My wife is on a fairly restrictive diet and is picky to boot, so I’m trying to work hard on finding creative ways to make things interesting on a day to day basis. I really, really want to start making chili because it’s finally cold out, but I’d have to eat it all myself—I might see if my wife would be willing to try some Turkey Chili.
I’m also trying to replenish our candle supply. I make our candles because we use a lot but I have a lot of used candleholders I need to clean out and put new wax in.
I’m currently building a game pitched as “Twin Stick Dota meets Animal crossing”. Right now I’m unemployed and working to get a piece of the game presentable ahead of an indie game show and tell in about 3 weeks.
This last week or so has been focused on NPC behavior, which is one of the central mechanics in the game. You’re dependent on the NPCs to accomplish your goal (in this case, mine stones) but they also think for themselves, and act based on what they’re equipped with.
so that means a lot of wrangling AI states and I’m doing it wrong, but that means there’s some animated Gifs
Here’s the NPC’s swarming a rock, and when it’s finished the one miner with a carry bag goes to each fragment and picks them up, this took a few hours of trial and error because I’m a bad.
Recently added behavior that lets the NPCs attack if they’re threatened, they run back to the player if they’re scared, and if you jam the X button they all swarm an enemy
Doing this all by myself is daunting. I was laid off last month and the job hunt is actually worse than making a game all by myself. I have no idea if I’ll be able to market this. I really hope I have time to update the art to something more presentable soon.
I’ve had this game in my head for about 3-5 years now, and just 4 months ago picked it back up again in earnest.
I am rebuilding my old streaming/recording/editing setup. I’d like to try and get back into content creation after my last channel crashed and burned along with my motivation when my partner/collaborator (Dylon from the Internet Box podcast if you’re familiar) decided he wanted to focus on his channel and left the project. Setup is practically complete, still working on the motivation to click start streaming.
Also at my work, I’m specing out and preparing to build a professional broadcast setup for school use. Excited to dip my toe into the professional-grade gear I can’t afford to tinker with at home.
Got my Rick and Morty piece done (for my Patreon backers, week wait before it’s public) so now I gotta work on a huge piece on Deponia, PLUS articles on that same series for HG101.
As for something I did that just released recently, this Halloween special of my bad anime podcast. Quite proud of how this came out.
(TW: Sexual assault comes up because we talked about a light novel show)
I’m working on composing my first real instrumental guitar piece, track, thingy. I’ve been playing steel string guitar for a pretty long time now and I have only put up some covers but I wanna start making my own music.
I’m slowly working on editing Iwata Asks into some books to keep on my shelf. It’s something that I can’t believe Nintendo never offered in a physical form, and I’m scared of the day when they are no longer available online. The Iwata Asks section of nintendo.com actually went down recently, so having all the great interviews in a handy place would be wonderful. I’ve done a test run of one to see how everything translated from the screen to the page, so now I’m reformatting some things and working on the Wii Interviews!
Working on a Jet Set Radio fan soundtrack. Basically a collection of 15 or so tracks imagining myself as the composer for a new game in the series. People are really into it. Some samples from Twitter vids.
Trying to do a proper learning of Gamemaker by transferring a fully-fleshed boardgame idea into digital format. Early days and constant headaches from every angle with every step, ha.
I’m trying to find an “easy” way to make games using Python for my students in Code Club. I want a good goal for them to aim for that doesn’t require knowledge of OOP as they are 11 and 12, so not quite their yet.
At the moment, I think I’m going to make some non-graphical games and then spend a couple of months just on graphics. Just have to make sure they keep on enjoying it…
I’m a writer. I’m working on short stories for various publications and I also run my own subscription service called Forgotten Folios.
I write stories that take place in the past and then recreate them using period appropriate props and aging techniques on the paper. So for example the story about a young archaeologist running from the KGB and looking for ancient Roman relics comes with artifacts from the Soviet Union and even ancient Rome. The story that takes place in the 16th century is on old fragile paper.
It’s a whole lot of work and I’ve been trying to edge it into being my full-time gig for the last year. Realizing I might have to go back to doing something other than writing to sustain myself has been tough, so this last month has been a real slog.
I’ve learned a lot though, about writing, creating, running your own business. It’s A Lot, and made me much more vocal in sharing and supporting other artists when I can.
