Blaze! (plus news and blog) (Patreon)

Some art of a character from the surface!  I fixed up one of November's sketches. :)  We'll be seeing a little bit of Blaze in chapter 5 (which is getting increasingly closer)....... and maybe elsewhere too. (I promised you Secret Gallery folks some more details about this, and I haven't forgotten!  I'm just still organizing my thoughts...)

I needed to skip last Monday's page update, but pages will return on 1/17.

Big thanks to everyone who replied with feedback to the Cooking with Belmont demo too!  I was hoping to reply to everyone individually, but it got away from me.  The feedback is super helpful - and still will be, if anyone else finds time to play it this month or next!  (Oh, and there's a new public channel for CWB discussion in the DOTU Discord too!) Freelance will probably start picking up this month, but I'm doing my best to wrap up the game ASAP.

So that's really it for news. The rest of this is more blog-like. :)

Aside from the usual work, I really needed to take my "free" time in December for a very important purpose - learning, studying, practicing, and trying to push my skills.  It's been hard to do that sort of thing since I feel like I'm always in production mode, cranking out work on a schedule.  So I needed it.

I got a new PC laptop and moved my 3D workspace to it - a necessity because Blender hasn't ever been compatible with my Mac graphics card, and v2.8 decreased the compatibility to the point that it would have become unusable on Mac, so I was stuck unable to update despite Blender having made significant usability improvements. But now my 3D stuff is back up and running on PC, and Blender 3.0 is SO GOOD.  The new setup will speed up my backgrounds a lot. (well, the ones I do in 3D, anyway.)  Still keeping my trusty old 2015 iMac for all my other work, though it might not have too many years left in it...  Why is good tech so expensive ;_;

I also needed to explore some approaches to art that would help me work faster, so I spent a lot of the past 1-2 weeks organizing assets and testing techniques.  I'm not young anymore, so I need to think about what stories I want to tell, and how I can fit them all in.

This art of Blaze was actually a study of a much quicker style than what I've been doing for DOTU - pencil lines, much fewer layers of shading, and full color. Yes, color makes it faster!  I don't have to spend as much time shading to visually separate things.  And color flatting, unlike shading, can be outsourced if needed without changing the look of the art.  I might bring more color to DOTU in ch5, we'll see...  It'll definitely be part of my other projects, though.

This post is patrons only, but will go public next week.