CUPdate 42: The Nays Brainstorming, Rewriting, & History

I was out of town for a lot of the time leading up to this CUPdate, so not a lot to show on my blog this time!

While I was on the plane, I ended up thinking a lot about the whole history of The Worlds, which meant brainstorming some stuff relating to the First Generation Nays. Also while I was on the plane, I sketched this drawing of Forlorn on my Switch.

With all of this, it also involved thinking a bit about the original creators of The Worlds (Malik, Sagun, and Jesper). And this led into my idea where all deamons could originate from Jesper (The Man Who Does Not Speak), and could be closely related to The Gek. There are a lot more ideas I was thinking about, but I decided to make a family tree for The Gek's family and also how they're related to the Lynx family (I was also figuring out the actual relative names in relation to The Gek).

And then it was my friend Hillary's birthday, so I drew her character Imogen! I had fun playing around with the crystal effects, since she's cursed with crystal powers.

And then I've also been continuing to read through some Eventures and I finally made it to the Preliminary World Leader Exam, which is the longest Eventure of all of them. So I'm anticipating that one will take me at least a week to read through on its own. While reading some of the parts leading up to it, there was a lot of continuity missing since it was around the time when we were making a lot of changes. So I went in and started to write some connections and leave some notes. There were a few scenes that I actually wrote straight in Google Docs and with no plans, so that was new! I need to go back and look at them later, but it was interesting to try that out for writing out some shorter parts.

So yeah that's it for this blog post. I do have a lot of progress on some other projects, so I'll be able to show those here eventually, too!

CUPdate 40: Digital Sketchbooks, Rogue Bird Eventure, and Notion

Wow, it's been a long time since the last CUPdate! We had a lot of in-person meeting up and other things going on over the past month, so we decided to postpone our CUPdate until after that so we could spend more time together in person. But now we're back, so I have quite a few different projects to talk about for this one.

I didn't post this last time because of the Global Game Jam, but last time I also finished my Digital Sketchbook for January. Most of it ended up being drawings from Colors Live, so it's more of a Colors Live sketch dump.

And because it's been so long since the last CUPdate, I also have the Digital Sketchbook for February! I honestly didn't draw much in February due to my recovery happening, but I was getting other non-drawing projects done throughout that time instead. I mostly drew these towards the end of the month.

I started to try and draw a bit on my cintiq again. Mostly while standing because sitting is still a little difficult for long periods of time. But I did this little digital sketch for my friend Jinny's birthday too.

And then I took a break from some of the other games, drawings, and things to work on The Nays again! While reading Eventures, I got inspired to do some drawings related, so I colored one of my drawings from my digital sketchbook of Akuma.

And then I also re-read the Kali's Mission Eventure so I drew a storyboard of one of those moments. On one of the last OONC Days, we read that Eventure together as well.

I started to read some Eventures and got really in the mood for writing more because it's been a few months. So I renamed the Blizzard Eventure to the Rogue Bird Eventure and decided to rewrite it since that was an earlier Eventure that could use a bit of work. 

In the meantime, I also updated my Notion a bit. I added weekly to-do misc tasks to the top of my calendar. These are reserved for things that I didn't really want to make a whole task for on my calendar so I could still check off boxes and keep track of things without flooding my calendar with non-project things. Most of my project things are going to stay on the calendar, but these are random other reminders and things. I'm also archiving them into a weekly task so I can check that off too for each week.

Speaking of Notion, I'm also going to have some of my longer projects have more details there than my actual blog, just because it's a lot of writing and other things that I'm not ready to post on my blog yet. Maybe I'll post them here eventually, but for now, I'm going to be leaving some of that on Notion instead.

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!