dev diary: scattered thoughts (Patreon)

hi guys! posting pretty late today because… im tired!!! i spent last week finishing my new starry flowers comic and posting that, and otherwise i’ve just been resting. because of this… i have no game updates to share :'( instead i'll just barf some of the thoughts and feelings i've been having lately. sorry this will be a bit scattered!

i love comics!!!

i'm really on a comics kick right now. i don't know what it is--the past couple days i was reading some to get inspired, and like seeing good ones makes me really want to draw more too. i mentioned in the mirror call pdf that i'm already working on the next peristille comic (and i am!) but last year i also had written scenes for the in-between chapters of starry flowers. i thought for sure i wouldn't be able to draw them, but i'm gaining more confidence... gonna see if i can finish the thumbnails for those hehehe (it's nice to have different projects to fall back on between games)

i feel like.. with illustrations, it's so much effort just to express one idea. i could never do them all the time. with comics i can go forever!!! which makes sense too, because it's not like all illustrators would be good at comics--they're separate skills. but comics are too slow to tell a longform story in, which is why i ditched them for games in the first place! so as much as i'm in my YEAHHH MORE COMICS phase, i'm absolutely not done making games lol. it's just been really fun to do a mix of them!

loneliness

i debated getting into this here since it seems like, too personal maybe? but since it's related to my projects i think it's worth talking about, even just a little. i'm heckin lonely these days!!! by that i mean, i feel detached from the world in a way i didn't before--probably comparable to the physical loneliness people felt in the thick of the pandemic (that didn't affect me at all...). it's like, half self-imposed isolation, and half an effort to protect my mental health.

the part that sucks about it the most is like, i feel really disconnected from people's reactions to my stories/art. part of the fun of making and releasing something is getting to see people's reaction to it, but i've had to limit how much of that i actually seek out/let in due to anxiety. i end up feeling like "did anyone look at this? was what i made even good? i can't tell at all" even though i get nice comments all the time, it's like my brain doesn't hear them.

i got a nice email recently from the parent of a younger fan who said their kid was super looking forward to the daily updates for another piece of candy that week, and it made me cry a little, like, "oh yeah!! people DO read this thing!!!" ...even though it's obviously getting views every day, it was something like that that made me realize it was real and actually mattered to someone haha.

so... definitely just a bad brain thing i need to overcome! i'll get there :)

organizing my apartment ✨

i went down a rabbit hole of desk organization youtube a few months back, and spent a lot of time optimizing my workspace! at the same time, my household has started overflowing with anime figures (the yen is at historic lows rn omg) so we've been setting up our apartment to display everything nicely :)

it's really uplifting to live in a space surrounded by things you love! i'll see if i can take pics of my workspace once i get it sorted a little better hehe. really loving this peaceful life, even when our home falls into disarray because of all the figure boxes and packing material...!

that's all!

sorry for this all-over-the-place update. the most diary of all my dev diaries, haha. i actually had another post written up for today, but i decided to scrap it... maybe i can rework it in the future! we'll see how i feel once i'm a little less tired.

thanks for reading~