2021 Update (aka what happened in the rest of 2020)
Hi there!
It’s 2021, somehow. The last time I wrote an email…was April. Whoops. A lot has happened in that time, both in my life and in the world.
In any case, I have had very little headspace to reflect upon personal projects over the last few months…but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been making things. I have, indeed, been making things, and generally not telling people about them. I said, I think a year ago, that I was going to start writing emails to announce releases of new work, and I have proceeded to forget to do that every single time. Whoops x2.
So, instead of the regular update I should’ve been giving, I’m going to dump an entire half a year’s worth of updates all at the same time! (Okay, I have published a variation of this update elsewhere, but in the abyss of time I didn’t send it as an email until a month late, so this is now more like…two-thirds of a year’s worth of updates.)
Life Updates, aka ‘Things I made starting from May 2020’
May
Strike
Strike is a web-based 1-bit paint program that you can use here.
I built this after participating in HyperJam in April (which was a game jam to build a game using a classic Mac emulator and HyperCard). I’d found HyperCard to be a surprisingly nice little paint program, so wanted to make something that’d feel like that.
I consider this project done; there are no features that I feel like it needs, and I’ve been using this as a doodling program. In general, I found in 2020 that I’ve really enjoyed making some simple software tools, like this program, like my site generator, because then I really know how they work.
June
I drew swords. A lot of swords, totaling 21 pieces.
June was a pretty hectic month, so there wasn’t much else I felt like doing.
July
At some point this year, I got back into Revue Starlight (an anime about theater school), and more importantly, got into Revue Starlight fanfic. July was about the time where I started more seriously writing fanfiction.
Paper Faces
I also made a game called Paper Faces over the course of two days by myself, which is an experience I don’t recommend. It’s a top down knife-throwing arcade game, and can be played online for free.
August
Continuing my trend of ‘getting way too deep into Revue Starlight’, I drew a series of six pieces for Starry Diamond, an album / series of storylines.
September - October
I spent most of these two months writing large amounts of Revue Starlight fanfiction, including one that ended up being 30,000+ words long. Because of who I am as a person, I also drew cover art for all of them.
I didn’t touch game development at all during this time, which I think is the longest I went without doing so for a long time.
November
…with the fanfic mostly done, I got back into making games!
Desert Angels
Desert Angels is still a game about blowing up trash and maybe some bad memories in a desert scrapyard.
When I last left it, I was hoping to make a demo by May for the Seattle Indies Expo. That clearly didn’t happen. It wasn’t until November that I finally picked up development again.
Given everything else that’s going on, I’m not sure how long this will take, nor am I going to rush it. There is now a cutscene engine in the game that can draw dialogue boxes and have simple character animations. I still need to actually make the cutscenes, but the tools are now in place.
Divine Intervention
I also joined the Seattle Indies game jam with a few folks, and did some programming work for Divine Intervention, a short turn-based battle JRPG where you assemble a team of demons and angels to power up your strategies.
It can be downloaded here, but note that it’s only available for Windows.
December
I made a text editor in two days, for some reason. It edits text, and has a search feature, but it honestly is not any better than any text editor you can already get for free – so there really wasn’t a great reason to make it. As a result, I haven’t formally released it; I decided that I’ll only publish it if I develop a feature that isn’t already in every other basic text editor. Which may or may not ever happen.
I’ve been using it to write fanfiction. Which…I’m writing an even longer story now.
Arms Race, but it’s a play
In January, I mentioned that I wanted to make a ‘short’ game. In April, that turned into a stage play somehow.
And by the end of 2020, I had taken that stage play, and was turning it back into a…3D interactive cutscene, I guess. Given the pandemic, and also the fact that I have no idea how to stage a play, I decided I’d stage it in Unity.
It was also a good chance for me to learn how Unity’s Timeline works, as well as Animation Rigging, both of which will be useful for Desert Angels. But like all my other projects, this is still incomplete; all the systems are done, but I need to finish implementing the content.
However, the goal of this Unity ‘staging’ was always for learning purposes, so ‘done’ might not end up being a finished, polished product.
What now?
Near the end of last year, I took a look at my ongoing projects and realized – that there’s way too many of them. Somehow I’ve accumulated 10 unfinished games, and now I’m adding personal tools and fanfic on top of that. There are projects I mentioned in my January 2020 email that I haven’t touched since then!
So with that in mind, I’ve decided that in 2021 I’m not going to take on new projects until I either cancel or finish an existing one. (The exception being game jams, since those are always done within a week.) I don’t know if this means I’ll actually finish anything, but we’ll see how this turns out.