CUPdate 16: First CUPdate of 2022

It's been awhile since our last CUPdate because we took a break for the holidays, but I'm dedicating this post mostly to combining my last two posts and also talking about what else I've been up to!

I'd recommend checking out my previous two posts to learn more about how 2021 went and what my plans are for 2022, but generally, here's what's planned for 2022:

• Draw every day (even if it's a 10-second sketchbook doodle). This is so that I can get back into the habit of drawing more (not posting).
• Finish at least the prologue of Compass Nays. This doesn't mean art and final mechanics, but it should at least be playable with the basic game design, story, and sequence of events from start to finish.
• Finish at least 1 more Eventure Twine of The Nays. It's the 20-year anniversary of The Nays, so I want to get into the habit of finishing at least one Eventure Twine a year. Hopefully more though so it doesn't take over 100 years to complete!
• Meet with my brother once a month to create content about The Nays.
• Talk more about The Nays/get more comfortable sharing my ideas with people (right now it'll be in the form of quick videos that I might compile together some day, but definitely this one's a personal one that I won't really be updating online about).

And then there will be various other projects that may come up and inspire me.

After my last CUPdate, I finished up the very first Eventure, The Gek Eventure, in the form of a Twine to celebrate the 20-year anniversary of The Nays. It's now public for everyone to see, and was a Christmas present to my brother. You can read the story here! When I presented last time, I was in the process of wrapping it up, but now it's officially finished and up!

Over Christmas break, my brother and I finally finished writing the Garlint Eventure that we started back in April. And then after that we finished all of the together parts of the Hide & Seek Eventure (though there's still a part for him to write on his own). We only ended up writing 1-2 Eventures last year, but at least this inspired me to keep working on this project and to dive back in!

I also went in and started to convert a lot of our Eventures into Google Docs. Patchou Log Viewer has been acting up a bit on Windows 10 for me, so I want to make sure those logs are in an updated format that's easier for me to read in case anything ever happens. And then I also just really like importing the images that go with those parts in the story, so I can see which scenes I want to still draw or which ones I plan to finish out of the rough storyboards. Overall I think Google Docs is the best format for an internal final version, especially since it's the last step before importing into the final presentable Twine versions. My plan is to try and convert all of the Eventures we've written so far into Google Docs over the next few months to start to organize everything. I already imported rough versions of the first half, so finalizing those documents over the next few months should be pretty reasonable.

And then after organizing a lot of Eventures, I was also reading a lot of them. So I decided to improve some parts of the Searching for Home Eventure and rewrote parts of it. It was my first time rewriting an Eventure like this where some minor edits were in Google Docs and then longer scenes were the usual mIRC logs, and I could just combine them all in Google Docs in the end. It worked out really well and went faster than rewrites usually go!

When I got back from vacation and back to work this week, I had less time to dedicate to this, but I am averaging to at least read through 1 Eventure a night and finalizing the Google Doc for it. I've even been able to fit in a few storyboards for them. 

I'm realizing that I really enjoy doing very quick layouts as my first pass for storyboards so they're very rough and just get the overall feel of the scene. After that, I can go in and fix up proportions, get characters on model, and clean up the drawings. But by starting with this extremely rough pass, I don't have to worry about pausing so many times to look up references of poses or characters, and I can kinda just get the scene out of my head onto the canvas. I'm trying really hard to be as loose as possible, because I really feel like those are when my best compositions happen.

And then other than storyboards, on days when I'm tired and I feel like I can't do a ton of drawings, I'm planning to do one quicker drawing that I focus on. The other day I did some Music Mania sketches where I listened to music and did mindless drawings, and from that, I was able to brainstorm some story moments and do this little sketch of Mar that you see below. I'm hoping I can keep my drawings meaningful and related to the story, even on days when I do wanna relax and just make something quick.

Also for the new year, I organized my Notion page a bit. I decided to make a new database for my daily tasks (inspired by Hillary's!) to keep track of the generic things I do daily in my schedule like work, drawing, exercising, etc. That way I can gauge how well I'm doing with some of those daily resolutions. Right now I have filters to sort them by CUPdate so I can show those too.

So overall I got a lot done for this CUPdate! A lot of that was because I did have two weeks of vacation to focus on some of my own projects, but I am hopeful that I'll be able to try and stay productive while not entirely overworking myself.

I just really love January overall because it's always a time for me to think about my goals and figure out what I want to focus on. Lately I haven't been making huge goals so I can actually accomplish the smaller things, but overall I'm still feeling much better than I did in the fall, in terms of personal projects at least.