To take a break between projects,
my brother and I spent a day just doing random activities with our
characters. One in particular that we call Return to Mr Marcus World.
It's where we do various prompts with our characters in different
mediums.
The first one we did was sculpting our characters in Donkey Kong Bananza! I started with Pigger.
Then I sculpted Cimc.
After
that, we went back to our animation roots with Mario Paint. I made a
little animated sequence of Doge and Ted eating a snack of Oreos
together.
Then
I used more of the copying frames features with the next animation.
This is from Mikey's perspective where he thinks Gojo is his best
friend.
The next activity was drawing pixel art versions of Hannah and Subeebia in the style of old Pokemon Red/Blue sprites with the same limited palettes.
Then continuing along with the Pokemon theme was Pokemon fusions between two characters. The first one was Mooth fused with Spectrier.
Then I drew Scott fused with Lombre.
So we did all of these on a Saturday after finishing Macca Masquerade, and it was fun to just do some little low-key drawings and things that didn't have to fit into anything. These kinds of projects always help rejuvenate me and keep me feeling creative.
The physical game is complete! It was exciting to see all of the cards fully printed and everything in the final box. Other than the final post, this will likely be my last post about the physical elements of this game!
When the box came, I started by counting the cards and making sure everything was there. For some reason a lot of blank cards printed and Pigger and Karol were printed twice. I’m not sure how that happened, but I ended up having a lot of extra blank cards because of it.
I played all of the modes with the final cards and it ended up being a lot more fun with the variety of cards! I also realized I may not have to limit as many traits in the Channel 6 Get Together mode because of the large variety.
Then while I was playing, I decided to put a twist on the last mode, the CourtNay Incident. I made some updates to how it plays (so it will slightly differ from what was written in the rulebook). Now the players play all of their 3+ Trait matches at the same time and can collaborate further to decide which characters they should play the cards on if they fit into multiple columns. To help keep track of Type advantages, I also am using the Numbered Character Tiles.
I also decided that once you match 6 characters, you’ll swap that character out for another one so that you can use cards from your hand that didn’t necessarily apply to any of the Active Characters. This could provide more strategy for players. I still need to playtest a few more times to finalize some of the mechanics and make sure it’s all properly balanced, but I’m liking this mode more with these slight adjustments.
In addition to physical playtests, I also exported the Tabletop Simulator version of the game. I exported the cards and imported all of the additional pieces into the game.
I also set up the game to be more themed. I laid out all of the pieces so each player has their own mini-board to keep their pieces on so they don’t have to take pieces out each round and they can all be set up on the tables at once even if not all characters are in play. This will make it easier for players to start playing immediately without having to sort through a lot.
Then I uploaded it all to the Steam Workshop! It was pretty straightforward to upload it. I took some screenshots so I could put them on the page as well.
And with this, I updated my itchio page to include a banner image and link to the Steam Workshop version, as well as the one on TheGameCrafter.
I ended up doing some video recordings of some of the modes with the physical cards because I wanted to make a how to play video. It ended up being fairly difficult to record all of the parts and come up with the plays and what I wanted to talk about without a real script, but I got some footage of all of the modes. I had to finish the final mode later since my camera battery died before I could finish though.
I also did some test playing in Tabletop Simulator. I mostly just recorded a video for each mode so I could potentially use it for the how to play video in case I wasn’t happy enough with the other recordings. So now I have options for how to explain it.
I decided to go with the physical card video recordings and edited all of those together. I wrote a new script and made the recordings a lot more concise to only about 13 minutes long, which was great!
I re-recorded a few clips for the final mode and then recorded the voiceover. I finished editing it all together and officially finished the video!
I also finally painted my 3D printed pieces for The Gek player pawn! I put some primer on them and then painted them over the next few days. It was a long process since I had to wait for the paint to dry and put multiple layers on it. They turned out okay though.
