2022 Recap

It's the end of 2022 so it's time for my yearly blog post! This was a very special year. The Nays is officially 20 years old! It was made back in 2002 when my brother and I played with action figures to create the story.

This year I had a lot of ups and downs, but I'll go into those aspects more throughout this post. I'll be going over a lot about projects I've done, but also getting into a little about my health and work since those were big factors in what happened this year and have really affected my personal projects.

To start, here's my 2022 art summary:

I started the year by converting all of our Eventures into Google Docs! This made it much easier for me to proofread and make small edits, and even rewrite some parts straight in Google Docs. Along with this, I read a lot of Eventures this year. Sometimes I was inspired enough to even draw storyboards for them as well. I made a lot of progress on reading through and updating Eventures so they could connect better and just be improved overall. I didn't read through every Eventure, but I did read through the first 105 and made a lot of edits in there. I also wrote/rewrote 14 Eventures, which is the 3rd most productive year in writing since I started tracking in 2008. I only wrote 1.5 Eventures last year, so that's a huge improvement.

Because I was reading more Eventures, that also inspired me to sketch more Eventure moments. One of the goals I had was to draw daily, and while I didn't actually end up doing that entirely, I did sketch a lot more often and ended up sketching a lot of Eventure moments of the ones I was currently reading at the time. I made monthly digital sketchbook posts for every month besides December, and those were a lot of fun. I'd love to continue that into the new year. It really helped me sketch more casually and was less stressful because there was no pressure to post every day, mostly just post once a month. Sometimes it was hard to keep up with, especially in the fall and winter when things are generally busier for me, but I kept up with it regularly towards the start.

Something else that kept me inspired this year was the monthly "Nay Days". These were days that my brother and I voice chatted to usually work on something relating to The Nays. A lot of the time it ended up being more of a casual voice chat, but we did end up writing a few Eventures together through those! So definitely more collaboration happened than the previous year, which was really fun. I'll go into this deeper in the next post, but we're planning to do this more often next year as well.

In addition to writing more Eventures, we also ended up doing some fun Nay Events. We mostly revisited the "Return to Mr Marcus World" event and made up some fun new challenges. It was our first time doing it virtually, but it worked out really well.

This year also ended up being a big year for game development. Not so much in the way I was originally expecting though. At the beginning of the year, my brother and I worked on our Global Game Jam project together. This year we made a game that was really fun to work on and had fairly different gameplay than what we usually make. The game's called Prisoners of Time Fabric and it's a survival game with new mechanics that we hadn't made before. It's probably one of my favorite games that we've made, and we actually were so motivated that we ended up working on it a few weeks later again to fix some areas up and polish it, which we hadn't done in the past before!

In addition to the usual GGJ project, I also made a game from start to finish on my own in one month. It was a game that's a spinoff of The Nays, called Spirits of Combination Village. This is a visual novel/puzzle game about Pamchan's cousin and I made it for the Indie Game Making Contest. I didn't win or anything, but it was a fun challenge to make a game and I got a lot of positive feedback on it, which was cool. It was my first time fully integrating the Inky plugin to write a lot of dialogue outside of RPG Maker too, and that was a great success.

One of my resolutions was to make a lot of progress on Compass Nays, which I didn't actually really do. I worked on it for a few weeks, but I didn't get far. I made some progress on the battle system, parallax maps, and arrays for social links though; I was inspired after my GGJ project to work on this. The reason I didn't make much progress is probably due to the full game that I made in addition, so I think that fulfilled my game design goal instead.

One of my other goals was to talk more about The Nays, so I ended up working on a vlog project called "Nay A Week" where I talked about The Nays for about a minute in each recording and went into detail about some of the projects I was doing. This wasn't actually every week, but I did at least half of the weeks! I haven't compiled these videos together yet, but that'll be coming soon and I'll probably put it together this week.

Building off of that, I presented my most recently created Eventure Twine to my friends during the CUPdate and talked through each drawing to describe the story to them, and it was received better than I was expecting! It was an unexpected way for me to talk about The Nays more, and I really enjoyed it.

