Nay Saga Devlog 13: Final Physical Cards, 3D Prints, Tabletop Simulator, & How To Play Video

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.

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.

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!

CUPdate 30: Combination Village Videos & Back to The Nays

I have been giving myself a break since the last CUPdate since I worked so hard to finish my game leading up to that one.

I started out by wrapping up a few things on my Spirits of Combination Village game. While the game itself was finished before the deadline, there were a few marketing/sharing things that I wanted to focus on since I usually don't spend a lot of time on that after a game is done. I started by making a video playthrough of the game.

I've also been seeing a few people streaming the games submitted to IGMC and I've loved seeing people's reactions to my game! It's been so much fun and very inspiring to see people enjoying a game I worked so hard to make. Then I started posting it on more sites include RPGmaker.net, the RPG Maker Web forums, and GameJolt. With that, I decided to make a trailer so I could better showcase what the game further than just screenshots.

Then I decided to transition back into working on The Nays, since it's been awhile! I started by just reading some Eventures from where I left off a couple of months ago to get back into it. And then I did a few sketches of them to get back into drawing more too.

Then I remembered my project that I abandoned last month for my game: my daily digital sketchbook! I won't be able to keep up with it for all of August since I'll be traveling a bit, but I did want to get back into that again a little bit. So I did some sketches for two days so far and had a lot of fun! I listened to Live A Live music both nights and honestly just let myself be really loose and sketchy. Lately I realize my drawings have been really stiff, so honestly taking a one month break from much drawing (other than game assets) really helped. Now I've come back fresh and I'm not afraid to make mistakes and have been able to really just be sketchy and feel things out. This made me really excited to get back into drawing and I actually had a lot of fun, which I've been noticing hasn't been happening with drawing lately, so I'm thrilled that the passion is finally back because I've really missed it.

So while this started as a sketch, I ended up getting carried away and turning it into a full illustration because I was having so much fun with it. I'm actually drawing posed characters from my imagination and not hating how it's coming out, which is a first!

I turned this drawing into the scene when Akuma faces off against Yuka and Mabui in the Death's Finale Eventure. I was listening to Gigalovania from Live A Live while drawing this too.

Recently I had a pretty bad downward spiral with a lot of doubts about myself and creating personal projects, but after making a game in a month and seeing the massive positive reaction I've gotten on it, even from people who I don't know, that really helped bring me back and feel so much better. It was a really nice confidence booster for someone like me who honestly has a lot of trouble with that.

I haven't been this excited to create art in a very long time, so like I said, I'm very happy to be back. I know I didn't have a lot to show this time around, but I am very happy with how I'm feeling overall. This year has been really rough due to just things going on in my life, so the fact that I'm finally letting myself enjoy my personal projects again and be happy making art is huge.

I'm not expecting next post to really have much either, but I will pick projects up again in September. I'm going on a trip in a couple of weeks so the next CUPdate won't be for awhile, but I'm not planning to get much done on my projects during that time.

CUPdate 14: Notion Pages, OC Cards, & Art Journey Video

I'm now back from Thanksgiving break, and I ended up getting a lot done! Some of which I still can't show yet, but overall, the projects I was able to get some work done on that I'll be showcasing here include: Notion pages to organize projects, prototypes of OC Cards printed (and played), a Twine story uploaded, and my Art Journey video finally finished.

I've been working on a lot of mini-projects, some of which I'll show once they're finished, but for now, I've been organizing a lot of this into Notion pages, which has really helped me refocus and start to see what needs to get done. So while there's not a lot of art to show for this time, there is a lot of Notion progress that I can share here!

So I started off by organizing some Notion pages. I made pages for each of my OC cards so that I could store the inspiration images that I wanted to reference for the style, as well as the current card that I have. I figured this would be a good way to keep all of this in the same place!

Then I realized that a big blocker for me when drawing is having to stop and look for references. So I decided to make a Notion page for The Nays. I know... I have a massive Google Drive of documents, but I think a Notion page to keep track of a few things will really help. So I started by making a Characters page, and from there, creating a Gallery where I have a page for each character. I already have my Weebly and Google Sheets to store a lot of those specifics, but I wanted one massive list that I can just quickly Ctrl+F the page to find a character and see their most recent design/image without having to click through a bunch of pages. And then I have links to the Weebly and Deviant Art searches if I end up wanting more. I think this will help me be more productive and able to draw without the dread of having to search around a lot for references.

