CUPdate 96: Return to Mr Marcus World

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.

CUPdate 93: The Nays Writing & Wiki Organization

One of my favorite parts about having extended stay at home vacations is that I usually end up diving back into The Nays and getting in the zone for writing and developing a bunch of new story moments. During Christmas break, I spent a lot of time re-reading Eventures and then rewriting some. I also worked on writing scripts for the Eventure Trailers that I've been gradually working through.

So for this CUPdate, I'm going to go through the progress I've made on The Nays so far this year!

I ended 2025 by starting rewriting the AV World Eventure. I didn't finish it in one night though, so I ended up finishing the rewrite in 2026 a couple of days later. It technically counts for my 1 solo Eventure of the year written, so that's one goal checked off already! I imagine I'll write more later though.

I also rewrote a lot of The Gek's Nephew Eventure. I usually write all of my Eventures in mIRC, but this one and finishing up AV World actually happened in Google Docs, which was a really weird transition for me. I've always felt a lot more comfortable writing in mIRC because of the commands I have set up, but for anything that involves keeping a lot of existing text and just making edits, I do think the Google Doc method works better. So I'm trying to do whatever feels right for the situation.

While reading through a bunch of Eventures, I also was writing the Eventure Trailer scripts to act as a recap for them. I had a goal in previous years to write more of these and never got far, but I wrote 10+ of them in a week, so I'd say that was pretty good progress. I just got into the habit of writing them after I did a copy edit pass and read through the Eventures. I added a new section at the top of my Google Docs for this so I can quickly read those recaps before starting when I dive back in.

And to start off 2026, I also drew my yearly Cipo drawing. I wanted to find an Eventure that he was in and just draw one of my Eventure drawings for a future Twine, so I found a scene in the Death Eventure to draw that's towards the start of that one.

I also started working on The Nays timeline again. I had an old version but there were so many changes to the story that it was starting to be outdated. So I made it look a little nicer and I've been working from the beginning of the story as I finalize the beginning Eventures to further solidify those dates. I added these dates to the Eventure pages on the Weebly too, so it's easier to see at a glance how much time passes in Eventures.

I've always wanted to make a wiki for The Nays. Every time I brainstorm how to do it or try something, it just doesn't feel right though. I've tried Toyhouse, Notion, Google Docs, Weebly, etc. But I'll spend about a day or few days on it, and then forget about it, or just not maintain it. Though I realized that whenever I want to remember something about a character quickly (whether that's their design, personality, etc.), I always go straight to my Deviant Art account. I've drawn ~600+ profile drawings from my old Nay-A-Day project and submitted it there, so it's really been my go-to place to look for information while I'm writing.

So with that, I decided to expand upon that. Because I'm already looking there and use it as a resource, why not just make that resource better and turn it into my wiki? So one of the few new features I actually like about Deviant Art's new design is that you can upload multiple deviations and add some basic formatting like bullet points and headers without code. This means I can have multiple reference images technically nested within the same deviation so I don't have to go looking for them elsewhere. I could change the main image to the one I want to show while still preserving the original nested within it too. So I started to add profiles to the main characters, adding sections and links whenever necessary. I took a lot of this information from my Weebly pages, but figured this will be an area I'll probably maintain more frequently.

Then I sketched a few storyboards of the AV World Eventure because the story moments were still pretty fresh in my mind. Sometimes it's hard going back to draw Eventure scenes after I wrote it years ago because I have to reimagine some of the scenes and remember where I left off. I tried to stay super rough with these so I could go quicker and just get my rough ideas out there.

So that's how I started the year! While it's not a lot of visual progress, I did do a lot of writing and organizing this time. I'm happy that I finally revisited and spent some time working on The Nays, because I really needed this and missed it a lot. 

CUPdate 90: Mr Marcus World Continuation

This is a shorter blog post, but it's a continuation of my earlier blog post here revolving around a Nay event that we've been doing recently: Return to Mr Marcus World.

