Did a lot of stuff, actually! Did more 3D commissions, gave color to a whole bunch of OCs for the first time, finally started making a prettier game dev document like I’ve been saying I’d do for the past year since I worked on a couple kickstarters and realized how fun it is to make big text documents pretty with diagrams and pictures, got a job interview, made a 3D chicken, made a game blog, didn’t get the job, etc. etc.
It was a lot! And as a result I have a ton of things that need to get put somewhere. Being confronted with trying to get a decent job also made me realize how woefully unprepared this site is to serve as a portfolio right now. For one, I’ve got all that stuff I just mentioned and more that isn’t even on here yet, but the layouts never really got properly finished in the first place because I tried doing everything at once and got fatigued with it. Putting together and maintaining a website is hard work! So going forward this month, hopefully this week, my goal is going to be to revamp this place, upload and organize more of my art, and assemble proper project galleries where I can actually describe and talk about the work that went into projects, which I’m pretty sure is something you’re supposed to do.
The best way I can think to start getting all of this mess organized is by talking about it here. So without further ado, it’s time to talk about all the stuff I actually did do, starting with that game blog I mentioned.
This picture isn’t actually on the blog, it’s the main header for the design doc. Fits very nicely here though, doesn’t it? Anyways the game blog is called FarmGame2 on tumblr, because farmgame was taken and we don’t have a different title. No complaints.
The only things on the blog as of yet are the ensemble picture of the dateable characters in the game and a short “About” post, but there’s a few pieces of old art ready to repost once I put proper alt text on them. I’m trying to be better about doing that.
Since I haven’t gone into detail about it here yet, I’ll save you the trouble of navigating to that post and give a quick summary. Farm Game is a collaboration between me and my partner, Stump, to create a farming/life simulator in the same vein as Harvest Moon 64, and specifically that game because of the more detailed mechanics it has surrounding community and relationships. We’ve been brainstorming about it since sometime in 2019 and we’ve finally gotten to the point where we feel ready to start making it and posting about it.
I’ve been posting a few things here and there that were done for it for a while, like the 3D cottage interior and the picture of a person sitting on a porch in the rain, but the game itself was never mentioned in any official capacity until now. It’s intimidating to post about, to be honest! But we really love this game and everything we’ve come up with for it so far, so I hope everything goes well with its development and that everyone else likes it too!
I’ve been really into using clip studio’s guache brushes lately.
There isn’t too much to say about the design doc I mentioned before, except for the fact that design doc probably is the wrong thing to call it. It’s more for sharing the basic gist with people than detailing mechanics, but the reason why it’s taken so long for me to make it is because I’m pretty bad at getting to the gist and very eager to explain in detail to you what “weather” is and every painstaking step involved in how you farm by “planting seeds” and “watering crops”, which is probably useful to someone, but not anyone that the doc is intended to be read by. I think this is maybe my third or fourth attempt at rewriting the same document about the same thing. It did lead to me rereading some notes in previous versions which was a lot of fun. It reminded me about a lot of important mechanics I just totally forgot about, and it also reminded me of bad ideas I had like the player carrying around a baseball bat for fighting off wild animals, which was delivered in the same breath where I went on about how much I hate combat in farming sims. I have no clue what I was thinking with that one. There’s also a section heading titled “Types of Socks” which is followed by exactly zero elaboration.
The document will be shared whenever I consider it to be satisfactorily finished, which is a measure of judgement that can change by the day. Hopefully it will be sometime in this year that it gets finished. Until then, I probably won’t share many more details about what Farm Game is in concrete. After all, it may have been like 3 years but it’s still early development. Everything’s thoroughly in flux.
I just scrolled up and saw how much text I’ve written, so let’s wrap this up with one last thing. I made a chicken!
Birds have actually been a hell of a thing for me to make ever since I started focusing on 3D and tried making a crow with functional wings. It did not work at all, and led to me actually trying to learn how to rig. Now, full years later, I’ve finally pulled myself together enough to try again, and I’m proud to say the chicken’s wings do work! It took a lot of trial and error that I plan to go into when I make a nice project page for it. There’s a goofier summary of the progress on tumblr, if that’s of any interest.
The animations are still in the works for this one, since chickens are weird to animate and I don’t have the best idea of what all animations I want to do for it in the first place. I will say that compared to the video I posted which was requested by people on tumblr, I have since fixed the walk so it looks much more realistic.
I had once wanted to make one animal like this per month, and they would be the big focus of these regular blog posts. Considering how this guy went, I don’t think that will be happening, but that’s okay because I’m very much still learning. I’ve really improved so much though, and that’s something I’m very proud of!
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