2021 Recap

2021 is at its end, and what a year it's been! It was my first full year living in my apartment and that really improved my mental health a lot, so I'm very grateful for that decision. As for my art and some other areas, there were some rocky parts and I'm still figuring things out, but I'll get to that later in this post.

As my tradition goes, I'll start off by showing my 2021 art summary:

So what happened in 2021? Well in January, my brother and I participated in the Global Game Jam as usual (play the game here!), but this time we had to interact virtually instead of being there together in person, so it was different. We were a bit more ambitious with a more detailed art style as well because they extended it to be a few days longer, so it was definitely a new experience.

Then in February, I made a Discord bot for me and my brother to talk with The Nays, to try and emulate mIRC. I still have to log into the bot each time I want to use it, but I switched the hosting over to repl.it at least so that either of us could load it up whenever we plan to use it.

In March I started to watch some Sketchbook tours on YouTube, so I made a few of my own. I recorded myself going through all of my old sketchbooks and edited together the first few throughout the year. I also recorded my Art Journey around that time as well while I was doing more video recordings.

I did a #SurpriseOCDrawing challenge for fun to draw other people's characters, and that was a fun little activity in the spring.

In April I spent a lot of time updating my social media platforms. I made a carrd and Art Station, and uploaded playthroughs of all of my GGJ projects to YouTube (and revamped my channel a bit).

At the end of April I teamed up with three of my closest friends to participate in CCAD's 24-Hour Animation challenge, where we collaborated on Discord to create a 30-second short film. Our team ended up winning and they showed our short film at their end of the year show that we got to all attend in May. So that was a really fun experience!

And after the 24-Hour Animation challenge, we were inspired to work on projects and talk about them together so we started the CUPdates (Creative Update Project), where we meet bi-weekly to talk about projects we're working on and present to the group. It's been really beneficial and keeping us all a lot more motivated to work on our projects. And it's a way for me to make use of this blog more too!

I worked on various projects about The Nays for short periods of time, including the Nays 2084 animation, where I made progress on a few more scenes, then overall I drew more storyboards and story sketches of a few of our Eventures. My brother and I wrote our first remote Eventure in awhile as well around that time.

Then starting in June, I got very deep into game development on Compass Nays (and came up with the actual name and logo for it!). I was super productive on this project until August, which was very different, since summer is usually my time where I don't get any projects done. This year those were my most productive months though, so I think the CUPdates definitely helped. I ended up making a lot of progress overall on the game, since previously it was just a rough battle system. But I went in and made some sprite and style tests, wrote dialogue for most of the prologue, drew the layouts of all of the maps in the prologue, did sprite sketches of all of the prologue characters, made some menu tests, and a lot more. You can check out all of my Compass Nays posts for more details, but I'm happy with how far I got in it this year!

In September I took a break from Compass Nays and completed my very first Unity game outside of work. I made Frank Hawk for my brother's birthday, so I got it done in about a month. During this time I also started to update my online presence in terms of game dev. I made a Game Jolt account, uploaded projects to RPGmaker.net, and revamped some of my itch.io pages.

Because I used up a lot of my creative energy in the summer this year, the fall was a huge lull for me. It was like ever since I came back from my vacation, I had trouble getting back into art. So I really just did inktober and Christmas presents for the rest of the year.

In November I brought back my OC trading card game and started to figure out some of the mechanics more. I printed out my prototypes and tested it. I also uploaded my Art Journey video after finishing it up. This month was mostly Christmas presents and a lot of Notion. I learned a lot about databases from work, so I revamped my entire checklist and task system to be a lot more efficient, and also ended up making a wiki for The Nays there, based on all of my Google docs and Weebly pages.

So overall this year was very different than previous years. I think overall I'm realizing that I definitely experienced burnout this year. Part of it could've been because I was using so much creative energy during summer (when I usually take a break), and then a mixture of other things. I did two weekend challenges of staying up all night with little sleep, and work has been super hectic the past year or so. So a lot has been contributing to this and I'm trying to figure out how to overcome it. Luckily in December I did start to feel better because I was creating again, and that's what really gives me a lot of energy.