My brother and I wrote the Mr Marcus World Eventure. It was a bit shorter, so we finished it within a few hours one Saturday. We now only have 1 more Eventure to write until we can skip ahead to writing Eventure 26 because of how many early Tag World Eventures we've already written.

Then it was only fitting to do the Mr Marcus World activity after that! We just did 1 round which was drawing one of our characters with a background character we hadn't drawn yet. So for the first one, I drew Clove and then a character who doesn't actually ever appear, Cabrinth. She's a wanted demon that Kali sees in a newspaper.

I also drew Jennie with Gardo. These two have probably actually met before because Jennie and Gojo are on the same hockey team. Gojo's dad is Gardo.

This has been a fun on-going activity and one of our favorites for drawing and random creative events that involve The Nays. We can usually do one or two of these activities in a day too, so it's an on-going one that we can come back to if we want to do a quick creative event. We still have a lot more since we just started this one, so I'll probably have those results in some future posts!

CUPdate 84: Mr Marcus World Event

It had been awhile since we did a drawing activity, so my brother and I decided to bring back the Return to Mr Marcus World activity a couple of weeks ago day. This activity always involves a variety of art projects and it really gets us thinking creatively on a variety of mini-projects revolving around our characters.

The first one we did was draw over Steam screenshots that we had to include our characters in them and as close to the style of the game as we could. I drew Gair and Lonny in Afterlove EP, and then Piko, Lonny, and Urom in Goodbye Volcano High. We kept most of the background and just drew characters over it.

Then we drew the base of our characters, and swapped for the other person to draw a different character's clothes over top. The base characters I drew were Zandra and Lee, and my brother drew JrTr and Yaro's clothes over them.

He drew the base for JrTr and Yaro, and then I drew the clothes of Zandra and Lee over them. 

Then we did probably my favorite activity of the day, which was drawing game design levels on paper! We created a level that the characters would be in and it would be something that they'd enjoy based on their favorite games. Then we presented them and talked about them. First was Grenna's level, which was an RPG about Black Fortress, and based on our old RPG Maker 95 game, Cypriss the Elf.

Then Pubby's level was a 2D platformer with endless runner aspects (until reaching the boss). It was heavily inspired by Sonic levels, and based in Neo Obelisque City, which is where he hangs out with his friend Lonny.

So I had a lot of fun with this activity! We tried to think outside the box for more different activities than we usually do, since this is our 6th time doing this activity. It's always fun to do these creative little activities about our characters!

CUPdate 83: Writing Eventures in The Nays

It's been awhile since I last got really deeply into working on The Nays, but it finally happened! So I have a lot of progress to share on The Nays this time for the CUPdate.

I started by writing the SN World Eventure with my brother. We finally found a day that we were both free, so we wrote that Eventure together in one day. 

So after that, we were inspired to continue a project from ~5 years ago where we drew The Nays in the style of Shonen Jump manga panels. So I did a few of those.

During this time, I was also playing Deltarune and replaying Undertale. So all of these combined is what really brought my inspiration back and got me in the mood for working on The Nays again. So the next thing I did was wrote a new Eventure on my own! It's been awhile since I did that. January 2024 to be exact. So this is part of why I've been feeling burnt out, since I really haven't been taking time to write and work on my project. So it felt great to just sit down and write an Eventure. I wrote the Forbidden Beddy Bye World Eventure, which was pretty short, but had some cool new moments that I made up on the spot.

It led me into a whole string of Eventures that I wanted to revisit. There were a few plot points I was considering connecting to Aiml World, so I decided to revisit the Aiml World Eventure. I wrote that Eventure last in 2018, so I figured I could refresh it a bit and flesh it out more. So I decided to completely rewrite all of the parts with just the M Nays so it could include more depth.

After that, I was inspired to draw a NAD for one of the new characters, Mesay. She's Skine's sister. I started with a sketch of her, but then decided to turn it into a full-body drawing as her NAD drawing. I also experimented with keeping the lineart a bit loose and trying to do a faster coloring/shading style. It didn't speed things up a lot, but maybe a little bit.

