CUPdate 80: Various Projects

It's been awhile since I made a CUPdate blog post here! I still have these bi-weekly meetings with my friends, but I've mostly just been sharing smaller updates and talking about various projects from sharing my Notion pages during these.

I decided to take this week to cover the various projects I've been working on lately!

To start out, here's the first drawing I did this year of Cipo. It's always a tradition to draw him as my first drawing of the year so I drew him from an Eventure moment.

I also already wrote 1 new Eventure this year with my brother: The Frank Lady Eventure! We've been trying to write all of the older Eventures since those are the main ones we skipped over in writing. It's been fun to reimagine those moments with our modern abilities. I also like going back and finding old music to listen to as inspiration during those parts to really bring me back.

I've also been reading Eventures and proofreading them a bit. I've been wanting to get back in and write a solo one, but haven't figured out which one I want to write yet. I did sketch a few moments after reading some Eventures though.

A side project I did one day was check out RPG Maker Unite since they have a free demo. I tried it out initially when it was in early beta, but now it's officially released so I thought I'd give it another try. Unfortunately there are still some bugs that make it a bit more difficult to use than MZ so I'm not really interested in using it for any full projects. But it was fun to test out and I do like some of the new features and what they're trying to do here.

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Nay Saga Devlog 15: The Final Game Links & Reflections

Over the past year, I've been working on a board game called Nay Saga. This is the last blog post I have where I'll wrap up the process!

At the time of writing this (in December 2024), everything is officially wrapping up!

To start off, here are the final links:

🎲 Play digitally through Tabletop Simulator here.

🃏 Physical version for sale on TheGameCrafter here.

🎮 Mini-digital demo of a few game modes on itchio here.

📄 Information & listing on BoardGameGeek here.

The ideal way this game is meant to be played is with the physical version on TheGameCrafter, but I wanted to make free digital alternatives that anyone could experience. So I'd recommend getting the next best experience by downloading the free digital version of the game on Steam Workshop, if you have Tabletop Simulator. That game's pretty cheap especially during Steam sales and is great for playing other board games digitally.

And lastly, I did make a mini-demo of 2 of the game modes that's available on itchio. I couldn't get it to upload and embed in the browser due to some plugins I was using, but it's available for free to download on itchio if you're interested!

So with this update, I did finally publish all of the pages above! Publishing on TheGameCrafter was surprisingly easier than I was expecting. Because I already bought 2 versions of the game physically, it was just a push of a button really to get it live and up for sale. I previously took precautions to split it out into different versions in case people wanted to buy cheaper and smaller alternatives to it. So that's all been implemented.

With those split out versions, I also bought a version of the game for myself. With the base set, I made a new small box to hold just the base set of cards, and it fits nicely into the bigger box.

And while the 3D printed Gek figures aren't included on TheGameCrafter, I do have the 3D print file available on Thingaverse. And I printed and painted 2 versions which I talked about in a previous post.

And finally, after sorting through everything and making sure it was all ready to go, I wrapped the present up to give to my brother for Christmas.

So overall, this was a really fun project! It was very different and involved a lot of moving parts, but I'm really happy with how it all turned out. I love having physical aspects to these kinds of projects, so this was really cool to have overall. And it's the first time I printed 2 versions of a physical gift so I could keep a copy for myself, so that's fun too.

While I didn't make quite as much progress on the digital version as I originally thought I would, I'm okay with that. It was an afterthought and not really the focus of this year. I still learned a lot about JavaScript and RPG Maker from it and I can use that in other projects, so I'm happy with where I ended up.

My favorite moments were seeing the physical game pieces with my art and characters on it. It just all felt so official! I haven't given the gift yet at the time of writing this, but I'm also really looking forward to giving the gift to my brother and playing it with him and my mom as well. I had a lot of fun playtesting with my friends the one time I did a couple of months ago, so I'm looking forward to playing it with others more.

And with that, I've had 15 devlogs about the process on this project. I'll leave you with some final photos I took of the final cards:

Thanks for sticking through these posts and reading about my process!