Another challenge this year has been that I haven't really had time to write The Nays. So because of that, I ended up trying to focus on Compass Nays instead, which would be a much shorter version of that story, and something I could do on my own. With my brother and I living apart, it's harder to line up our schedules to dedicate a weekend or even one night to writing an Eventure, so progress on The Nays has been pretty much halted. We only wrote 1 new Eventure this entire year. I think this is part of why I've felt disconnected in a weird way. Since I haven't really been thinking in-character as much because I'm not constantly working on the project, I have to do a lot of re-reading to figure out where I left off each time, which is a little weird. I know my goal was to work on side projects more than actually write Eventures this year, and that's what I did. But it's still weird!

Something else I realized this year was that I stopped doing daily drawings. I didn't do them last year, but I still did them more than this year. This year I drew less and less as the year went on, and I think that really hurt my abilities and motivation a lot. I made a lot less drawings overall and it's been hard to get back into it. I'll talk more about this in the next post on how I plan to bring some of that back, but I realize I'm definitely the kind of person who can't take long breaks from drawing, or it really messes with me.

Because I didn't draw much this year, I realize I didn't really improve drawing-wise as much as I would've liked to. But I did improve in a lot of other aspects of my life. Especially in game dev. I've been learning a lot of Unity at work, and some more JavaScript, so that's really been helping me understand and utilize programming a lot more, which in turn really improves my RPG Maker games and workflow a lot, which I'm thankful for. I improved a lot professionally and at work as well, and even got promoted to Senior Curriculum Developer in February this year. So I've been taking on even more responsibilities than I had been previously. We also got a lot of additional partnership courses so I've worked on courses for Google, MIT, and NYU so far. So I'm learning a lot for sure.

And then I also realized over the past year that my social life has improved a lot. Now that I'm living with my best friend, we hang out all the time. One of my friends visits and hangs out with us pretty much every weekend. There are at least 1-2 people that I meet with virtually every month to talk about art and other things. I meet bi-weekly with my friends to talk about our projects in CUPdates. And I've met up with some other friends in Columbus a few times, and one of our friends visited for a few months in the spring. So this year has had A LOT of social interaction in comparison to last year. I'm an extrovert so that energizes me and I love it, but I think that's part of where my time and energy has been dedicated to, so it really does make sense that I have less time for art and personal projects with that on top of work. And I'm not saying this is a bad thing by any means, this is a huge improvement. The fact that I accomplished as much as I did this year on top of all of this means that my mental health is just way better, because I probably couldn't have done that much in previous years. So it's just a different use of time, and it's starting to make a lot more sense.

So now that I've gone over a lot of what happened this year, I'd like to end by answering this question: Did I accomplish my 2021 goals?

I wanted this blog to be less about daily tasks and more about processes and longer posts like this one. And the CUPdates have been working really well for that. I use Notion a lot as well for personal tasks, so this blog works great as my bi-weekly showcase.

A huge goal for this year was to focus on game design and I definitely did that! I learned a lot about Unity, making Frank Hawk, and made a lot of progress on Compass Nays. I even made progress on the gameplay mechanics of the OC trading card game.

I wanted to create more storyboards and finished beat boards, which I suppose I kind of did if you count The Gek Eventure Twine that I just posted. There were a few throughout the year as well, and the last few days of the year, but I still think I could've done more overall. I did say I wanted to share The Nays story with the world through Twine, and I started that, which is fun!

And then finally I achieved a goal of wanting to meet with artists more to talk about my personal projects and simulate college art classes. This was achieved through our CUPdates project! It really helps with motivation and I'm very thankful that my friends are willing to meet so often to make this dream a reality.

So overall even though this year felt crazy and ended kind of weirdly, I still did actually accomplish most of my goals. So I'm glad about that! These posts are really helpful to reflect back and really feel that sense of accomplishment. I have some plans for what to do next to address some of the issues that came up this year, so stay tuned for my next post.

See you in 2022!

