End of Year: 2023 (Patreon)

It's that time again. Hard to believe this is the seventh time that I'm making a post like this!

That said, let's just jump right into it:

This post will recap the year's productivity and highlight some stand-out releases from throughout 2023. I always put a lot of effort into these posts: I think they're a lot of fun, but also because I find it really useful organizationally and mentally.

That said, if you're not here for the recap and you just want to grab that sweet loot, I'll put a download up front for the 2023 Patreon release bundle:

• 2023 Yearly Patron Bundle

NOTE: Some browsers have a hard time with .zip files. If the download isn't working, make sure to right-click and 'save as', or try a different browser.

Now with that out of the way-- we can take a look at some of the highlights from this year:

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More Tribes

This year had a few patron releases that might been a fun surprise when they showed up as a regular release: they dropped with multiple characters all at once. The idea is to have the sprites for a whole faction: hopefully enough to fill out a whole town or village in your game world.

These started this year with the Elf Pack Expansion, which was originally a special commission. I loved how they came out and I knew that the dark elf set was something that had been requested before, so I gained permission to share them.

Later on, we had a few more tribal sets: the Rat-men base was shortly followed by a set of Rat-men characters. I think that these guys were much-needed as an alternative "bad guy" tribe that was different than the original orcs.

Another special commission inspired these two sheets of characters that I called War Elementals, which are a bit different than the other tribes, but could definitely have a use, especially in some sort of sci-fi setting.

And lastly, just this month I finally put together a tribe of Myco-folk, the mushroom-people, based on a long-standing patron request.

These tribal sets are always fun to share-- even if they take a lot more time than a regular single-character release. I hope that you were able to make a lot of use of these additional tribes, and maybe we can expand on them even more in the future.

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Ships and Airships

Another set of releases that I'm really proud of are the ships and airships that I updated and shared this summer.

Really these started with this airship sprite that I made towards the end of the previous year, but in 2023 I revisited them and expanded it into a more complete collection.

The full set now has diagonal frames for the airships, which makes them a lot more useful on the world map and can really give a sense of flight. And after doing those, I knew that I needed to make a set of sea ships with the same style and animations.

And then I finished off the group with an adorable little sheet of 16x16 ships. They're essentially the same style, but shrunk down to fit into a single-tile, because that might be a more useful style for a lot of RPGs.

Ultimately, I'm really proud of this little collection-- don't be surprised if they show up in some sort of expansion pack in the future (I might want to include them in the Elements world map tileset pack-- whenever we get there!)

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Elements Tile Set Releases

Speaking of Elements tiles packs... this year saw the launch of the tileset side of the new Elements series... with not just one pack: but two!

The Hometown Tileset and the Caves and Mines Tileset were both created and published this year. I'm very proud of them as some of my finest-- and most detailed!-- environment work, and I think that they're a great start to the Elements series of tiles.

Of course, it will take a long time to reach the sheer volume and variety that's available in the Time Fantasy series. We've been building onto those for nearly a decade now (wow!)-- but I know we'll get there eventually.

The quality of these tiles is simply better than the older TF stuff-- I've learned so much during all this time, and I put those lessons into really pushing myself with this new series.

I'm looking forward to making another new tileset pack in this style in the new year!

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Honorable Mentions: there's two more events from 2023 that I wanted to give a special shoutout before we wrap up this year's recap thread.

At the beginning of the year, we finished and released a fun little RPG Maker game called Buddy Boy.

Buddy Boy is a chain game, it was organized and developed by people in the Something Classic discord server throughout the year of 2022 and finished in the beginning of 2023. Everybody took a turn making their own chapter until the story was finished, and the fun part was that you couldn't look at the game until it was your own turn to add onto it!

It's something that was just pure fun to make and share with friends, and the finished product is a little game worth being proud of-- I'm happy that I got to share it with you!

If you're interested in the whole chain game activity, my buddy and I set up a little site here. Check it out, it's a ton of fun. Maybe you can organize a chain game with some of your friends.

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And lastly, I wanted to make a special mention of the Collections that I created here on patreon.

This is one of those rare new features to the website that actually seemed useful instead of just being annoying 😅.

Seems like a great way to help patrons-- especially newcomers-- find what they are looking for, and maybe get some inspiration for their game projects while scrolling through.

• Collections Page Here 

I spent a whole weekend going through the backlog and organizing previous releases into some big collections that made sense for me. Not every post fits into a collection of course, but I think it's a great way to showcase the real depth of the patron release backlog.

We can always add more collections in the future if we think of a good theme that makes sense, and going forward with new releases, I'll categorize them if they fit into a collection.

I hope that you can get a lot of use from this new feature on the page.

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Now I want to wrap this thing up...

In the end, I can't help but acknowledge that this year wasn't nearly as productive as I'd originally hoped for. After a significant death in the family this summer, things got shaken up for my family, making for a lot of chaos and then giving me some extra responsibilities-- and ultimately my productivity hit a low point for a few months in the late summer and early fall.

I can't help but feel bad about the severe delay in the Elements character expansion-- I had hoped to release it much much earlier in the year (instead of scraping by with a patron beta the day before Christmas), and I'd also planned for an additional tileset expansion before the year was over. Unfortunately that just wasn't realistic, so I apologize for that.

Let's hope that next year we can make up for it with some more consistency in the bigger releases.

Oh, by the way: if you've actually read all of this, the secret password today is 'gauntlet'; so if you work that word into your comment, I'll know that you're a true hero.

Although: I will say that I'm proud that the regular patron releases didn't take too much of a hit-- things were a little bit... flexible... for a while there, but in the end we've remained overall consistent. So even though the bigger releases took quite a hit with the delays, I did so to avoid messing up what we've got going on here. 

Remember: I do treat the regular patron requests and releases as my main priority: I emphasize patrons as my primary focus for my job doing pixel art. 

And I'm very proud of that, and remain thankful for you for allowing me this dream job where I get to be creative!

Let's look forward to 2024!

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I'll be back on Monday with the new request thread for January. See you then!

Thank you for everything.

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Previous Yearly Reviews:

• 2022 
• 2021 
• 2020 
• 2019 
• 2018 
• 2017