CUPdate 38: Nay Event, Colors Live, and Storyboards

For this CUPdate, I've mostly been getting back into things. This is going to be one of my more productive CUPdates for awhile though.

I started off by continuing the Nay Event, Return to Mr Marcus World. My brother and I are meeting more frequently to do voice chats where we can work on projects together or just do fun activities. For this one, we tried a new event which was a lot of fun! One of us sketched a character digitally, then we sent that drawing over to the other person. They then had to hold a paper up to the screen and trace it. Then we used traditional mediums to color the other person's drawing. This was a really fun collab!

These are the ones I started with the sketch and then he colored:

And these are the ones that he did the sketch for and I colored:

And then another activity that's continued from previous ones is that we'll search for our character's name on Google images and then the first image of a person that comes up, we Photoshop it and turn it into an image of them. These are a little weirder, but here are the two I edited this time:

I've also been continuing to do pretty much daily sketches on Colors Live. The Colors Quest mode with prompts and challenges has been really fun. I see that I only have about a month's worth of them left maybe though, so I'm going to have to come up with my own prompts once I do all of those. It's been a fun way to learn the software though.

And then I've also been making progress on storyboards for the Stinky Girl Eventure whenever I'm at my computer. I finished all of the lineart for all of it, so I'm hoping to have all of the art colored and finished sometime in the first few months of this year.

For next time I'm going to try and do the Global Game Jam. We'll see how that goes! I'm getting surgery in a week and will be recovering in weeks to come, but the plan is to take it easy and do a more chill game this time. After that, depending on how recovery goes, I'm also not expecting much from myself for the next month or so at least, so these may be fairly small posts going forward other than the next one potentially. I'm hoping after this that I'll be feeling better and able to work on art more again though, if everything goes well!

CUPdate 37: Recap and Plans for the Year

I've been making a lot of blog posts recently, so I wanted this to be a shorter post to summarize those posts for my CUPdate presentation. I'm also going to talk about the projects and everything I've been working on since the last CUPdate!

To start off, here's the summary of my project-based goals for 2022 and how those went:

• 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.

And then here are my goals for 2023:

• Draw daily, or as often as possible, and post those digital sketchbook pages online once a month.
• Meet with my brother bi-weekly for Nay Days.
• Create 2 Eventure Twines for The Nays. Also continue to focus on The Nays with proofreading, storyboards, and rewrites.
• Record a new vlog series called Eventure A Week. Talk about each Eventure in less than 30 seconds each, spoiler-free.

Since the last CUPdate, I finished the Cimc Eventure Twine! Check out the post here to learn more about that and read through the Eventure. I made a landing page website here and posted the Twine on itchio here.

For Christmas, I got Colors Live on Nintendo Switch, so I'm excited to have a way to create digital art portably now! I've been doing some of the daily challenges that they have and they have some fun limitations to help me get used to using the platform. You can view my profile here.

 

I also met with my brother over the break and we finished writing The Nays Eventure, which is the 3rd Eventure and the next one for me to create a Twine out of. So now I can progress forward on that. We also talked about some plans for the next ones that are earlier in the story, so we might start working on those ones during our next Nay Days. I also read the Stinky Girl Eventure, which is one that I wrote back in April, so he got to hear that part of the story finally.

I also finished my Nay A Week vlog series. I recorded a video (roughly) each week throughout 2022 and talked about The Nays generally. It ranges from general story explanations to what projects I was working on, or just random thoughts or tidbits that I had about what was going on in The Nays.

And then as a tradition, my first drawing of 2023 is related to Cipo. I drew a scene from the Project CBF Eventure that I wrote last year. This is when The Nays let Milada free in the lab and she sees Ciporsius after learning about his time travel plans relating to her.

I also made a Notion page where I'm going to plan out and track what projects my brother and I do during our bi-weekly voice chats! And I have a database of options for us to do so we know what's upcoming as well.

So that's it for this post! I got a lot of end of the year stuff done and also started to draw more. This is probably because I had some time off from work so had more time to dedicate to projects, but I hope I can keep some of this up in the weeks to come, too!

2023 Plans

It's 2023! Last time I talked about what all happened in 2022, so if you haven't read that already, you can read that here; it'll provide more context for some of my goals for this year.

2022 was the 20-year anniversary of The Nays, so I made a lot of progress on that!

Here's my updated improvement image to keep up with my yearly tradition:

While 2021 was a year that my mental health improved, unfortunately, 2022 was the year that my physical health declined a lot. Keeping that in mind, I'm going to try and be mindful when coming up with this year's goals.

I really liked the goal last year of trying to draw more. Because of health and other issues that came up, it declined halfway through the year. I do want to keep on posting a monthly digital sketchbook drawing and keep my drawings more personal and less publicized like I did last year. That worked out really well for me and took a lot of pressure and stress off of me. I might even end up drawing more if I set up a routine to sketch something after dinner while I'm still in the living room, either in my sketchbook or using my Switch.

I talked about how I started doing "Nay Days" where my brother and I would meet to work on Nay-related projects. It was hard to find a whole day that we were both free each month, so this year instead we're going to try and meet bi-weekly on a weekday night so we can just talk for a few hours and stay connected more often. This might help us stay more focused on a full day if we have one so we can be productive and write more too!

Last year I had goals about Compass Nays. I didn't end up working on it much and I've really switched gears back to The Nays. It makes sense for me to put this project on hold for another year so I can focus on really putting The Nays out there first. That's the original story and I want that to be the first impression that's out there instead of the modified version. I'm not saying every part is going to be public before I can work on this game again, but I do want to focus on getting it in a good spot where I can routinely make at least 1-2 Twines per year before trying to split focus on a different big project. I'd like to make my goal that I create 2 Eventure Twines this year.

So with that, I'm going to focus on The Nays again this year. My goal is to finish proofreading all of the Eventures I've written and then start making progress on more of the rewrites and storyboards for various Eventures. With these new bi-weekly Nay Days, I'm hoping we can also write more of the Eventures that are missing from the earlier parts of the story so I can make quicker progress on these.

I'm also not saying I won't work on Compass Nays at all this year. If I'm inspired and want to pick it back up to work on it for a few weeks, I will. But I'm not dedicating any goals or expecting that I'll work on it this year.

I also had a goal last year where I wanted to talk more about The Nays and get comfortable sharing that. I made progress on it but I wouldn't say I really perfected that, so I want to work on it some more. If I end up creating more Twine stories this year, that means more opportunities for me to share those parts of the story with my friends during the CUPdates.

I also was thinking about trying out the Nay A Week project again this year, but with a twist. It could be called Eventure A Week instead. This idea would be to vaguely describe each Eventure in under 30 seconds, and spoiler-free. This would help me talk about The Nays and pitch it better!

Also not really project-related, but I had fun taking a photo every day, so I would love to continue that project for fun as well.

And this may not be a possible goal, but I'm putting it out into existence! I'd like to improve my health this year. I don't know if it's possible with my conditions, but I'd like to at least try harder with continuing my daily exercises and using my standing desk, and maybe gradually things will get better.

So overall, here's a summary of the main project-based goals:

• Draw daily, or as often as possible, and post those digital sketchbook pages online once a month.
• Meet with my brother bi-weekly for Nay Days.
• Create 2 Eventure Twines for The Nays. Also continue to focus on The Nays with proofreading, storyboards, and rewrites.
• Record a new vlog series called Eventure A Week. Talk about each Eventure in less than 30 seconds each, spoiler-free.

Hopefully, these goals are reasonable and I'm able to accomplish them this year! I love the feeling of starting January with a fresh slate. I'm looking forward to making this year better than 2022!