After about a week or two, I finally finished painting them. I put a lot of layers of paint on them so the colors would pop out more.
So a lot of great progress this time! I’m nearing the end of this project; only 2 more posts left.
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.
This is the last CUPdate post of the year! Our last meeting actually happened the other week, but because I spent the majority of my past few weeks working on Christmas presents, I didn't want to actually post publicly about them until after Christmas. So now you can all see what I've been working on in my secret projects over the past couple of months!
The main project I've been working on is a Twine interactive story of the very first Eventure of The Nays: The Gek Eventure! We wrote this a few years back in 2017 and I've been working on the comic for it, but I've never actually shared the beginning of this story with anyone besides my brother, so this is a big step! I'm hoping in the future I can make more of these chronologically since I know in the past the few I did upload were way later in the story.
The beginning portion of this story has drawings from my comic (and some of those are just lineart currently, but I plan to update them at some point), and then there are a few videos/images that my brother drew a few years back as a gift for me. But other than that, the rest of the drawings were done new for this project! So it took me around 100+ hours to draw, but I'm happy with how the overall presentation came out.
This is the story that we've been working on ever since we were kids. It's gone through multiple title changes (The Guy Who Talks Like This, The Kids, The Worlds, and eventually The Nays!).
When we officially called it TGWTLT or The Kids and made it its own story was back in 2002, so we're coming up on the 20-year anniversary! And then in 2012, we rebranded it to The Nays and the direction changed a lot, meaning it's now the 10-year anniversary of that as well. I figured this would be a great time to finally share the start of what we've been working on for all of that time. You can check out The Nays website if you want to learn more about the characters.
Though this Twine project has been the main thing I've been working on, I also did a few other mini-gifts. One of them was creating a website for all of the presents that my brother and I made for each other for holidays over the years! This goes back to 2006 when I made an AMV with inside jokes in it for my brother's birthday, then they started to get more customized over the years. Some of these are super old versions of our characters and the story when we used to just include actual characters from other series in our story, so please keep that in mind if you end up viewing this site! lol Anything 2013 and after should be more applicable though.
And then another present for my brother was that I created one of his characters (Yaro) on Hero Forge and then commissioned Sandro on Etsy to 3D print it and paint it! It turned out super small, but it's still really cool that we now have a 3D-printed model of one of our characters.
And then lastly, not really CUPdate-related, but I made a custom cookbook for my parents that includes all of our custom recipes. I used Blurb to print it, just like I used for the Spoon Bath Eventure book that I printed for my brother last year. Most of them are from my brother and I, and our friends, because we've been cooking a lot more since we moved out of my parents' house last year.
And that's it for now! I'm planning to make my usual end of the year/start of the year posts as usual, so those will still happen before the next CUPdate. I'm glad I got to finally share these projects with all of you, since it feels like this has been all I've been working on the past few months.
For this week's CUPdate, I've been working on three projects, so I'm gonna show some of the progress I've made so far on each. A lot was admittedly writing, so if there's not a lot to see, that's why!
*Note: Some of the links in this post are private Google Drive links and only in there for my presentation, you won't have access to these files. I've provided some screenshots to show what's included in these links to give you an idea though!
Nays 2084
I started on this animation back in 2017, but hadn't worked on it since 2019. Well, a few weeks ago I got inspired to start working on it again since it had been a while. At this point, I've spent over 40 hours working on this project, and I still have a lot more to do.
Here's the animatic that I posted 2 years ago, just with the rough storyboards and layouts:
The idea for this is that I wanted to make a trailer for a bunch of events that take place in the year 2084 in The Nays (which is the current year for the most recent parts I'm writing). At this point, about half of this video has already happened, but there are still some moments that I haven't written yet.
This was inspired by my brother's Nays 2008 animation that was made over 10 years ago at this point, but that was always one of my favorite animations that he created.