Then I decided to draw more sketches relating to the Eventures I was writing. I also planned to rewrite the Muko Inc. Delivery Eventure because it's related to all of this. So I did some sketches of some story moments.

So to say the least, I finally found my inspiration and I'm having so much fun working on The Nays again! Starting is always the hardest part, and my exhaustion and lack of motivation is what really held me back. Now that I've started though, it's hard to stop. When I start writing Eventures and planning story moments in The Nays, it's really addicting. It feels great and I've really missed this since it's been almost 2 years since I experienced inspiration this deep. I'm happy that I'm finally recovering from my burnout (for now) it seems!

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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CUPdate 52: Digital Sketchbooks, Nay Events, Game Dev Vlogs, GitHub Pages, & Eventures

Life has been busy so it's been a while since I've posted my CUPdates here! To catch up on some of the things I previously presented and just didn't formally put into a blog post, I'm going to compile those here.

For June, I did a few sketches for my digital sketchbook. Some of these were for Nay Events.

And then for July and August, I didn't really draw very much, so I combined those doodles into one small digital sketchbook page.

I did a Nay Event where I watched a clip from the endings of games and drew one of The Nays in that scene. They were mostly sketchy and just to get back into drawing more. First was Scott in Wild Arms 3 and the second was Gair in Final Fantasy 3.

I was also playing around with some GitHub pages, since that has free hosting. GitHub has always been kind of a foreign concept to me, so I'm trying to slowly immerse myself in it and figure out how it works. So I made a new page on my side account and uploaded an old website I made for a Nay Event a few years back called "Spriter's Homeland". I had a few issues at first, but after reading some of the guides and watching some videos, I was able to figure out how to get it fully hosted! Check out the site here if you want to see it.

Something else I've been working on is creating game dev vlogs for my Global Game Jam projects! It's been fun to reflect on my game projects and the processes I went through. So far I've finished the videos for the GGJ 2017 and 2018 projects. I recorded the audio files for 2019 and 2020 but haven't edited those together yet. That's been a fun side project that I've been doing when I get in the mood for it.

Also during that time, I did Inktober! I posted them on my other social media like Instagram, but would need to scan and compile those all first before posting all of them here.

I've also been doing some writing to get back into The Nays. My brother and I wrote The Night Kids Eventure, and I wrote some parts on my own that were just with the M Nays. Then I wrote my part of The Gek's Favorite Eventure (which is honestly the majority of that Eventure). And then I also wrote a new introduction to the Pubby & Lonny Reunited Eventure, to tie in more with Pearl's backstory.

This also got me in the mood for doing some Eventure-related sketches. I came up with a new color scheme for El Pubbo so he's not quite the same colors as Pubby. I also came up with a design for his Molee character, Herb. And then I drew an idea for how Clarisse might look. I think Clarisse is gonna actually have white hair instead, but that'll be her design still otherwise.

I've been mostly working on parts at the beginning of The Nays, in terms of writing and drawing lately, so I took a break from that and started to read some of the later Eventures. It really inspired me again. I always forget how much reading these helps me get back into it. So I did a few Eventure sketches throughout November as I was reading various parts.

I've also been wanting to get back into my Nay-A-Day project. I started this project back in July 2014 where I was drawing a full-body character drawing every day, and I draw the character whose birthday it is. Obviously, I don't have the time to do that anymore (especially when they take 3 hours now), but I do want to try and do more of these whenever I get the chance to. It's apparently been 2 years since I last did one of these too. I started with Centrino since it was his birthday on the day that I thought about it. Then I drew Woodsaid.

So that's all of the catching up for this time! We honestly only have one more CUPdate left of this year, so that one will likely end up being a recap of the year, or it'll just be other various projects. But the one after that will definitely be the new year's one where I talk about what's coming up for next year! So it's getting to the end of the year already, which is exciting! I always love this time of year when I have more time off and I get really inspired to start fresh and work on my projects again.