Rad Palette Studies Azaraih Did To Be Used For Selkie Game Backgrounds Later. I'm Really Interested Weather

Just rewatched Pacific Rim, I LOVED it the first time but hadn't had a chance to see it again since. Ugh just as good second time around. I have a lot of feelings about Pacific Rim and how much I appreciate it but I won't really get into all that at the moment. I'll just say I enjoy it a ton :] Watched some of the special features including the drift space which was really interesting (although I wish we'd seen some drift facts about the Kaidanovskys, the Wei triplets, etc) and the bloopers (which solidify the fact that everyone on this film is super adorable.)

Watched the digital artistry feature too and it was awesome seeing del Toro's thoughts and input and creative process and how teams worked together with him on making the film. I always love watching this stuff on special features - production stuff, concept art, art direction, all that goodness that goes into making films and games and comics. That's why I'm so into "art of" books! I've been thinking about this more often lately so I think I'm gonna try to look more into this kind of development stuff. This stuff is fascinating to me and I wanna soak it up like a sponge.

Me? About to read 270 Miles and More from the beginning again just so I can drown myself in your beautiful writing? YOU BET! Obsessed. Thank you for sharing. 😭

Omggg you are the sweetest thank you and bless you!! :’] Haha I gotta read it all again myself so I can remember what the heck I’m writing as I pick it back up for Ch 6 writin’. Wish me luck! 

@azaraih and I are back on our bullshit, and by bullshit I mean having a good time making games together again. Been a while since we’ve posted about game making! 

Currently, we’re trying to make the smallest possible VN that still feels personally interesting for us to work on, and basically it’s turned into Awkward Lunch Conversations: The Game. Here are some sprites I’ve been making for one of the characters you can interact with in the game. Unnamed at the moment, but non-binary with they/them pronouns.

I’ll talk about the game more soon, but pretty much my thought process was “What are VNs great at? Character interactions like conversations. What’s a super small, limited character interaction you could do? Having lunch with one other person. How can I make this more interesting for me? What if you don’t actually remember who you’re meeting for lunch, and why.” And that’s pretty much how our game started. Current title is Lunch with J. 

Thanks for reading!

Fixin’ up some refreshments for a tea party

I’ve been drawing a bunch of fruits and herbs while @azaraih programs them with magic so you can drag & drop ingredients to the carafe and assemble these infused waters in our game. More kitchen fun to come!

So this is, oddly enough, an insight into the weird shenanigans I get up to at work. It started when Edmond imed me to ask if I had any Hostess Ho Hos at my desk. Explanation of convoluted work shenanigans under the cut.

I said no, and that since I had no car it would probably take me a while to walk to a store to get some Ho Hos. He asked me if I thought we could trick Ellen into getting some and I said, possibly. He suggested I fake a coma, and then they'd find a note in my jacket saying they needed to feed me Ho Hos to revive me. I said I wasn't confident in my ability to convincingly fake a coma. Edmond said he'd do it, but he'd already done it twice so it would be suspicious. I suggested he fake the coma and I pretend to be a doctor to legitimize his medical need for Ho Hos. So we did that. 

This whole Ho Hos thing inspired a pretty long email thread too, but I won't really get into that. At one point though, Ellen joked that we'd eat Ho Hos at our bi-weekly instructional designer jam session this week while Edmond would be out of office. Edmond told us adamantly not to eat Ho Hos without him.

We probably wouldn't have eaten Ho Hos without him, except that the next day, Ellen discovered a pack's worth of peeps hidden around her cubicle, including drowned in her water bottle. (The peeps are a whole nother Thing I won't even explain.)

A little revenge was, thus, in order. In addition to relocating the peeps to hiding spots around Edmond's cubicle (including the rescued drowned peep, now placed in a bowl and perturbingly still soggy a day later), we decided to eat Ho Hos at the jam session while Edmond was gone. 