And to continue along with my goal of making more Eventure Twines, I created the next Eventure in the series: the Cimc Eventure. This one was shorter so it was more manageable to complete. I even started on the storyboards for the Stinky Girl Eventure as well so I can have a head start on the next one!

I ended up doing a few sound recordings relating to The Nays as well. There was even a brief while where I was recording sound files and soundproofing part of my apartment so I could make some Eventure trailers and recordings.

So overall looking back on it all, I did a lot of work on The Nays to really prepare it for Eventure Twines to come, which is really a big project in itself. It may not be a lot to show because a lot is writing, but I did make a lot of progress and feel better about it all now that I've laid it all out.

Now that I've talked about all of the projects I worked on, I'm going to get into some of the challenges that happened this year, why I've been kind of down, and what's been preventing me from doing as many creative projects.

It all started at the end of January. I started to have some health problems which I thought was just going to be a mild case of sciatica, but it turned out to be spinal arthritis, so it's been very difficult to do much of anything without being in a lot of pain.

I did physical therapy for my condition for a little over 2 months and didn't see much progress, so I've been hopping between doctors and specialists to try and figure out if there's anything that can be done. It's been pretty exhausting, to be honest.

And that's not even all of the health issues I've had this year! In June I had appendicitis so had to get surgery for that and wasn't really able to do much on my own for the next few weeks during recovery. I'm honestly impressed with myself that I decided to make a full game the following month of all of this happening actually.

I also had a scare in October where I tested positive for COVID while on a trip, but I never had any symptoms and had recently gotten the vaccine, so it may have been a false alarm, but was still fairly stressful, to say the least.

In addition to these health issues, I also accepted a management position around that time of it all starting in February, so it was adding a lot more stress to my life. After a long struggle and figuring out it really wasn't a good fit for me, I finally got the approval from my managers to step out of that position and back into one that fits better with my overall career goals. So I'm excited to pick that senior position back up when I return from the winter break.

Through all of this, it wasn't all stressful though. I learned a lot about Discord bots and made an advanced thread-tracking bot with one of my coworkers. I also wrote one of my favorite courses at the start of this year! It was a LARP course that uses RPG Maker, so honestly a lot of fun. And recently I've also been working on more JavaScript and even learning GDevelop.

Looking back at the year, I don't think it's much of a surprise that I wasn't able to accomplish quite as much as I had originally planned, taking all of the health issues and other things into consideration. I was really tired and in pain for a lot of this year, which made it very difficult to focus on projects. I'm hoping next year will get better, but just in case, I don't think I'm going to be as ambitious with my resolutions.

I've noticed over the past couple of years that my productivity has been a bit reversed from what it used to be. I'm now more productive the first half of the year, then once August hits, I slow down and take a few months to recharge. Part of it may be because November and December are when I travel a lot now, so it's harder to work on personal projects. It's weird, but something I should get used to and work with! I still did Inktober, but it was definitely a struggle this year and I'll have to see if I can continue to keep up with it if this is how my track record has been.

So now for the big question. How did I do on my New Years Resolutions?

• Draw Every Day: For the first few months, I did actually draw every day. Once my health issues started to spiral downward in June, I stopped being as consistent, but I did still post a digital sketchbook page every month besides December.
• Compass Nays: I didn't finish the prologue. This one should probably be put on hold. I DID finish a full game called Spirits of Combination Village though, so I'd say that can count in its place!
• Eventure Twine: I finished at least 1 Eventure Twine. I also started on a second one and got a headstart on a lot of storyboards for various Eventures that I read or rewrote. I also organized all of them into Google Docs and read through a lot/did a lot of proofreading, so I made really good progress on this.
• Monthly Nay Days: I set these up with my brother and we met pretty much every month for the most part! They were really helpful and we're going to try and do more.
• Talk more about The Nays: I created the Nay A Week vlog! I also talked more about what happens in the actual Eventures in my CUPdate presentations in December.

