welcome to the compound
Snappy title, huh? Sorry to be so slow catching up the postings on this page and mainly posting to Twitter/Tumblr now that I’m back to this project. I’ve had to miss a couple days but spent the morning putting in extra time to make up for that. Had some computer troubles this week and a few streaming engagements making the daily goal a little tougher.
Long time no cross post again, eh? Whoops. Today I finally got around to the 100+ follower/ Affiliate status stream I’d been wanting to do for a while, raffling off quickie free sketches to chat and hanging out. I don’t have a massive following, but a pleasant one, and it was a nice way to kill the afternoon and shake off a bit of rust. I’d been neglecting my sketch goals a bit lately and I really do feel it when I pick the pen up again. But I’m feeling a lot more stoked to get back to work again. So, here’s the roundup of sketches from today.
Also I’m finally about ready to dip my toes into the wet and sticky world of speed running.
Been pretty busy the past few weeks between settling into the new place and participating in RGL stuff, but still setting aside time to draw where I can and am not spazzing out. Luckily the things I was stressing most about didn’t come to pass (owing money for repairs and junk on the old place since it was a little junky since day one and four years of single guy dwelling didn’t help it out much, and some dickery involving the utility company0 and I’ve been back in a much more productive kind of headspace. My own channel and work are doing pretty decent right now, I’m now among the first bunch of streamers invited to Affiliate status, so if anyone catches me streaming and feels like, feel free to toss a Bit tip my way. I need to do some work updating this site to better show off my projects since WordPress was originally just adopted as an easy, more streamlined way to get text posts and articles online. It’s a bit trickier to get comic page layouts and gallery updates up and going.
So, on the subject of projects, I’m still planning to do the card game and set up a proper page for it to give an overview of the rules and general setting for the sake of gathering some interest, though the thing that I’m about to start seriously picking away at is, of all things, a re-imagining of Revolver Knight! It’s a drastic overhaul, but it should be a pretty massive improvement as a story too. I could gripe about the old one for hours (though I still don’t hate it enough to just pull the whole thing down) but the chief problem with RK, IMO was I just tried to jam too many ‘cool things’ into it. It was kind of intended to be a pastiche or mashup of stuff I thought was cool in various games and anime at the time, which probably should have been a warning sign from the get-go, but it was received decently in the beginning so I ran with it. Over time though, I kind of ran out of steam and the later chapters are rushed in an effort to show off more of the world but not really afford time to flesh them out by much. One of the biggest things I think will help is focusing more on the small-level story, sticking with the characters and their homeland and how things are affecting THEM and not forcing an ‘epic’ cross country trek. I’ve been roughing out the first chapter already and may release it as a stand alone .pdf or something to see how people enjoy it to see whether to continue it or focus on something else.
On another topic, I’ve been pretty interested in game randomizers lately, though the only one I’m really playing is The Guardian Legend one, TGL Worlds. It doesn’t have a very robust set of features compared to the Zelda ones where you can toggle some features for the seed, you just insert a rom and it spits out a randomized version of it. It also doesn’t really seem to check very thoroughly that it will give you a completable version of the game. But it does do the chief thing I want and actually alter maps, vs. just shuffling item placement between chests. It does some pretty wacky stuff and tends to cluster items and rooms of a same type together, making it easy to get overpowered (and overly costly) weapons early on… or create chains of 3-4 save chambers end to end. Still, it’s a pretty cool way to breathe new life into an old game I already like, just like trying to adopt some of the tricks speedrunners use to make some of the more aggravating bosses and stuff go down all the faster.
Woo hoo, it has been a time lately, lemme tell ya. But in a good way. After a good while following, I was brought on board at Retrogaming Live, which has been a nice boost to my Twitch presence along with a chance to show off some of well, MyGames. I started off with a playthrough of The Guardian Legend, moving on to a recent rediscovered favorite, Macross: Scrambled Valkyrie and Metal Warriors. My usual spot will be Wednesdays, 3pm-5pm though occasionally I’ll be filling in for other casters. Lotsa good people to watch on that channel, give ’em a look some time!
I’ve been taking some bigger steps towards getting My Stuff in order after saying I was going to over and over, I’m going to focus on finishing up Irrgarten and starting a proper page for it, then possibly offering a PnP version through Amazon or some self publisher venue if the ‘demo’ goes over well enough. In bigger news, if I didn’t mention before, I’m finally going to be getting out of The Box and moving into a larger apartment at the end of the month, which I’m both excited for and a bit anxious when I realize I have basically *no* furniture and I’ve almost forgotten what having room is like. It’ll be nice being able to get a couch or something though, and not continue sinking deeper and deeper into my mattress while I try to get work done.
Sadly, I gotta confess in spite of the sketch dumps basically evening out, I *have* missed a couple days in my SaD challenge, but mainly due to working on requests and stuff. I usually prefer not to make gifts/commissions public unless the recipient is aware and cool with it, especially when like original characters are involved and such.
Hopefully soon I’ll have some Irrgarten news to share since I’m going to be trying to focus on the parts I’ve been procrastinating (new dungeon tiles and redoing basically the whole item list so there will be more ‘utility’ items like keys and less redundant special weapons.) The hero cards are by far the most fun thing to work on but I think I’ve got plenty of those, time to focus on ways to maim them.