CUPdate 44: Small Update

I have a pretty small update for this week. May has been super busy in my personal and work life, so I haven't really had time to draw.

For this month's digital sketchbook, I was just playing around with some color palettes and styles for Sagun to figure out the design. I decided to go with the one that's larger on the left.

It was my friend Laura's birthday, so I drew her characters Banana and Belle!

I also went to a baseball game, so I did some quick gesture drawings.

And that's it! I have a pretty busy summer up ahead, so I'm not really expecting any big updates until the fall.

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 33: Gift, Inktober, Projects, and Eventure Writing

October is always a pretty productive time for me, mainly because Inktober gets me back into daily drawing and project creation. So I've been doing a lot of drawing but also getting into a lot of writing! Because I'm drawing more, I'm also more inspired to work on projects even on weekday nights and I've had a lot more time on weekends to work on projects too because I've been socializing a little less this month (other than the week that I was out of town).

So this was something I actually did for the last CUPdate but now that it's publicly out there, I can talk about it here! I made a drawstring bag design for my brother's birthday gift this year. You can find the design here on RedBubble.

And then I've been keeping up on doing Inktober every day! I'll post all of them next time, but for now, here are a few for now:

I decided it would be fun to make mini Notion project pages for all of the projects I've ever worked on! That'll be a big project to go back and document everything, but I figured this could be a fun way to look back on projects I've done and document all of the aspects of each project. I want to even include very small test projects in there so I can remember everything I've done. I started with a few projects.

I've also been doing a bunch of Eventure rewrites while I'm reading through them. I rewrote the Rovi Eventure first to make some of the parts more impactful and overall remove some of the generic parts that I wrote over 10 years ago in there.

Then I updated some of the Neo Obelisque Delivery Eventure, mostly doing a copy edit pass to update some things. But I also removed one part that was pretty unnecessary and replaced it with a shorter scene that connected better to the end of the Rovi Eventure.

And then I rewrote the Welcome "Home" Party Eventure, which I revamped entirely. It's now called the Tag World Ceremony Eventure and fits a lot better into the story. The previous iteration was basically a filler, so now it feels a lot more integrated and leads up to the next Eventure (which we still haven't written or fully thought of ideas for).

And then I decided to make up a new Eventure and do a little bit of re-ordering. The War on Tag World is now just going to be combined with the You-Know-Who's Reign Eventure, so instead of just pushing every Eventure number up, I decided to add a new Eventure to fill a gap after the Return to Sir Dude World Eventure. It's called Kali's Motives and goes into more depth about Kali's past.

So that's about 60 pages worth of new Eventures I've written! So this time was pretty productive, even though one of those weeks I wasn't working on any projects, and I did have some health-related issues in the middle of that. But I got a lot of writing done and have been keeping up with Inktober for the most part.

CUPdate 15: Christmas Presents and the Last CUPdate of 2021

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.

Read the story here!

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.

Frank Hawk Devlog

So you may have noticed my lack of CUPdates recently relating to Compass Nays. That's because I took a sidetrack onto creating an endless runner game in Unity for my brother's birthday! Now that I can finally post about it, this will be a mini-blog post before the next CUPdate that showcases my process on this project.

Ever since December of last year, I've been teaching myself Unity for work. So I decided to finally create my own project outside of work in Unity for fun! This was a short project that I finished in under a month, so I didn't have a whole lot of time to dedicate to it.

This game is called Frank Hawk. It's an endless runner skateboarding game where you get to eat tacos.

Backstory

The idea behind this game came from an arc early in The Nays where they visit Frank Lady World, which is a World full of skate parks and skateboarders. And Frank Lady's specialty is making tacos.

The idea of this World was inspired by Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3, since I used to play that game all the time as a kid (and that's why the music you'll hear are midi versions of the songs from that game). It started out with The Nays just creating characters and levels in the game and eventually turned into a full World where they would skateboard in real life and compete in competitions.

In this game, you play as Chozu, who's a huge fan of this World, as you race through levels created by friends, both current and old, and the ultimate goal is to collect the taco at the end of each level. Each level increases in difficulty and new obstacles show up along the way.

Development

I started out by brainstorming some ideas for a short game that would be fun to make in Unity. Since I've already made a platformer game in Unity before, I figured it wouldn't be too much different to make an endless runner.

Something that's core to my games is making sure there's character dialogue, so I explored the Unity Asset store to try and find a quick and easy dialogue editor, since I didn't want to dedicate a lot of time to building my own from scratch. That's when I found Runia Dev's Dialogue Editor, which worked perfectly for what I needed.

After that, I made the basic character movements and collisions for the hub scene in Frank Lady World where Chozu interacts with characters to enter the levels. Starting out, I was just using sprites I already had or quick sketches as placeholders for the characters.

Then I made the endless runner level. The hub world works like a platformer game where you're not endlessly running, so this was just a quick tweak to make Chozu move on his own. And the actual mechanics were actually a lot easier than I was expecting. I just needed to make a way to end the game and teleport back when you reach the end.

So I made a few scenes like the game over and title screens so that this could feel more like a full game.

Once I had the core mechanics down, I started to create the sprite art for it. Luckily I already had some quick sketches of these characters drawn for Compass Nays, so I just had to clean up those sprites and that meant I was completing the art for that project and this one at the same time!

Once I created the main sprites, I decided to add some various mechanics for each of the characters to move differently in their levels. That included Grenna spinning, Ralphie standing in the way and slowing you down, and Scott shooting projectiles downwards.

Then I started to design each of the stages to be different so they weren't all just clones, and were their own designs. It was really fun to make each of these be unique to the characters and how they acted at this time in the story.

After that, I did some tweaks to make the game more enjoyable and easier to play. So I updated the retry button on the Game Over screen to send the player back to the beginning of the current stage rather than the hub map, so they could retry. I noticed this was needed when the last level ended up being a lot harder than the previous ones, so I didn't want the player to be frustrated from having to redo the conversation before.

And finally, I was able to get to a few of my wishlist ideas! I started by updating the kill object block to be actual lava, since it was previously just a red box. And then I added collectible salsa containers to help lead the player throughout the levels. I also added UI on the screen to tell the player how many salsa bottles they've collected.

Final Thoughts

So overall this was a fun mini-project and I learned a lot more about Unity in the process! There were a few wishlist items I didn't get to like adding more story, custom text boxes, more customized backgrounds, and a few more polish things like animations, but considering I made this in less than a month without a whole lot of prior Unity experience, I'd say I'm fairly happy with how it turned out!

This was also a fun break from the RPG Maker project I've been working on this year, and it felt good to finish a project (since that project is still years away from being close to finished). So this made me think about how I might want to take some breaks from my main project to still have that accomplishment of finishing things, to keep me motivated along the way. Obviously, the Global Game Jam is a huge boost for that, but also it helps to have other smaller projects throughout the year so I don't experience burnout.

Firebreath's Exploration

This was the first full project that I coded from scratch in JavaScript! It's a short choose your own adventure game where you follow Firebreath, a self-proclaimed dragon, through various scenarios.

Play the Game at this link:

I created this as a present for my brother's birthday. The style was inspired by one of his favorite games, Famicom Detective Club (which the music also comes from).

This was a short project made for fun, so enjoy!

Here are some screenshots from the game: