CUPdates 2: Nays 2084 Preview & Nay Recruiters Game

For this week's CUPdate, I've been working on three projects, so I'm gonna show some of the progress I've made so far on each. A lot was admittedly writing, so if there's not a lot to see, that's why!

*Note: Some of the links in this post are private Google Drive links and only in there for my presentation, you won't have access to these files. I've provided some screenshots to show what's included in these links to give you an idea though!

Nays 2084

I started on this animation back in 2017, but hadn't worked on it since 2019. Well, a few weeks ago I got inspired to start working on it again since it had been a while. At this point, I've spent over 40 hours working on this project, and I still have a lot more to do.

Here's the animatic that I posted 2 years ago, just with the rough storyboards and layouts:

The idea for this is that I wanted to make a trailer for a bunch of events that take place in the year 2084 in The Nays (which is the current year for the most recent parts I'm writing). At this point, about half of this video has already happened, but there are still some moments that I haven't written yet.

This was inspired by my brother's Nays 2008 animation that was made over 10 years ago at this point, but that was always one of my favorite animations that he created.

So I ended up creating a lot of the more finished drawings when I was making the Truth of Yaguzi Eventure, but I didn't do a lot of the animating. Recently I finally composited together a lot of animations that I had drawn and started to realize I was getting closer to finishing this than I had originally thought.

My plan is to finish this animation by the end of this year (maybe by fall if I'm lucky), so I'm hoping that'll happen!

Here's where I'm at in terms of progress so far:

Nay Recruiters Game

Another on-going project that I've been working more on is the Nay Recruiters RPG Maker game. It was originally an MV project that I started back in 2019, but I updated it to an MZ project and have mostly been working on the battle system, GUI, and overall concept plans for how the game works. 

Well, recently, I decided to start working on the sequence of events and overall story. My plan is to make the story basically an abridged, shortened, retelling of my huge The Nays story. In this version, I'm planning to focus on some of the main characters and a lot of the characters that come later will be side optional characters, where their stories will be optional quests that aren't required for the main plot. I really wanna focus the story in more for this game, and it could be a chance to explore rewriting the story without affecting the Eventure structures too much, and it'll be a kind of fresh start. I've narrowed down the opening scene to 3 different ideas, but still trying to figure out which of those to go with.

Then I also started working on style inspiration boards, mainly for the text boxes, and then a bit for character/background art. I'm still kinda all over the place and not quite sure what I wanna do, but the art won't actually be coming for awhile since I need to finish the story and programming main parts first, so that's okay. I might do some style tests in the near future though to try and at least explore some of my options.

The Nays

It's been awhile since I wrote anything for the main storyline of The Nays (since December actually, so I haven't since last year!). Well, last weekend my brother and I wrote the Garlint Eventure, which has been planned for awhile, but never actually written. I also drew some storyboards for the Hot Ice City Eventure that was written a few months back, and turned it into a Google Doc.

Here are the storyboards:

And as a bonus, I also discovered Hero Forge this week (thanks to my friend Anna!) and I decided to make The 6 Main Nays on there:

Creative Updates Project

My friends and I are starting a new project where we're planning to meet bi-weekly, or close to that frequency, to talk about whatever projects we're currently working on. This way, we can receive feedback from each other, or just generally talk about art and creative things to help motivate ourselves to work on our own personal projects. We're not sure what we're calling it yet, but we might be just sticking with our old project title of the Improvement Movement, which is still a working title! I'm going to refer to it as the Creative Updates Project here on my blog until I come up with something better though. Edit: We ended up going with that title, with the acronym of CUP, and have been referring to it as CUPdates.

I decided personally that I'd like to get back into blog posting, and so I want to make bi-weekly blog posts that go over what I'd like to present at our meetings. This will be a better way for me to collect my thoughts and have more meaningful conversations during these meet-ups. For this first one, I'm going to talk a bit about the various projects I've been working on over the past month or so.

Recently I've been dedicating Sundays to project workdays, and it's been a wide variety of whatever I feel like working on. I just finished up my #SurpriseOCDrawing project where I would sketch a character designed by someone I know and then post it and tag them. This was a fun little project I did to brighten peoples' days, because I know I get super excited whenever someone draws one of my characters. I wanted to spread that love and positivity around to artists that inspire me.

