Unity before, I figured it wouldn't be too much different to make an endless runner.

Something that's core to my games is making sure there's character dialogue, so I explored the Unity Asset store to try and find a quick and easy dialogue editor, since I didn't want to dedicate a lot of time to building my own from scratch. That's when I found Runia Dev's Dialogue Editor, which worked perfectly for what I needed.

After that, I made the basic character movements and collisions for the hub scene in Frank Lady World where Chozu interacts with characters to enter the levels. Starting out, I was just using sprites I already had or quick sketches as placeholders for the characters.

Then I made the endless runner level. The hub world works like a platformer game where you're not endlessly running, so this was just a quick tweak to make Chozu move on his own. And the actual mechanics were actually a lot easier than I was expecting. I just needed to make a way to end the game and teleport back when you reach the end.

So I made a few scenes like the game over and title screens so that this could feel more like a full game.

Once I had the core mechanics down, I started to create the sprite art for it. Luckily I already had some quick sketches of these characters drawn for Compass Nays, so I just had to clean up those sprites and that meant I was completing the art for that project and this one at the same time!

Once I created the main sprites, I decided to add some various mechanics for each of the characters to move differently in their levels. That included Grenna spinning, Ralphie standing in the way and slowing you down, and Scott shooting projectiles downwards.

Then I started to design each of the stages to be different so they weren't all just clones, and were their own designs. It was really fun to make each of these be unique to the characters and how they acted at this time in the story.

After that, I did some tweaks to make the game more enjoyable and easier to play. So I updated the retry button on the Game Over screen to send the player back to the beginning of the current stage rather than the hub map, so they could retry. I noticed this was needed when the last level ended up being a lot harder than the previous ones, so I didn't want the player to be frustrated from having to redo the conversation before.

And finally, I was able to get to a few of my wishlist ideas! I started by updating the kill object block to be actual lava, since it was previously just a red box. And then I added collectible salsa containers to help lead the player throughout the levels. I also added UI on the screen to tell the player how many salsa bottles they've collected.

Final Thoughts

So overall this was a fun mini-project and I learned a lot more about Unity in the process! There were a few wishlist items I didn't get to like adding more story, custom text boxes, more customized backgrounds, and a few more polish things like animations, but considering I made this in less than a month without a whole lot of prior Unity experience, I'd say I'm fairly happy with how it turned out!

This was also a fun break from the RPG Maker project I've been working on this year, and it felt good to finish a project (since that project is still years away from being close to finished). So this made me think about how I might want to take some breaks from my main project to still have that accomplishment of finishing things, to keep me motivated along the way. Obviously, the Global Game Jam is a huge boost for that, but also it helps to have other smaller projects throughout the year so I don't experience burnout.