CUPdate 34: October Recap

For this CUPdate I didn't have a lot to show. I've mostly been busy with life things and then rewarding myself with time to play video games. So I only have a few things.

I started out by finishing up Inktober! It was a lot harder this year than it's been any other year, and that's due to just everything that's been going on this year. But I'm at least glad that I pushed through and finished it though. Now I'm looking forward to a break from daily posting. I haven't had a chance to scan them all, but you can find all of my daily posts on Tumblr here.

Most of my art throughout October was sketchbook drawings due to Inktober. I did manage to do a few digital sketches, but not as many as usual for my digital sketchbook. But I did theme a lot of these ones for the month!

I've also been proofreading Eventures when I am at my computer and working on personal projects. While doing this, I sometimes update dialogue to improve it and make sure it's connected to previous Eventures. So while doing this, I got to the Glitch Vessels Eventure. I remembered an old drawing I did of one of these scenes in 2010. So I decided to do a quick sketch to redraw that scene with updated character designs and art for fun. This is when Grenna is temporarily sent to another timeline and Elftair is fed up with how the replacement Grenna is acting. So here's the comparison from the 2010 version to 2022:

Other than that, I didn't do a whole lot. Hopefully I'll have more next time, but also one of those weeks is Thanksgiving week so not a lot will happen during that time. It's also getting to Christmas time where I'll be more busy, so there might not be a ton until New Year's, but we'll see!

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 13: Catching Up

So it's been a while since I had anything relating to my game Compass Nays, so I've kind of decided to take a break from it until the new year. I've realized that I'm experiencing burnout, so I think in this situation, it's best to take a step back and try to change my focus so I can try and get back into things.

For this CUPdate, I mostly decided to refocus and figure out what all I want to accomplish before the end of the year. I started out by making a bunch of checklists on Notion. Some of these are mini-art projects I can do and others are as simple as starting to buy Christmas gifts for loved ones. I just really need to reorganize my life since I realize I've been in a bit of a slump the past few months due to what I think must be burnout. I had been accomplishing a lot for my game, but stress from work/life has mostly been taking a lot of energy and I think that's why I've been struggling to get back into working on my own personal art projects as much.

During the last presentation, I talked about my process on Frank Hawk from my devlog post here. I've also been making a point to post this game on other platforms (Game Jolt, RPGMaker.net, and simmer.io) since it's my first real finished personal Unity project.

I also finished Inktober! This year it didn't re-energize me as much as it usually does, unfortunately, but I did get all 31 days done. You can check out all of the individual posts on my Instagram.

Then I decided to go back to working on one of my YouTube projects, which is a 30-minute video about my art journey and how I got to where I am today. I recorded the footage for this back in March, but haven't gotten around to editing it until now. Some of the things I mention are about 2021 being the current year, so my plan is to finish this by the end of this year. I've been making great progress on editing it, and only have about 5 minutes left to finish up, so once I can grab some footage from my parents' house, I'll be able to finish it up and post it for the next CUPdate!

And after talking with some friends, I got inspired to go back and work on the trading cards for our card game we were gonna make a while back. We decided to finally make a more accurate template to get the prototypes into, so I went through and imported placeholder art for all of my cards with the information. So far I have 4 cards that are completely finished with the final art (which are the ones above), but the icons and formatting are subject to change for the actual final prints. I'm hoping this can be something I'll come back to, since making the art for these was really fun!

I printed out all of the cards last night, but I still need to work on the sizes, because some of the text came out a bit blurry in the prints. I might try to reprint them sometime soon, but for now I can at least start to try playing the game and see how balanced it is, with characters from different decks. 

There are a few other projects I'm working on that I can't post here yet, but once I'm able to, I'll add them to one of my future CUPdate posts. Until then, I'm slowly making smaller checklists to complete so I can be ready to finish a few mini-projects up before the end of the year.

Inktober 2019 Results

I finished up Inktober and used the official prompts this year.

Here's all of them together!

And then below are all of them individually: