It's the end of the year so that means it's time to recap what all happened this year! This has been one of my busiest years in my personal life and I did a lot of traveling, so that did mean a bit less time for personal projects. But I'll get into that in a bit.
To start, here's my summary of art:
I spent a lot of time at the beginning of the year drawing, but then slowed down and didn't draw a lot in the second half of the year. And that's okay! As I mentioned last year, my goals are more game dev-focused and less drawing-focused. So if I draw more some months than others, I'm okay with that.
But in all honesty, I do think I kind of burnt myself out to some degree and that does show a bit. I was really passionate about working on my projects, but trying to fit it in on top of travel and everything this year was a lot and led to some burnout. I was a bit overambitious on some of my projects, which led me to overwork myself. I'm planning to try and mitigate some of this in the future, but before I get into that, I'm going to break down what projects I worked on this year.
As I mentioned in my 2023 Recap post, I ended 2023 very strong. I was very inspired and working on my projects earlier. This included starting on my 2024 project as early as November 2023. I came up with the idea to make a physical board game rather than a video game for the year. This led to my biggest project of the year: Nay Saga.
My main goal was to make a game around the Nay-A-Day drawings I had done and a big goal for me was to draw more of those this year. So I started by drawing a few, but they did take awhile to draw. Some of them were ones I was redrawing so I could have more finished drawings of some of the more main characters.
I spent a lot of time brainstorming ideas for card layouts. I was also updating character spreadsheets and tracking down the 1,000+ characters and which ones had drawings that I could use. I was planning to eventually draw all of them to use, but decided to scope it down a little to only 750+ characters, and cut about 300 of them so I had less drawings to do.
During this time, I also wrote the Sram Eventure because I came up for some new ideas for characters who may be important to include. That meant creating new characters and redesigning old ones for this.
I actually started by designing a digital version of Nay Saga so I could playtest against a CPU and wouldn't need to find real people to try out some of my early concepts. And then I used some playing cards to test ideas. And by the end of January, I had some basic prototype layouts for ~40 cards printed that I was testing out 2-3 different game modes with.
On top of working on Nay Saga and writing an Eventure, I also did my yearly Global Game Jam project. This year, like last, we were very ambitious with the project. We included ~24 characters with different abilities and stats for this game. It meant that I spent about a week or so after the GGJ polishing it and expanding upon it, but I really enjoyed working on it.
And lastly for January, I also started working on my first Twine for the year: The Night Kids Eventure. I mostly did the sketches and some of the lineart.
Though I was extremely productive in January, that quickly changed in February. I was out of town for about 2 weeks and catching up on some games, so I really didn't accomplish much in my personal projects outside of a few drawings here and there.
Then in March, I also didn't make much progress. Final Fantasy VII Rebirth was released, so that was really my life for most of the month. I mainly got back into the project towards the end of the month, where I tried the game out in Tabletop Simulator and added ~64 new characters and printed them out to try and test the balance of the game more.
April started out with more travel for work, and then I took more of a break from Nay Saga. I came back to The Night Kids Twine and finished all of the lineart and basic coloring.
I decided to make another game dev vlog since it had been awhile and got back into looking at my portfolio and old projects. I recorded a few more playthrough videos of my more recent games around this time as well.
In May, I ended up traveling as I usually do to visit family, and was also just playing games and hanging out with my friends more. Outside of that, I got back into drawing more. I dedicated time to finding the best drawings I had of every character and drawing or cleaning up drawings of each character that I wanted in the game. This turned into a project that lasted until August and was really the main part I was working on for Nay Saga.
By the end of May, I finished all of the drawings for The Night Kids Eventure Twine and compiled the Twine together in June.
I drew all of the drawings for The Gek's Rival Eventure Twine in June and finished the shading and compiling by the end of July. I also made a new Twine Template Generator in p5 that helped me automate my process a bit more, so that was helpful.
June was another month where I ended up traveling for a week or so for work, so it was a little disruptive to my personal projects. I did end up finding a Saturday that my brother and I were both free though so we wrote the Complex.Net Eventure during that time.
In July, I was starting to feel the burnout on my projects. Likely because there was so much travel happening in between it, so I decided to take a week off from everything and participate in the O2A2 Visual Novel Game Jam. I started listening to game devs on Twitch in the background while working on projects during this time. It was a nice break to work on this project and have a game finished because I wasn't feeling a lot of progress on my other game with all of the drawing and massive scope I set up.
When I started working on Nay Saga again, I was coming up with more new game modes, printed out more characters, and was doing a lot of playtesting with a set of about 100 prototype cards. A big part of my progression was playtesting, making small tweaks, and finding drawings of characters. So while it was all important, it did feel like slow progress at the time.
During these months, I was constantly updating the card designs and wasn't really happy with the layout. So in August, my friend Jinny sat down with me and helped me finalize my design to where it is today.
I started to concept the different game pieces outside of the cards from here. This included the logo and box art. And then I finally playtested the game with real people using the prototype cards. I was finally feeling confident about the project and pieces were finally coming together. So I finished the game and sent the initial test pieces (1 of each) off to be printed through The Game Crafter.
In the meantime, while waiting for the first draft to arrive, I continued to work on character drawings for the game and finalizing assets. Outside of Nay Saga, I finished up my 2 Twines by creating recap trailers that I imported into the Twines and finished them.
I also started to upload The Gek Eventure drawings online because I realized I had never uploaded those individually to Deviant Art yet. Then August ended with more travel and breaks from my projects.