And of course, if you're trying to make someone envious of your Ho Hos, they've gotta be damn magnificent. So we decided to try for some fancy plating. Ellen provided the Ho Hos (we've actually got an extra pack to give Edmond - after he sees the photos of these ones) and the little plate. I brought in the Torani sauce, glitter, and carved the strawberry roses.

tldr; my co-workers and I get kind of ridiculous and now I have gained the useful life skill of knowing how to carve strawberry roses.

Today was cool! And terrible.

Today was cool: 

Hey again! I still live. Still working on getting my work/life/etc balance in order, sorry I haven't been posting much at all for a while. Recently apartment hunting's been thrown into that mix, so. Someday I will be on top of my shit. Someday.. 

Got news today that tomorrow I'll be put onto my first instructional design interaction prototyping assignment! For Google?? I'M SCARED AND EXCITED. I'M HEAVY BREATHING CAT REACTION IMAGE. I'm real stoked to try my hand at it and it's awesome I'm being shifted towards more instructional design stuff in addition to the scripting, QA, and revisions I normally do. I also was part of some client conference calls this week and that was cool. I like my job a lot and I'm horribly fond of my co-workers. Today an email/im highfive chain made its rounds in our studio. I got a couple ims that just said "/highfive!" followed by an im instructing me that my new top priority was to send Tim an email with the subject "/highfive!" and paste this image into the body. Basically, I work with a bunch of kawaii as hell nerds. 

To people who follow me for game/otome stuff, azaraih and I have been getting pumped to work on the selkie game again, and I know tiny-shout's been doing some writing for Prince route on and off. 

There appear to be some new folks here who seem to maybe have been lead here by AFA? Hello? Haha welcome. Uh, like I said and as you can see, I haven't been posting much. Thanks for checking me out though! :]

Uh, sad stuff under the cut. Not related to anything else I said here, but..

Today was terrible:

Well, in the middle of writing this post I found out an amazing professor I had, Adrianne Wadewitz, has died. Prof. Wadewitz was such an awesome person that I honestly just don't even know how to believe that she's gone. She was seriously fucking cool, and brilliant, and nice. And I really don't know what to say, but this news is just...so incredibly awful that I felt it'd be somehow...really strange to post about cool things that happened to me today without mentioning this truly terrible thing that happened. So if you'd like to learn a little about (and maybe in some small way honor?) an incredibly smart and cool woman who did great things with digital and literary scholarship, and for whom I once helped build a rad website about the New England Primer, this was Adrianne Wadewitz. 

I draw @azaraih's characters 500% more than my own, so sometimes K reminds me it'd probably be cool to think about and draw em again. Gettin a feel for them back. If you saw some of my sketchbooks in college or high school you might recognize some of these guys, though they've probably changed.

K is great at making cute games! Stay tuned for our pleasant robo game

making a robot game!

I decided to do NaNoReno this year since I’ve been getting back into working on Ren’Py games recently and thought it would help push me to finish a project. I’ve decided to work on a cute little scifi game called Grandma June’s Robot House since I love robots haha. So here’s a little info about my project so far. Good luck to everyone else who’s working on NaNoReno games!

Synopsis June is an old lady who has always loved robots and has collected many of them over the years to help her around the house. You play as the Artificial Intelligence in charge of running the household and wrangling the other robots. The game takes place one day when June tells you she’s expecting a special guest and wants you to prepare everything so the evening will be perfect. But a lot can go wrong when you have to manage a whole house of robots with a wide range of ages, talents, and personalities. Team I’ll be working on art/writing/programming, @somonasticwill be helping with some things too, but I’m not sure yet how we’ll divide things up. I haven’t done much with music/sound so I’d probably find some free stuff to use.

I’ll update once I make some progress on this!

I really like buying stuff in Artist Alleys or ordering from artists online, and I’m SUPER excited when there are bonuses like adorable packaging! These are all double-sided acrylic charms from laughingbear. They’re awesome and I will definitely be buying more stuff in the future! Probably some more charms and some stationery c: 

I put these guys up on my cubicle wall. The horde of small adorable things in my cube is growing. I’ll post some more pics of it sometime and do some posts on other merch. 

Store is here with all kindsa goodies!

I’m enjoying aisle 6 remix.

Thank you so much anon! I'm enjoying writing it so far :]