Other than that project, I've actually been doing a lot of video editing recently. It started when I watched some YouTube videos about sketchbook tours and general art advice, so I sat down one day and went through every sketchbook I had, and recorded videos of myself talking about them. I recorded at least 20 of these, but so far have edited and uploaded 5 of them. I'm planning to finish the rest someday, but it's been a fun on-going video project that motivates me to practice working in Premiere more (which I did end up doing with our 24-Hour Animation too! You can read more about that project in my previous blog post).

Here's the playlist where you can see the sketchbook tour videos that I've made so far, and one of the most recent videos here:

After drawing other people's characters and looking at their social media sites, I made a carrd page that links to all of my social media pages and can kind of act as a landing page for myself. It also inspired me to finally try out Art Station, since a few of them had accounts on there. I'm using that site as a place to showcase bigger projects and just highlight some of my best art, so it can show as more of a portfolio site.

From making my Art Station account, I also decided to create some videos to showcase my Global Game Jam projects, because I wanted to make a page for each of those. And I realized that sometimes people don't have time to play through my games, or get stuck, so I wanted a way for people to be able to see those whole games without playing them themselves, if they preferred not to. So I've been uploading those videos to my YouTube channel in this playlist. Here's one of them:

And through all of this, it's been making me reconsider my YouTube channel, in general. I never really used it very much before, but I've been working on a YouTube class for work, and it kind of inspired me to play around with playlists and how content is displayed on my channel. So I've been reworking that overall presentation a bit as well.

But going forward, I'm hoping to get back into drawing or working on games some more, like I originally planned for this year. It's been a while since I drew my own characters, so I am looking forward to getting back into that soon!

Exit 84: CCAD's 24-Hour Animation Contest

In March, I participated in the CCAD 24-Hour Animation contest, alongside 3 of my other alumni friends, Jinny Hinkle, Hillary Hastings, and Laura Mansfield. This year they let alumni participate, so we were excited to have the opportunity to participate, since it had been something CCAD started doing after we graduated.

Before I take you through the process behind our short film, I'll post the extended version (with additional credits and a custom title screen) that we created here:

Now I'm going to go over our process. The kickoff video in Discord started at 6:30 PM on Friday March 19th where we got the prompt, which was this video. And from there, we all hopped into a Discord voice chat where we brainstormed ideas. Our first idea was about someone watching movies on their TV in their living room while all of their food came to life. But then we came up with the idea where there's this afterlife that looks like a drive-in theater, where whichever food you eat, it makes you remember a different memory.

Once we had that idea, we started to draw concepts of the main character. Hillary drew our storyboard thumbnails and I timed them out into an animatic. Then Jinny started to create the color scripts while Laura drew more character concepts.

Here's how our storyboards, color scripts, and final animation compare:

We finished our edit of the color scripts into an animatic about 6 hours in, so we were ready to start animating and working on backgrounds! We figured out some final looks and color tests, so I made these color tests based on Jinny's color scripts:

Hillary and Laura went to bed at some point while Jinny continued to work on backgrounds and I worked on the sound design for our film. I made a shot list in Google Sheets for us to keep track of the progress of each of our shots.

In the morning around 7-9 AM, Hillary and Laura came back online to help out with backgrounds, while Jinny finished up the character rig that she created in Photoshop. From there, all of us animated various scenes and basically just kept revising as we went.

Around noon, we finished all of the animations and I put together a final edit while everyone went to grab some lunch. We wrote notes and make some final edits to adjust some of the timing and make final changes. Around 3 PM, we finished entirely and exported the final video and watched it a few times together as a group. And by 4 PM, I submitted the final short film for judging. Jinny and I ordered Noodles & Company, then passed out immediately after.

Here's an image I put together of our OCs before we worked on the project:

So overall, we had a lot of fun and were really happy with how it came out! For me, this felt more intense than Global Game Jams because animating is a lot of work, and also we had a lot less time to work with. But I would do it again! We all felt super motivated to work on our own projects after this, so it was a huge booster for us.

I also learned a lot while working on this. I hadn't done a lot of sound design edits on projects before, so to spend hours focusing on that, I had a lot of fun. And overall this was probably the largest Premiere file I'd ever created, with tons of sequences nested inside of each other. My main job on the project was editing, since we were constantly updating the film and needed me to do that almost full-time. I did get to draw some concepts and animate a scene though, which was fun!

And then afterwards, we put together a documentary where we talk about our process and the whole event!

So anyway, thanks for reading this post and watching our short film!

Check out Jinny's blog post here!