It’s been a long time since I was doing regular updates on this site, and I honestly don’t know who if anyone is going to be reading this. I just feel the need to kinda catch up with those of you still out there.
Getting more involved with Twitch and the communities therein, including/especially RGL came to take up a lot of my focus, and let’s face it- I ain’t getting any younger, so I’ve been making a proper amount of sleep a pretty high priority.
I suppose the original 2015 Sketch-A-Day project had sort of mixed results on my output, since it pretty much inadvertently ended regular [+/-] installments and I didn’t feel like it really lead to substantial growth when comparing drawings from the beginning to near the end, though it was nice in terms of improving basic techniques, particularly coloring and inking. I think I’m most comfortable drawing lightly with a thick brush to keep things nice and smooth without being painstakingly inking while zoomed in 300% pixel by pixel. Inking is still my least favorite part of the process so it’s been something I’m focusing more on this year. I should probably make a to-do list of weak areas to focus on because it feels like the longer I’m at it and the more artists I look at these days the further my confidence falls into the gutter. Lately I’ve had some encouraging new art pals to bounce ideas off of so that’s coming around. I really had surprisingly few artist friends for a long time for some reason or another, poor networking and people skills, I guess. Maybe my talent was always a ‘big fish in a small pond’ situation. At any rate, even if I still find myself thinking “if that person won’t acknowledge me, I must be trash” from time to time, I know better and even if I suck, I’m enjoying what I’m doing.
On that note, let’s talk about my new little game project a bit, shall we? I’ve always enjoyed the trope of anime girls in sci-fi/fantasy armor suits, like Galaxy Fraulein Yuna or The Guardian Legend and had kind of kicked around ways to work drawing them into projects, but falling into the ‘moe anthropomorphism’ sort of sub genre where people take inanimate objects and base a character around them really clicked with me, especially as a challenge in design itself. So, largely inspired by my Girls’ Frontline addiction, I started drawing a series of girls based on warplanes drawing from how much I loved visiting the Air Force museum near us as a kid.
Eventually once I had done enough random doodles of them to declare it A Thing, I got to thinking about what I could do to make a strategy RPG setup that would sort of carry the sense of speed and constant movement that aerial combat necessitates while keeping the basic rules as easy as possible to follow. As a Coding Impaired individual, I decided to follow in the footsteps of my other frozen project, Irrgarten and make it into a tabletop game with the logic if I could dumb things enough to work in a board game, maybe it’d be easier to expand on in computer game format later. I’ve gone through a couple very early test builds and it seems like it has some legs! Hopefully by the end of the week I’ll have a test build downloadable for people to try out. I typed up the core rules yesterday, so it’s just a matter of making up some test cards and game pieces, really. My work has been declared “essential” so I haven’t really had time to buckle down like I wanted until my vacation week hit and the COVID-19 distancing orders are a pretty good incentive for me to focus on something I’ve meant to do for a while. Who knows, maybe Irrgarten will come back. Maybe Eishi and Dixie, too. Possibly Revolver Knight because I had a lot of planning done towards remaking it, but thinking about that setting has me feeling kind of sour lately for personal reasons. Plane Girls, no- Critical Heaven has absorbed some of my other scattered ideas into it and hopefully becomes a fruitful project.
To sum up, basically; I’m not dead, I haven’t given up on the site completely, I just got busy and shifted my content production to other platforms out of laziness and convenience. But now that I look to ramp up original work, I’d like to put it in one, self-curated place again, so I hope you’ll all check in from time to time and see how things are going.
Wish me luck, and I hope some of you will come join me in Critical Heaven!
Special shout outs to Piku, Rich and Fistfulofkittens for being so supportive and interested in my recent work. It really helps a lot.