Friday, September 30, 2022

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.

Friday, September 9, 2022

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!