So I did pretty good! As for my non-art goals to keep up with, I ended up keeping up with my social life which was good. Building off of talking about The Nays more, I also tried out an app where I took a photo a day and that was a fun way to document my life without needing to really do much effort. 

I tried to do VR exercise more, but that, unfortunately, didn't last long until I had health issues that prevented me from doing it. I did end up doing more exercises for my condition instead though with physical therapy three times a week. And now I've been doing at least 4 different exercises at least 2 times a day.

As for my video game backlog... I did play a few, but not many. There were just so many games that came out this year that I was so busy playing new ones and never got caught up on old ones! Next year is gonna be busy with new games too, so we'll see if I get to catch up on any in the backlog.

So this year, as I said, had a lot of ups and downs. I was hoping it'd be all great because it's the 20-year anniversary of The Nays, but that's okay. I did actually get a lot done on The Nays, so I'm happy about that! I know this was a long post but I really wanted to talk about everything that happened and the reasoning behind it all.

Next time I'll talk about my plans for next year, so stay tuned!

CUPdate 36: Cimc Eventure Twine

Just like last year, this CUPdate technically happened a couple of weeks ago, but because it was relating to Christmas presents, I wasn't able to post this publically until now!

I finished the second Eventure Twine in The Nays! This one's called the Cimc Eventure.

Read the story here!

During the last two CUPdates, I presented the storyboards in their current state and told the basic story to my friends. It was a lot of fun to present the story that way and I ended up having a lot of fun going into details about it without even needing to open the script itself.

In addition to the Eventure itself, I also made a website to hold all of the Eventures here. This is going to be the landing page for each Eventure and the main way to navigate between them. I made pages for both The Gek Eventure and the Cimc Eventure so far.

I also made an Eventure recap trailer for The Gek Eventure so that a reader could watch that to remember what happened in the previous Eventure without having to re-read the whole thing.

And similar to the above, I also created a "Characters" image to show which characters were in the previous Eventure to also help keep track of who everyone is.

I'm still working out the details of the Eventure pages, but I think all of the information that's needed is in there now. So I'm going to continue to update these pages and add more of them as I finish the Twine stories.

This Eventure was a bit shorter, so I was also able to get some progress on a later Eventure Twine, the Stinky Girl Eventure. That one is still in the rough stages and not at all ready to post, but it may be coming sooner than the end of next year because I've made some starting progress on it!

I'll have some yearly updates coming up next, so stay tuned!

CUPdate 35: Timer Eventure & p5 Side Project

November's been busy! I ended up being busy in my social life more this month and a lot of video games came out, so I drew a little less often than I would've liked, but I made up for it on a few days by drawing more.

I started out by creating a JavaScript project in p5. This was going to be a short little project for fun that ended up taking a few full days of development to make. Basically it grabs a CSV from one of my massive Google Sheets that lists every character I have and it imports that data into the p5 project. And depending on what the date is, it shows all of the characters whose birthdays it is currently! This is a fun project that will help give me daily prompts of who to draw (and if I haven't drawn them, encourage me to!). Sometimes I want to just have a random character prompt to draw, so I figured this would be perfect to help with that. Right now the picture reference isn't working, but I at least have the basic info about them that'll be good to see for each day.

My brother and I finally wrote the first half of the Timer Eventure! This is one of the biggest turning points in the story and it's been one that I've wanted to do for awhile. We finally got started on it, which was good. Hopefully we'll get to finish writing it before the next time.

And then November ended, so I finished my digital sketchbook for November. I was reading a lot of Eventures this month so I did some quick sketches of some Eventure moments. Also we rewrote a lot of the Timer Eventure, so I did some concepts during some of the intermissions. And then November 3rd 2022 is Rocko's actual birth date, so he was officially born this month!

So while there's not a ton in this post, I did actually get a lot of secret projects done that I can't show yet. Next month I'll be able to talk about some of these projects publicly though, so until then!