Discord Bot Creation

I usually only make blog posts about art here, but since I'm not making a ton of blog posts anymore, I decided to switch things up! This might mean more frequent blog posts about various processes, even if they're not solely art-related. But this is going to be a rather lengthy text post.

tldr; I used to use mIRC commands to make my characters talk, but now I'm learning how to implement that into Discord through creating my own bot.

Here's the difference:

Discord has been the main platform that I use for communication for the past few years, not too long after it was released. And in the past year, I've started to finally learn how to code, mostly in JavaScript. So creating a Discord bot is something I've been interested in for awhile.

So I'm going to talk a little bit about how I got here and where I started actually, when it comes to programming.

The Origin: mIRC

Back in 2002, I came across Pojo's DBZ website (which I guess still exists?) and entered into their chatroom. From there, I learned what chatrooms were and quickly made some cool friends on there, (some of which I still talk to this day!) and downloaded mIRC, since it was an easier way to access more servers than what was just on that website. And once the main server I used went down, I had to figure out ways to keep in touch with these friends, most of which I only had access to their IRC username, and no other form of contact with them.

But with mIRC at my disposal, I started to learn very basic programming commands, just by poking around in the Alias files or various other areas. I downloaded some bots to play fancy games and a lot of the friends I met on there were programmers or had some knowledge in the field, and were able to answer some of my questions.

Eventually, in 2006, my brother and I decided to go on a server where we would make our characters talk, much like we used to do when we played with action figures as kids. Some servers would ban your IP address if you had multiple accounts logged in at once, so we were really pushing it just by having the two of us log in on the same IP address. So we wondered... how can we make multiple characters talk without having to type and format their text every single time? Well, poking around in the alias files, our questions were answered.

Alias Files in mIRC

mIRC has some default commands programmed like opping someone or kicking someone from a channel. So I ended up copying some of that code and realizing that I could use the same command used to op a user to type /characterName and print something.

Eventually, I modified the kick command to create a pop-up window to allow the user to type in a text instead of a reason for kicking them. So with all of that, I knew how to type /characterName and have it print out text that the user typed!

Eventures

So this is what led to my current writing style, actually (which I call writing Eventures). I join a server and type commands for my characters to speak, and it prints out nicely with their text colors and everything. I save out the logs and view them in Patchou IRC Log Viewer whenever I want to view them as if it's on mIRC. We're probably the only ones on the planet that write our story fully this way, but it's really the only way I can get in the zone!

Transition to Discord

mIRC had been my main communication platform until 2011, when I slowly started to use newer social media platforms to communicate with people I knew in real life. Because let's face it, none of my real-life friends had ever heard of IRC or wanted to use it, but I did still use it to communicate with my online friends. I was constantly trying to find something that felt as much like home as mIRC did, but nothing really did. My college friends used Facebook Messenger and Skype to communicate for years, and looking back at it, I can't imagine using either of those to keep in touch with people now.

Finally, Discord came around and it had a lot of similar features to mIRC, which made me really like how it functioned, and it started to feel like a home, just like how mIRC has always felt. And when I got a smartphone, I got spoiled being able to talk to my friends on mobile and PC (which mIRC was unfortunately lacking). Even my online IRC friends moved to Discord so I can still keep in touch with them there. Discord was still missing a bit of customization though. I couldn't just pop open the Alias files and type my own commands easily like mIRC did, and I couldn't change the color of text.

For years I had been wishing that Discord would add something like this. So finally I decided to research bots and see what I could do with them. While it ended up being much more complicated than one line of code like mIRC had, it's getting closer to what I was hoping for. And now that I understand programming a bit more, I'm capable of making a bot myself that does close to what mIRC could accomplish.

The Discord Bot

I started by watching Drew Conley's tutorial video on how to set up Discord.js. I learned a bunch of the basics like using VS Code's terminal to have the bot join the server and sending messages to the channel. From there, I knew enough to start experimenting on my own.

I started to research webhooks, and had something working pretty easily where each webhook could be associated with a different character, and it would show their icon and name. This was pretty much exactly what I wanted, aside from the names not having role colors.