I was inspired by The Mysterious Package Company, which provides a similar service, though their products have less mailings and cost a small fortune. I wanted to play around with how writing is perceived. For me writing is not just about storytelling but about the form of the writing itself. Something handwritten today looks different than it would in the 80’s or in centuries past. Reading a series of letters between friends is so very different than reading a novel. It feels like you’re discovering something, and that’s one of the things I love about the Uncharted Games or Assassin’s Creed. You’re uncovering hidden stories that make the world feel so much bigger, full of more frontiers.
Anyway. Some great art up in this thread. Keep it up.
It sounds stupid but my current project is trying to get popular on Instagram. I make illustrations and I really want to make it my full time job to make art for a living doing commissions/prints/freelance etc. It’s just really important to be popular on social media and I can’t seem to make it click with people. Lots of likes from strangers but no follows. Bums me out. Can I be critiqued? We’re all projecting folks here in this thread- I’d love to hear from people what they think is good/bad because I’m at a real standstill here.
Current project is the same cyberpunk sidescroller I’ve been messing around with for way too long now. It’s embarrassing how long I’ve been working on it since it’s meant to be finished in a very short amount of time (like way less than five minutes). I’d like to be finished with it soon though because next month is NaNoWriMo and I’ve done that for several years in a row and found it really creatively fulfilling.
And then I have another game I need to do as a kind of cathartic exercise.
So here’s my advice and understand I’m not an artist but these are things I noticed that worked for others.
First the most important one, your website is non-existent. That should be your home base where you want people to eventually end up on because there you can link them to all of your work, your other social media accounts, and how they can contact you.
Second don’t focus on just one platform, not everyone uses Instagram. Branch out and get on as many as you can. You don’t need to interact with people on them all but when you post new art it should go up on all of them.
having a lot of instagram followers (or even just getting a lot of instagram likes) will absolutely not translate into more/more consistent comissions etc, unfortunately. it feels nice and eventually you might be able to turn it into a platform to promote prints/etc but mostly it’s just a place where you feel nice about getting numbers. these days i feel like you have to be a kind of “personality” no matter what you do and illustration is no exception - personally i’ve had way more comissions from my twitter where i just talk about videogames in between posting art once a week than i’ve had from an art-specific instagram. try to reach out to people you’d like to work with, do fanart for indie projects, etc. we might be on the internet but people still get jobs through friends and acquaintances.
this advice can be applied more widely but if you wanna get popular on instagram then you gotta figure out how to make your art ‘work’ on instagram more. think about the platform. working in a square format is cool, but the detail on your drawings ends up getting lost due to the scale. be more critical with your cropping. what if this looked like this instead? being able to see the neat details you put work into is way more interesting than seeing the pen you’re drawing with each picture. and don’t shy away from using instagram’s colour adjustment tools to make the inks look blacker than they maybe are. black ink looks nice.
when you’re looking at art on instagram or just checking out artists you like try to think about how you found them or why you like their work, both from a technical standpoint and a i’m-looking-at-this-on-instagram standpoint. some artists that work with ink and tend to have a good sense of how to showcase their art on that platform: @rome_adzan, @katsuyaterada, @ianmcque, @momopich.
i hope this didn’t come across as meanspirited! i’m very tired at the time of writing.
adding to this basically just to echo a Social Media Following For Art doesnt necessarily shake out into more work ime
i wasnt like Ultra-Famous but i did pretty ok on tumblr and like. even when i was giving away comic downloads for free, the post w the gumroad link would get a couple thousand notes and my comic would get like, maybe ten downloads
i dont have a public twitter right now but much like swords my exp back when i did was that just like. being present, talking to people, talking abt other hobbies etc ironically enough lead to more work than my actual Art Accounts. that’s not to say. go make an account and attempt to make friends solely w the goal being To Get Famous bc like people can smell that a mile off, just. maintain an active online presence and try to think of ppl as yr peers and colleagues u know
one thing also i found before i uhhh gave the fuck up is: you might get a few people who become like Regulars in terms of commissioning you and they are Incredibly Nice to have around. keep it Business obv but try to maintain relationships with people like that. if i was about to start a big push for commissions i would sometimes email ppl who’d bought from me a few times before just as like a “hey do you wanna jump in on this before i make An Official Post anywhere” that sorta thing? tho ymmv
I’ve mostly been working and saving money this year, but I just applied for a PhD in music and philosophy so fingers crossed that’ll come through. In any case it’s motivated me to do more reading and thinking than I have been lately and I’d like to keep that going.
Finally forcing myself to learn this piano beast after around 4 years of procrastination. It’s been difficult to find the time to practice now that music isn’t my full time focus, but it’s darn rewarding. Un Sopsiro - Franz Liszt