CUPdate 34: October Recap

For this CUPdate I didn't have a lot to show. I've mostly been busy with life things and then rewarding myself with time to play video games. So I only have a few things.

I started out by finishing up Inktober! It was a lot harder this year than it's been any other year, and that's due to just everything that's been going on this year. But I'm at least glad that I pushed through and finished it though. Now I'm looking forward to a break from daily posting. I haven't had a chance to scan them all, but you can find all of my daily posts on Tumblr here.

Most of my art throughout October was sketchbook drawings due to Inktober. I did manage to do a few digital sketches, but not as many as usual for my digital sketchbook. But I did theme a lot of these ones for the month!

I've also been proofreading Eventures when I am at my computer and working on personal projects. While doing this, I sometimes update dialogue to improve it and make sure it's connected to previous Eventures. So while doing this, I got to the Glitch Vessels Eventure. I remembered an old drawing I did of one of these scenes in 2010. So I decided to do a quick sketch to redraw that scene with updated character designs and art for fun. This is when Grenna is temporarily sent to another timeline and Elftair is fed up with how the replacement Grenna is acting. So here's the comparison from the 2010 version to 2022:

Other than that, I didn't do a whole lot. Hopefully I'll have more next time, but also one of those weeks is Thanksgiving week so not a lot will happen during that time. It's also getting to Christmas time where I'll be more busy, so there might not be a ton until New Year's, but we'll see!

CUPdate 33: Gift, Inktober, Projects, and Eventure Writing

October is always a pretty productive time for me, mainly because Inktober gets me back into daily drawing and project creation. So I've been doing a lot of drawing but also getting into a lot of writing! Because I'm drawing more, I'm also more inspired to work on projects even on weekday nights and I've had a lot more time on weekends to work on projects too because I've been socializing a little less this month (other than the week that I was out of town).

So this was something I actually did for the last CUPdate but now that it's publicly out there, I can talk about it here! I made a drawstring bag design for my brother's birthday gift this year. You can find the design here on RedBubble.

And then I've been keeping up on doing Inktober every day! I'll post all of them next time, but for now, here are a few for now:

I decided it would be fun to make mini Notion project pages for all of the projects I've ever worked on! That'll be a big project to go back and document everything, but I figured this could be a fun way to look back on projects I've done and document all of the aspects of each project. I want to even include very small test projects in there so I can remember everything I've done. I started with a few projects.

I've also been doing a bunch of Eventure rewrites while I'm reading through them. I rewrote the Rovi Eventure first to make some of the parts more impactful and overall remove some of the generic parts that I wrote over 10 years ago in there.

Then I updated some of the Neo Obelisque Delivery Eventure, mostly doing a copy edit pass to update some things. But I also removed one part that was pretty unnecessary and replaced it with a shorter scene that connected better to the end of the Rovi Eventure.

And then I rewrote the Welcome "Home" Party Eventure, which I revamped entirely. It's now called the Tag World Ceremony Eventure and fits a lot better into the story. The previous iteration was basically a filler, so now it feels a lot more integrated and leads up to the next Eventure (which we still haven't written or fully thought of ideas for).

And then I decided to make up a new Eventure and do a little bit of re-ordering. The War on Tag World is now just going to be combined with the You-Know-Who's Reign Eventure, so instead of just pushing every Eventure number up, I decided to add a new Eventure to fill a gap after the Return to Sir Dude World Eventure. It's called Kali's Motives and goes into more depth about Kali's past.

So that's about 60 pages worth of new Eventures I've written! So this time was pretty productive, even though one of those weeks I wasn't working on any projects, and I did have some health-related issues in the middle of that. But I got a lot of writing done and have been keeping up with Inktober for the most part.

CUPdate 32: Sculpting, Animation, and Music

So this time around I decided to do a variety of creative projects. These were mostly on Sundays, which is the day I like to dedicate to personal project creation.