So I ended up creating a lot of the more finished drawings when I was making the Truth of Yaguzi Eventure, but I didn't do a lot of the animating. Recently I finally composited together a lot of animations that I had drawn and started to realize I was getting closer to finishing this than I had originally thought.
My plan is to finish this animation by the end of this year (maybe by fall if I'm lucky), so I'm hoping that'll happen!
Another on-going project that I've been working more on is the Nay Recruiters RPG Maker game. It was originally an MV project that I started back in 2019, but I updated it to an MZ project and have mostly been working on the battle system, GUI, and overall concept plans for how the game works.
Well, recently, I decided to start working on the sequence of events and overall story. My plan is to make the story basically an abridged, shortened, retelling of my huge The Nays story. In this version, I'm planning to focus on some of the main characters and a lot of the characters that come later will be side optional characters, where their stories will be optional quests that aren't required for the main plot. I really wanna focus the story in more for this game, and it could be a chance to explore rewriting the story without affecting the Eventure structures too much, and it'll be a kind of fresh start. I've narrowed down the opening scene to 3 different ideas, but still trying to figure out which of those to go with.
Then I also started working on style inspiration boards, mainly for the text boxes, and then a bit for character/background art. I'm still kinda all over the place and not quite sure what I wanna do, but the art won't actually be coming for awhile since I need to finish the story and programming main parts first, so that's okay. I might do some style tests in the near future though to try and at least explore some of my options.
The Nays
It's been awhile since I wrote anything for the main storyline of The Nays (since December actually, so I haven't since last year!). Well, last weekend my brother and I wrote the Garlint Eventure, which has been planned for awhile, but never actually written. I also drew some storyboards for the Hot Ice City Eventure that was written a few months back, and turned it into a Google Doc.
Here are the storyboards:
And as a bonus, I also discovered Hero Forge this week (thanks to my friend Anna!) and I decided to make The 6 Main Nays on there:
So I downloaded Adobe Fuse on Steam last week and played around with making some of my characters in it. I really like how custom you can get with character proportions, but I feel like the clothing and hairstyles were a little limited. Below you'll see the 3D model on one side and the 2D drawing that I based them off of.
Zandra was my first test. This ended up looking like an older version of her though.
Lonny was one that I could really play around with the proportions on, since he is not very humanly proportioned. Although the hat and hair I had trouble making look okay without overlapping.
So after watching ZBrush Summit this weekend, I got super inspired to make a ZBrush sculpt. I'm pretty rusty since I haven't worked in it for a few months, so I decided to start with a simple character bust sculpt. I chose to sculpt my main character, Gair. Also I played around with an expression. My first time actually sculpting a human model with their mouth open, actually.
And here's the final illustration that I created in Photoshop.
The turntable I made of the sculpt.
Buffle is the oldest of his brothers. He is a rather successful airplane pilot who is very full of himself. His brothers are very jealous of him and sometimes resent him because of it. Regardless, his family can always bond over their mother's homemade cheesecake. He is very nosy and always curious about what kind of fun his neighbors are planning without his family.
For the past month or so, I have been working on a 3D environment in Maya. I decided it'd be fun to create a haunted mansion environment. You can check out the initial concept drawings here, and the modified sketches here. It was a challenge working in Maya again, but I think I learned a lot from the overall experience! It's an improvement, I'd say, over my first Maya environment.
And this is the final rendered image, composited together in Photoshop.
And this was the initial rendered image without any extra passes composited over it.
I finished my last project for my Digital Sculpture Class! There are still a few things I'm fixing up, since I had a critique today, but this is as finished as it is for now! I may upload a turnaround sheet of the final version at some point next week. You can check out my concept work for Ivy here. And if you want to see the initial concepts and sculpt for O-llie, check them out here.
These are the final Illustrations with my human character and creature posed together.
And this is the turntable for the above.
And the turnaround sheet in color!
And in grayscale.
A turnaround sheet for my human character, unposed in color.
And in grayscale.
And this is the turntable video for the character.
