CUPdate 20: Game Dev, Eventure Writing, and Drawing

This time I wasn't super focused and kind of worked on a variety of projects. I'm still trying to get back into creating more often. Work has been super hectic recently so I've mostly just had time to work on my own projects over the weekend and not so much on weekdays. I'm slowly trying to motivate myself to get back into it regardless, so that's why I've been kind of all over the place for this CUPdate.

I started out by working on the Link Point system in Compass Nays. This started because I wanted to add how many LPs each character got on the victory screen after a battle, which meant starting this massive mechanic. I was able to set up a ton of loops to actually make these 40+ playable characters fairly manageable. And I set up a system where even if I add up to 60 characters, I won't have to change anything internally, which is great, because this is a huge part of the gameplay system and I'm happy I got it all set up and working so I won't have to touch it unless I have to debug anything down the line.

Then I took a break from my game to get back into writing and working on The Nays. Last weekend my brother and I spent most of our time rewriting the Piko's Concert Eventure. We originally wrote it back in 2009 so it was pretty bad, honestly, since it was one of our first Eventures ever written. But I think we made some good improvements overall this time around! I've been working on figuring out some new ideas revolving around Kali in general, so I was able to sprinkle some of her first moments in there, to connect things better. We still have a few scenes left to rewrite, but we'll come back to it.

So after rewriting a lot of this Eventure, I drew a bunch of storyboards for it. I had already drawn 6 of these when I was brainstorming, but now I went through and drew the rest. It was fun to just be really rough with these and not worry about accuracy or being on model, just to get the first rough pass out on these. It helps me draw a lot more fluid drawings and get the emotions and composition down on the page.

And then also with another month complete, I finished my February digital sketchbook. I started to draw characters each day relating to what I drew the previous day to kind of make it feel like a continuous story. And then towards the end I had the idea to draw characters whose birthdays fall in February. I kinda like these ideas, so planning to carry some of them over into next month as well. I also got some splashes of color in there this time!

So overall I did some game design, some writing, and some drawing. And a little bit on all of my projects! I guess it helps to have projects I can bounce between depending on what I'm more motivated and in the mood for working on.

I'm thinking about getting back into reading Eventures more so I can get all of those proofread and fully into the new Google Docs format. Maybe I'll even be able to draw some storyboards or write some more through this too. Right now I'm still kinda figuring out if I want to focus on something specific, but it's been kinda working by switching between what I'm most in the mood for. This way I'm making progress on a bunch of different projects relating to The Nays, like I wanted to do for this year anyways.