I started out by trying out 3D sculpting in Blender. I haven't done character sculpting in years so this was just a quick test to re-learn how it all works, but I'd say it's pretty close to having functionality that ZBrush has and a really good free alternative that I can use now that I don't have access to ZBrush anymore. This was just a fun little Sunday project to test and see what I could do with it, and I learned some new things! This is my character Kali.

Then I decided to check out what the 2D animation was like in Blender. It still is a bit different from what I'm used to with Adobe Animate, but I was able to make a short animation in it. Just a quick transformation animation of Zandra for fun!

And for fun I decided to play around with BeepBox. I saw a video where someone recommended this site for making game music and I remembered trying it out once before. So I was playing around and made this short little loop. I also forgot I had a SoundCloud so I decided to make it be my first post on there.

I also made a quick loop in Bosca Ceoil. I was mostly just trying out some software and then found some old ones that I made and uploaded those as well.

I continued the Return to Mr Marcus World Nay Event where I did draw-overs of some game screenshots, so that was fun! The first one is Mikey and Gojo in How to Say Goodbye, and the second one is Arianna in Melatonin. I just drew the characters/drew over existing characters and added text, I didn't draw the other background and official character elements.

And then today ends September, so I finished my digital sketchbook page. I mostly just ended up drawing these on Sundays throughout the month, since I haven't had as much time dedicated to working on projects at my computer. But I managed to sketch a few more this week.

I also finished rewriting the SN World Festival Eventure that I started over a month ago. There wasn't even that much left, so I could've done it sooner. But I'm glad I finished that up!

So overall not a ton for this post, it was kind of just a variety of different small projects. But that's mainly because a lot has been going on in my life. Some health-related things, some traveling, and just overall a lot of things contributing to me being more tired, which leaves me with less energy to actually dedicate to bigger projects more consistently.

Hopefully I can be back to normal sometime in the near future. But the next CUPdate isn't for about a month, so we'll see what happens between now and then.

CUPdate 31: Quick Update

Although it's been awhile since the last CUPdate, I was out of town for most of that time, so I didn't get a lot done.

I started out by reading some Eventures and then I finished up my digital sketchbook page for the month. Because I was mostly just working on my game in July, I decided to combine it with August since there was only one drawing for that one anyways.

Then I pulled an all-nighter the night before my trip because I had a 6am flight. So in that time, I started rewriting the SN World Festival Eventure. I got about half of it done, so hopefully I'll come back to it soon.

While I was on the trip, I managed to do a few pages of gesture drawings. It's been awhile, but it was good to get back to it. It makes me want to do this more often again.

As a side track, the IGMC results came in for the People's Choice award. My game got 26th place out of 147 entries, so not bad! Thanks to everyone who voted for my game! I'm still eagerly awaiting the final results, but I do know that I at least made it to the third round, which is cool. Drifty gave me some really good feedback and areas I'll be sure to look out for in my next games. It's so interesting to see how differently people play my game, and it's just really cool to see honestly. It really gets me thinking about games and how important it is to focus on the main story where everyone will see regardless of which choices they make throughout. This was my first time actually finishing a game with this many branches paths, and I'm learning a lot (especially because it's one of my favorite game types to play and create).

And then other than that, I did some non-CUPdate related things. This includes a Notion database where I organize all of the trip photos that we take on vacations and writing mini-journal entries for each of them. It's a fun way to keep a log of our trips.

So next time I'll have more time to get back into projects again. During this CUPdate, I was mostly away from my computer and dealing with some rough stuff at work, but now I'm hopefully rested and can try to get back to things!

CUPdate 30: Combination Village Videos & Back to The Nays

I have been giving myself a break since the last CUPdate since I worked so hard to finish my game leading up to that one.

I started out by wrapping up a few things on my Spirits of Combination Village game. While the game itself was finished before the deadline, there were a few marketing/sharing things that I wanted to focus on since I usually don't spend a lot of time on that after a game is done. I started by making a video playthrough of the game.

