A year of hermiting later
Hi there!
It's April, at time of writing. By the time I send this, it might be May, because I'm bad at keeping track of time. In my defense, this last year has been very wonky.
But! It's been about three (four...?) months since my last update, so that's actually a fairly normal schedule for me! What exactly has changed since January...?
Life Updates
Not much, as it turns out! I still work from home, and I will until the Seattle office reopens, which will probably be much later in the year. Eventually, I will return to Seattle -- though exactly when is still a question mark. I'm not looking forward to finding a place to live again.
Beyond that, not much has changed. I'm glad COVID vaccines are going out. I've been a hermit for over a year now. I'm ready to be done with video chats (I don't think we'll ever be truly done with video chats).
Project Updates
Last time, I mentioned that I decided to not take on any new projects until I finished or canceled them, except for Game Jams. Well, I'm proud(?) to say that I have not been very successful at that! But I did at least finish more projects than I've started in the first third of 2021, which I think is an accomplishment.
Xip & Xander
This was my team's project for Global Game Jam 2021. We made a puzzle platformer about a unicycle-janitor robot and their cat-AI buddy(?), where you have to swap parts in order to use various movement abilities. I was the artist, and did all the pixel art!
The game itself can be found here: https://kiraroci.itch.io/xip-and-xander -- and one of our team members did some video editing, so we also have a trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2OWgsFXD8E
Guardian of Ruin
I wrote another very long Revue Starlight fanfic, which -- it's twice as long as the last one I wrote, so it's 60,000 words. This kind of trend isn't really sustainable, but I'm having fun, so I will probably keep writing fanfiction! As with all my fanfiction, I wrote it assuming that it'd be enjoyable to myself only.
I did, however, draw cover artwork for all the chapters again, and turned them into a sort of art series of their own, which you can find here.
Operator
In this time, I've finally done the Programmer Move of making my own todo list app, because I kept on forgetting where I put my todos. I figured, if I made the app, I'm vain enough that I'd remember that, at least.
The app is called Operator, and you can try it for yourself here. The main feature I wanted was to be able to make todo lists and then write paragraphs about them to give context, because I'd forget the context around my lists all the time.
I've been using it for a few months, and have yet to forget about it, which is good...but we'll see what happens in the months / years to come.
Two Stand to Fall
At the end of April, I wrote a solo-roleplaying tabletop game with a friend, as part of Carta Jam. It's a game about love and sacrifice, and also recklessly charging into danger to rescue your partner who tried to sacrifice themselves to protect you.
This was my first (completed) foray into making tabletop games, and it was a lot of fun! I've played a few times now, and made some cute and some really tragic storylines, and I'm quite proud of what we put together. But this does make me wish I was better at graphic design, so I could make a fancier pdf...ah, well, that's a skill for another day. It's interesting, trying to design around text and print rather than graphics on screen.
Arms Race but it's a Play
...the obligatory project that I've been working on for many months, and that is definitely not complete.
In between everything else, I've been slowly whittling away at my stage play. Which is a precursor to finishing up Desert Angels. It's just a giant stack of projects at this point.
Progress is slow, but smooth; the stage is built, and lighting works. I've also begun adding animations to all the characters, and it's -- it's actually all coming together. Unfortunately, I don't think I can embed videos into this email, so you'll have to make do with twitter versions:
https://twitter.com/_morphous/status/1379191407995449344?s=20 https://twitter.com/_morphous/status/1383950008316096517?s=20
There are still quite a few challenges; namely, I've realized that there are certain actions that are much easier in a real stage play than in a game-engine play. Like actors picking up props. (I miss theater.)
I'm aiming now to get this play done by August. Or...a slice of it, enough of it that I can use the learnings to work on Desert Angels again. We'll see how far I get -- though I'm a little more confident in my ability to finish projects now, considering every other project in this update is actually finished. Wild.
That's all for now. I'm pleased to say that this email is fewer than 1000 words. We'll see if the next one stays that way, however many months later.