When I came back from my trips, my first initial print of Nay Saga arrived so I was able to test everything out and make final decisions about the assets. I created the rulebook for most of September.
I also created a 3D model of The Gek, which I used as a player pawn for the game. I 3D printed it along with many other 3D card holders that I found on Thingiverse.
In October, I printed the final version of Nay Saga. So I started to revisit the digital version of the game. The physical version was done so I wanted to make all of the game modes playable. This ended up not being realistic because it was a lot of intense gameplay mechanics and just not enough time. So I ended up mostly focusing on the second gameplay mode.
October was also a busy month for game releases, so I was playing a lot of games outside of working on my project. I was also invited to do an artist talk at CCAD, so I spent some time putting together a presentation and talking to students as well. I also went to GDEX.
So in November, I finished up the digital game as much as I could. This is when I really started to realize the burnout and just that I had really overscoped when I thought I would finish the entire digital game with 6 modes and a story. So I scoped down a bit and settled on just having 2 gameplay modes and basic menus. I did also add a card encyclopedia database to the game as well though which was a fun addition.
Outside of the digital game, I finalized a few areas for the physical game in November. The final game arrived and I was able to finally playtest with all 750+ cards! I took a lot of photos and videos, and created a "How To Play" video that I edited together.
Then I worked on the presentation aspects. I imported all of the final assets into Tabletop Simulator and created a Steam Workshop page for it.
I also updated some of its presentation on TheGameCrafter and made the final itchio page. None of these were published publicly yet.
Then my last physical aspect that I finished in November was painting the 3D printed Gek player pawn! I made 2 because I ordered a second version of the game so I'd have my own copy after I gave away the main print of the game to my brother for Christmas.
So from there, the game was mostly done and I just had some time to polish and wrap up loose ends in December. At the end of November, while I was creating the encyclopedia database of all of the characters, I was reading Eventures and starting to get in the mood for working on The Nays again.
I also was working in RPG Maker a lot for the digital aspects of the game, so I created a new Google Doc that compiles all of my RPG Maker notes in an organized way so I can keep it open and reference it during development. I also created a side document to organize plugins I commonly use and link to their documentation so I can more easily find those while I'm working. It's helped speed up my workflow.
As usual, November and December had a lot of travel, but even more than usual this year. I had additional travel for work in December for a week, which gave me even less time to work on projects. I'm hoping to work this out so we can do this trip sooner next year since it was pretty hectic. I also ended up getting sick from going on the work trip, which lost me a lot of time just trying to survive and canceled one of my original travel plans. I ended up being sick and traveling most of December, so I didn't end up really making progress on my projects for that month to end the year.
2024 Goal Breakdown
So that was the crazy year of 2024! Now that I went over specifics of what I did each month, I'll compare my goals from last year and talk about my progress:
- ✅ Write at least 2 Eventures.
- ✅ Create at least 2 Twines.
- ❌ Write (all of?) the Eventure Trailer scripts.
- ✅ Draw a few Nay-A-Day drawings.
- ✅ Make a game (either progress on Compass Nays or a new game finished).
- ❌ Finish game dev portfolio and updated resume.
- ✅ Create a few game dev vlogs.
- ✅ Attend GDEX (or another local game convention).
- ✅ Publish a game on Steam.
I made some pretty good progress on my goals. I literally only wrote 2 Eventures this year which was a bit less than I was hoping, but I did technically fulfill that goal. And I made 2 Twines! I'm hoping to do more on both of those in the future.
I didn't end up writing the Eventure Trailer scripts like I was hoping to, so I am hoping to continue that for next year, because it's something I do want to do.
I did a few Nay-A-Day drawings, but this one actually ended up leading more into creating more portrait drawings of new characters and cleaning up old drawings, which overall worked really well towards my game.
While I didn't work on Compass Nays at all, I did make a finished game: Nay Saga! And I made the O2A2 game, so technically 2 games outside of my usual GGJ project.
I didn't end up having time to finish my game dev portfolio or finish updating my resume, but I made some progress on it. I'm hoping to continue to poke away at that one. I did make at least 1 game dev vlog though. I was hoping to make more, but that's an on-going project I'll continue to work on until I've finished all of them! I did make a how to play video for Nay Saga though, which goes into talking about my games more.
And then I did attend GDEX, which was fun! It was more to play games than promote myself as a game developer, but it was a great first step to doing that. I'll probably end up going again next year too.
And finally, while I didn't publish a game on Steam in the degree that I was thinking... I technically did publish a game on Steam. I published Nay Saga to the Steam Workshop as a free DLC for Tabletop Simulator, so I technically have a game on Steam now! I do still want to publish one of my finished games on there and go through the whole process of submitting a game, but this was my first steps towards this goal.
Final Thoughts
So overall I did a lot of travel. I traveled to locations where I stayed long enough to spend the night at least 7/12 months this year. A few of those months had 2-3 different trips of doing that as well. So it equaled out to almost every month. That caused a lot of disruptions to my personal projects and I had a lot of instances where I had to come back to my projects after not working on them for long periods of time, which made it harder and did burn me out more.
I also overscoped a lot. Because I was focused and knew what I wanted to do, it encouraged me to push myself further on a lot of my projects. But this year I just didn't have the time to do that, so it just burnt me out. I've been brainstorming ideas on how to fix this going forward, but I'll talk more about that in my next post.
So anyway, this was my year! I'm really happy with how Nay Saga turned out and it was a huge part of this year. I'm looking forward to what's to come next, but that'll be in my upcoming post. Thanks for reading this long post and sticking with me through this journey!