I've also been seeing a few people streaming the games submitted to IGMC and I've loved seeing people's reactions to my game! It's been so much fun and very inspiring to see people enjoying a game I worked so hard to make. Then I started posting it on more sites include RPGmaker.net, the RPG Maker Web forums, and GameJolt. With that, I decided to make a trailer so I could better showcase what the game further than just screenshots.

Then I decided to transition back into working on The Nays, since it's been awhile! I started by just reading some Eventures from where I left off a couple of months ago to get back into it. And then I did a few sketches of them to get back into drawing more too.

Then I remembered my project that I abandoned last month for my game: my daily digital sketchbook! I won't be able to keep up with it for all of August since I'll be traveling a bit, but I did want to get back into that again a little bit. So I did some sketches for two days so far and had a lot of fun! I listened to Live A Live music both nights and honestly just let myself be really loose and sketchy. Lately I realize my drawings have been really stiff, so honestly taking a one month break from much drawing (other than game assets) really helped. Now I've come back fresh and I'm not afraid to make mistakes and have been able to really just be sketchy and feel things out. This made me really excited to get back into drawing and I actually had a lot of fun, which I've been noticing hasn't been happening with drawing lately, so I'm thrilled that the passion is finally back because I've really missed it.

So while this started as a sketch, I ended up getting carried away and turning it into a full illustration because I was having so much fun with it. I'm actually drawing posed characters from my imagination and not hating how it's coming out, which is a first!

I turned this drawing into the scene when Akuma faces off against Yuka and Mabui in the Death's Finale Eventure. I was listening to Gigalovania from Live A Live while drawing this too.

Recently I had a pretty bad downward spiral with a lot of doubts about myself and creating personal projects, but after making a game in a month and seeing the massive positive reaction I've gotten on it, even from people who I don't know, that really helped bring me back and feel so much better. It was a really nice confidence booster for someone like me who honestly has a lot of trouble with that.

I haven't been this excited to create art in a very long time, so like I said, I'm very happy to be back. I know I didn't have a lot to show this time around, but I am very happy with how I'm feeling overall. This year has been really rough due to just things going on in my life, so the fact that I'm finally letting myself enjoy my personal projects again and be happy making art is huge.

I'm not expecting next post to really have much either, but I will pick projects up again in September. I'm going on a trip in a couple of weeks so the next CUPdate won't be for awhile, but I'm not planning to get much done on my projects during that time.

CUPdate 29: Spirits of Combination Village [Playable Game]

So for this CUPdate I get to present my final submission for the Indie Game Making Contest: Rebirth! A lot has gone into this since the last CUPdate and I haven't really documented it along the way, so my plan now is to go over my process using final screenshots instead.

You can play the final version of the game below:

I started out by working on the puzzles in the second stage of the game. I spent a lot of time making those functional and some of them were more complicated than others. I drew all of the character sprites and backgrounds to go with them as well.

Then I finalized all of the UI elements for all parts of the game. I even made some custom menus depending on which part of the game you're in.

And then I finally finished writing all of the other parts of the story, including Pamchan's route and the ending of the game.

And over the weekend I really worked on a lot of various things. I finally came up with a title for the game and made the title screen and credits.

Then I did a lot of bug testing. And I think I underestimated how long that would take. My brother played through it once, then Jinny played through it multiple times. They both gave me some good feedback to implement, and I kept finding little things that would be stopping points. I think I got most of them, but it was a stressful rush to the finish line Thursday night. I usually upload a web version of my games so it can have a larger audience, but this time around, it really wasn't working out. I had to remove a bunch of files to get the web version to even upload to itch.io without an error, and when I finally did, it had an error with the ink script almost immediately when starting the game. So I decided this one will be download-only!

So overall this was a really big experience. I had a lot of fun along the way but also I definitely wish I would've done things differently. For example, the first couple of weeks I didn't really work on my project, which left me with rushing a lot towards the end. I wish I would've had the extra week to properly bug test and make sure it was all uploaded at least a day before it was due. But I hopefully have learned from this and will try to improve that for next time!