And then I took that even further to be able to sort by Eventures that they appear on. I know I already have a Google Doc for this, but being able to open up that Eventure and quickly sort to see references of every character involved on that Eventure will help me a lot, especially when I'm doing storyboards for these scenes. So far I've only done this for the first Eventure, but I plan to update this whenever I start writing a new Eventure, so I can have it open while I'm writing.

After that, I ended up getting pretty carried away and deep into Notion. I started to convert my massive Google Drive worth of documents into Notion pages to more easily link them all to each other. And through this, I found myself accidentally creating a full Wiki for The Nays, which I honestly had always been wanting to do. This will make updating data a lot easier than updating a bunch of different documents. I still have a lot of work to do in terms of adding everything from Google Drive to this Notion page, but I'm having fun doing it, and I think it'll be a great resource in the end.

I realized another area that has been making me unmotivated to work on projects is a lack of schedule. Through this, I decided to break down the tasks I want to do before the next CUPdate and scheduled them out on a calendar in Notion. This way I can have a goal for each day, or push them back if I need to. And once the day is complete, I'll either check the Complete box to mark that I did it, or move it to another day. I think this will help me stay more organized and on top of my tasks.

Another Notion discovery I made was the ability to connect Discord to Notion! Using Zapier, I was able to set up a connection so that whenever I post in a certain channel, it creates a new database on Notion. I started out by just using my channel where I write my dreams on my personal server and populating it from there, and it works out really well! I'll have to utilize this more in the future.

After all of the Notion organization, I also started to work on some of the tasks I planned out. I started by reprinting my prototype cards after doing some research and figuring out what the best method for printing is. 

I discovered that we'll want to make the text size a bit bigger on the cards themselves since they're still pretty small. Then I realized that printing PNG files are not ideal; the quality is very blurry on the text and overall not great. When I printed them as JPEG, they came out much better. And when I printed as TIFF with no compression, they turned out the best, so that's the best method to print at. 

After those print tests, I cut them out and placed them into card sleeves in front of Pokemon cards (as one of my coworkers recommended!) and that method worked out great for prototypes so I can shuffle them and they'll feel like actual cards.

I got to actually try out my prototype game with my brother when I visited my family for Thanksgiving. There were a few cards that I wanted to change mechanics for that were too overpowered, the wording was unnatural, or some cards that needed specifications when played together. But the main changes involved Support cards and how often they're drawn, since they were definitely skewing a lot of the game with how we played it. Also, I want to add more strategy by choosing what positions you play your characters on the first turn, and specifics on how to shuffle cards or refer to specific slots on the board. So overall I learned some things and I do want to try playing it again with some of the overall changes like with Support cards and strategies to see what further changes might need to be made in relation to the specific cards.

And then I finally finished my art journey video! I recorded this back in the spring of this year, but I didn't actually edit it all together until a few weeks ago. I had to record some additional footage from old art that I had at my parents' house, so I took some time to do that when I visited for Thanksgiving, and collected a lot of old folders and notebooks to bring with me for future reference. This was fun so I might end up doing more of these kinds of videos in the future to kind of change the focus of my channel.

While I was looking back on some old projects I did in the past, I realized that one of the Twine Eventures that I made never got uploaded, so I uploaded the Pubby & Lonny Reunited Eventure on itch.io here!

Also a bit unrelated, but I did want to share a discovery I came across the other week. I've been having an issue in Photoshop where I couldn't turn off Windows Ink or it would also get rid of pen pressure, but thanks to this blog post, I was able to figure out how to do that, and my line quality is SO MUCH BETTER! It's such a relief, because this Windows Ink issue has really been demotivating me to draw since it's been a struggle, but now with it all working, I'm enjoying drawing digitally again.

And lastly, I spent a little bit of time making some Notion databases to help one of my friends organize her to-do lists. The one pictured above is a daily task tracker where you can set the visible dates and archive old tasks.