it's my freaking month and that means everyone has to listen to me. hi
the comics i planned on doing in late spring are nonexistent! i had a lot less time and was a lot more tired than i had bargained for—it somehow slipped my mind that i would have finals. and projects. right. ugh. i would still like to do these test comics, but they've been moved to the backburner.
the good thing is that they ran out of school to give me and now i can do whatever i want.
cat comic is going... alright. i'm a bit dissatisfied with the pace at which it's moving, but slow and steady wins the race and all that. i've switched over to using obsidian to organize it, which has been really fun! i like its focus on customizability cause if i don't like something i can just change it. cat comic progress has also been slowed because
it's SUMMER and that means i'm working on bad dream again. i made a commitment in entry 4 to release an itch demo by september. which means i have... i',m git commit... ummm. git commitment. finish the joke. thanks!
the battle system is more-or-less COMPLETE and i'm very happy with it! it's very extendable—i've got five or so actions with unique behavior that were atrociously easy to implement. the rest of the demo todo list goes something like
finish the party members' designs
work out an idea of their toolkits
workshop my three arena ideas
figure out some appropriate enemies
spritework spritework spritework
touch up the ui design
key art for the itch page
if i have time left over, i have some cool ideas for more game systems i'd really like to implement. we'll see!
i have a rough idea of what the game's gonna be about & design-wise, i think i'm going for a "crafts" theme... where each character has a different craft (woodcarving, origami, gardening, painting, smithing, whatever) associated with them.
- title
i'm dropping the upbeat blog accent. okay? this is serious. no more positivity on this blog. we're shadow the hedgehog now and serious and everything sucks. it's serious. i hauve covid and NOT in a horny way.
things i have learned from this experience so far:
life is so hard for me
joe biden should give me 1000000 dollars
god has afflicted me personally
nothing will ever taste good again
since the last blog all vestiges of hope have been sucked violently out of me with a silly straw. i eat dirt and worms every day. cough cough hack
just realized how much i love my friends. if you're reading this im giving you a big smooch on the cheek
the plastic death euphoria has still not worn off. everyone go listen to plastic death by glass beach right now. 1. amazinf music and 2. smacked me over the head with nearly all of cat comic's maimn themes. which is awesome. i NEED to buy it and hold it in my own two paws but it will be cheaper once i am at college. i must be so so so patient
other than that life sucks. procrastinating on things i should not be procrastinating on and feeling generally gross and unproductive and scared. can someone pay pal me $20
ok bye. look at this awesome image ardenna made for me
- the year starts like it all did—with explosives!
happy 2024! let's start the new year off with a bang!
i've remixed the index page, again—but no drastic site-wide changes this time! patch notes for index v5.1:
click to expand
tinted the white and black yellow and blue respectively. makes it a little easier on the eyes
where feasible, buttons now use the webcatz tricolor—#32a7e2, #e23254, and #e2a732—instead of individual colors. helps the page look cohesive (without disrupting the messiness)
made everything thicker. borders, shadows, text, splashes of color—helps it feel more... "solid"
removed the sidebars. the blank space helps channel attention to the nav (where it should be going) + rests the eyes
added some clicksplosion code adapted from mf2fm. for the next little bit imagine they are new years' fireworks
it is certainly the slickest of my designs. it's also a heck of a lot lighter — v5.0 had 7 different fonts that all had to load before the page did!! insane!! & most of them were used for like 1 button and that's it!!! sigh. i think v5.0's two-banner + three-column layout was better at creating a sense of "open space" and having lots to explore, but v5.1 feels much more calm and self-contained and, yeah, slick, i guess.
what does new year mean for webcatz? obviously, none of the promises i make in the next few paragraphs will *necessarily* come true, but i'd like to lay out some basic goals when it comes to my creative projects. i'm carrying two big ones into 2024—cat comic and bad dream.
progress has been proceeding very well on cat comic!! however, it's a very ambitious project—i've been aware of that since day one—and even if i had the story completely finished tomorrow i still wouldn't yet start publishing it. i'd like to get some practice in before i start the figurative marathon—over the first half of 2024, i want to finish at least one short comic to help me figure out workflow and style stuff! that'll probably be published on the site and mirrored (heh) on itch.
bad dream is an only slightly less tricky project. i'm starting to think of it as a bit of a "testing ground" for the more surreal imagery late cat comic will demand of me. i'd like to get a demo out on itch by the end of summer—this would entail three or so different arenas, a few interesting enemies, and a basic player toolkit (all friend-playtested). i can then use that, along with any feedback i might get, as a base to build the rest of the game on! it'll probably be a 2025-26 release, if it ever gets finished.
that's the big projects covered! other than that, i also want to do some more game jams—the ones i did over the summer had some of the lowest effort-to-return ratios of literally anything i did that year. i want to participate in a larger game jam (not just me and mart. mart can join if they want though i love you mart) and i want to do some non-game related jams too. we'll see if i can squeeze them in between everything else!
really wanted this bird but it was expensive. world is hellHolemy dog sitting in her crate because she is so scareys (fireworks)
2024 is gonna be a really interesting year for me. gonna be leaving my country for university & hopefully starting to chip away at transitioning... i feel like i'm finally starting to get on my feet, as like, a person.
dear readers, thank you for visiting this little site. i hope the new year brings you all nothing but love and kindness and all the good things u deserve. love u all dearly. peace
