Friday Rambles 2023-08-11 (Patreon)

It's Friday, and that means the Friday Rambles. It's weird, because it feels like Friday came a little faster this week. I guess that's what happens when the last Friday Rambles is on Monday.

The Steam Visual Novel Fest is ongoing, and I made another trailer for it. You can see it on my Twitter here. No one else did. Ha!

Above: Also not canon

Well, I'm having fun making them, anyway. Good warmup for actual story stuff.

In any case, the sale is going about as well as I was hoping for, and it looks like I can afford rent for a little longer. 

I've been spending a lot of time the past two weeks packing shop orders. After all these years of selling merch it's still just stickers lol. I really need to do something about merch. I wanna make really cool and good merch but I don't have the time or drive to git gud at all the work that goes into making good merch, especially with my time already being so limited that I barely have time to work on my actual priority, which is making video games to sell so I can eat food. Makeship is a promising thing happening later this year, but... whatever, maybe I should just make good games so one day Good Smile Company will notice me and make a Skye Nendoroid.

I updated my weekly email newsletter after like a month of no updates, to market my video game because it's on sale. Since everyone subscribed probably has bought the game by now, I also asked for reviews, after which I felt really bad. idk why asking for reviews feels so tacky. I mean, the Monster Prom series does it in their credits scenes, and they're a pretty big franchise. And it really does help. Speaking of reviews, EMDND only needs 56 more for "overwhelmingly positive"...

I drew a stupid shitpost pic because I was frustrated that I couldn't draw anymore. It's been something like... 3 months since the game came out, and I think I've drawn like two pictures since then? And it was all for game marketing. Not only was I completely out of practice I also had a hard time just drawing for fun, because it didn't feel productive. Must only work on game!

But I thought it was funny that Penny would immediately give up at the first sign of art block and dive headfirst into the field I used to work in (about which I have already expressed my opinions many times in many forms, (no shade to people who are in that field and actually enjoy the work)). 

I drew a follow up because why not? 

I think this is the first time I drew Tiger-chan since the game came out. Wow! And she's disappointed...

The story continues! It's becoming (even more) very stupid. But it feels like Tiger-chan is talking to me personally, in a way...

Spoilers for next comics: Thinking about one or two more sets of panels where Penny cries to Tiger-chan about finally finding what her true passion is and how her software-as-a-service application vendor company actually cares about her and how she's finally part of a work family now and how she doesn't need Tiger-chan anymore. The comic after that, she gets laid off during the Big Tech meltdown of 2022-2023 . And then tearfully asks Whiskey for her job back and Whiskey's like, "huh? you were gone?"

Or something like that.

ANYWAY, I've really had fun drawing these, even though the story is probably the stupidest thing I've ever posted online. I might just stop here while I'm ahead. It was really nice to just do some drawing for fun, though, for the first time in like 8 months. I think I might put these in the next issue of the zine, because they're a nice black-and-white format already, and I feel completely free to be as stupid as I want for the audience that cares enough about my work to buy zines.

As for the next game, I'm still fleshing out a few ideas. I think I need to just make a few prototypes and get on with it at this point, because I'll never know it's actually fun to play till it exists and I can play it.

Okay, time to go to the post office to ship my shop orders. Thanks for your support, as always! See you next week!