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!