But then I found out you're limited to 10 webhooks per server, and I have over 50 characters that I wanted to include in this, so that wasn't going to work. I then started to read through Discord.js documentation to see what I could do, when I came across embeds. I then worked through various stages of how I wanted it to look until I ultimately got to where I'm at now.

This was mostly through just trial and error. I eventually made a webhook for each color, then used embeds, functions, and roles to accomplish what I wanted.

I'm still looking into ways of hosting the bot online so I don't have to run the terminal every time I want to use these commands, but I'm getting there and this was a fun learning experience for the past week!

Thanks for reading through this long process! Not a lot of people know about my origins with mIRC, and it was really what started my interest in programming at the young age of 9-years-old. I probably wouldn't have as much interest in pursuing it further if it wasn't such a big part of my childhood. 

If you want to see more coding process blog posts, let me know, and that might be something I do more of in the future!

Slumbered Apart: Global Game Jam 2021

Over the weekend, my brother and I worked on our 7th Global Game Jam project together! This time was a bit different, since we weren't in the same room together, we worked virtually. It turned out not being all that different since we were screensharing and voice chatting the entire time. We just had to use Google Drive to transfer files instead of a flash drive.

Here's where you can play our game:

This year was also different with everything being online, so the theme "Lost and Found" was announced early in the week, giving us some extra time to brainstorm ideas.

On Tuesday, we brainstormed what the game would be about. Then on Wednesday and Thursday, I drew the walk animations for our two playable characters, Pamchan and Gojo.

Friday was when we started to work on the game more. I figured out some of the basic UI and we started programming the basic mechanics in RPG Maker MZ. This was our first time making a GGJ game in MZ, all the others had been in MV.

Saturday is when we developed most of the game. I started by getting a dialogue system working and some of the beginning story portions.

My brother finished one of the backgrounds, I imported the UI, and he got a system working where objects would be highlighted when going near them.

We continued to program mechanics, finalize art, and work throughout all of Saturday night and into Sunday. I ended up working on story and overall sequence of events more closely with the gameplay than I usually do in these projects, so it was fun.

Towards the end of the night, I helped clean up some of our more sketchy backgrounds.

And then after the last tests, I added the map and the ability for it to fill up areas over time as you explore new places.

And finally, we made the finishing touches and uploaded the final build to itch.io here and the GGJ website here! You can download it for Windows, macOS, or play online in the browser with the itch.io link.

This was the first time where I was able to play through our game and then go back and make small changes afterward. Normally I'm too tired and ready to be done, but this time I was motivated to make small changes and just make it better. There are still some things I would've liked to do to improve it, but I'm happy with how it turned out! And this was definitely the most ambitious project we did for one of these, but we ended up finishing it!

So in conclusion, some of the things that I learned and tried out in this GGJ include:

• Storing dialogue styles, pictures, and transitions in Common Events so that I could use them like functions, calling them every time a dialogue event happens. I started doing this with my other RPG project for game mechanics, but this was the first time I tried it for showing dialogue, and it made me less hesitant to do transitions and effects.
• Using player position data! We used this to switch between characters and save their map positions. We also used it for positioning the dialogue bubbles above their heads. I still could've played around with it a bit more to make those positions more precise, but it was a learning experience!
• Using simple switches to show a map that progressively unlocks each time you visit a new place. This one I actually made fairly easily in the last few minutes before we uploaded the project, it was just something I hadn't thought to do before!
• Utilizing plugins for allowing everything to be played with the mouse or keyboard. Previously I had always tried to program one or the other, but allowing the player to choose which gameplay style they'd prefer was a great outcome!

Check out our game and let me know what you think in the comments!

2021 Plans

It's 2021, which means 2020 is finally over!

Before I start talking about what my plans are for the year, here's my improvement throughout the years:

Looking back on last year's 2020 Plans post, I actually accomplished most of what I decided I would do: stop worrying about posting art every day and making it more for my own enjoyment instead. And while that was a better approach, and actually ended up helping me a lot mentally for that rough year, it still felt like something was missing. I think because life got so crazy, I wasn't able to fully complete the goal of wanting to do more with my story. I did a fair amount, but I do wish I had time to do more.

Because I'm not sure what 2021 will be like in terms of life and the world, I don't want to make unrealistic goals, but I still am going to make goals going forward, to keep myself motivated to work towards something.

So this was a theme last year, and it seems to be a reoccurring one for this year as well: In December, I usually get a burst of motivation during the holidays when I have more time off, and it inspires me to set goals of the year to come, based on how the year ended.

This year, I want to focus on game design. This could go a few different ways, and I'm not actually sure which one to strive for most. I'm not saying I plan to finish a game by the end of this year, because I know that could be unrealistic, but I do plan on making more progress on the various games that I've started, or potentially even start a smaller-scaled project that could be closer to finished.

Here are some options for games that I could work on:

• Nay Recruiters: an RPG with an alternate retelling of The Nays' story. I've planned out the playable characters and some gameplay mechanics, and have been working on programming a custom battle system. This is one of my more recent projects that I'd be interested in fully fleshing out.
• Detective Ragger: my college senior thesis project that I made back in 2015. I've been thinking about remaking this game into more of a point-and-click adventure in RPG Maker MZ, since there was some weirdness in how it was originally set up in VX Ace. The overall main story and concept art are complete as well. It would be different than the demo that I originally made, but this might be an opportunity to revisit a project that already had a lot of the basics figured out.
• Zandra and Yaguzi Project: a visual novel that I was creating concepts and story for a few years back that involves a lot of player choices, alternate endings, and gameplay mechanics relating to time travel. It was based on one of the Eventures in The Nays, and I never actually made a project file for it, but I did a lot of research and concepts, so it might be fun to revisit this project at some point.
• 2D Fighting Game: I've been wanting to make a 2D fighting game for a while, and my roommate and I recently were learning Unity and talking about maybe finally making this game. It would require a lot of research into gameplay mechanics, and learning more Unity (or maybe Game Maker?), but it would be something completely different from what I've done before.
• 3D Platformer: also a recent idea, where my roommate and I would be working on our own projects, but designing games at the same time. Mine was going to be about Uather and the orphans, and I made a test with some basic mechanics down. This is planned to be a very short, side project, mostly just to learn new things. This would require me to learn more about Unity and 3D art in general, but might be a fun challenge!
• OC Card Game: my friends and I started making our own trading card game last year. We've already made up most of the rules and what goes on the cards, it's just a matter of finishing all of the art and actually printing the cards. This would be a much smaller-scaled project and possibly able to do by the end of the year, so it might be fun to finish this project to have something more complete.
• Something else: I have various other RPG Maker games that I've started already that might be interesting to revisit, or maybe I'll come up with something entirely new. This is up in the air!

I might work a little bit on all of them, or start focusing on one of them to make more progress. I'm not sure which one that will be, but it'll really be whatever I'm most in the mood for. I want to keep this fairly open, but the main goal will be to work on games, make progress, learn new things, and continue to practice game design.

In addition to games, I also want to create more storyboards and finished beat boards for the Eventures that I've finished writing, so that I can turn them into Twine stories and start to actually share The Nays' story with the world. I feel like it's at a pretty good spot where there aren't a whole lot of Eventures that haven't been written, in the earlier times.

So overall, I think I'm going to focus a lot more on side projects, rather than writing and creating new content for the main story of The Nays. If I want to work on the main story, the plan is to work off of mostly what I've already written by creating storyboard or Twines, while the other side stories will be in the form of games. Obviously, I might write a few Eventures here and there, but that isn't the focus of this year for me.

I realize I'm most productive and creative when I'm working on a project at the same time as other people, so I'm hoping to get some other artists on board for working on personal projects and talking about them, so we can motivate each other! I want to simulate a college setting of being in the same class as other artists, but bring that to our own personal projects. I've mentioned this to a few people so far, but if you're interested and reading this, please reach out! I'd love to figure out how to do this.

So anyways, thanks for reading this! I know this year has had fairly long posts, but that's because I've had a lot on my mind and haven't made blog posts in a while. I can't wait to see what comes next!