One month left in 2022! Time has flown fast for me! I’ve been trying to stuff as many of my art projects into the month as I can while keeping my sanity!
New Website
The first big thing I can say in November is that there’s now a new website for Blackmask and news of its development! This is a large task that’s been taking up my time. Even if I’m getting things down on this website, there’s still much to learn about self-promotion.
I will say to join the Blackmask Mailing List! It’s a direct way to get news of our progress without missing any of my posts due to algorithms. Now that the website is set up, it’ll be less confusing for anyone who’s been following my website and getting unrelated news.
Articles on development, story tidbits, and other related info will begin on this website, then span out to the other social sites. Mailing List features will also be available as soon as I can arrange it, so you can keep up with updates!
If you’ve been following this blog, my Twitter, and Instagram for news about Blackmask, I haven’t been working on much myself. But my programmer, Adam has been going all out on the game!
Here’s a new check-in blog post today! Things are mostly the same: drawing things for clients and dabbling in my video game, Blackmask with my pixel art streams.
I’m struggling with my direction to take the game assets without a straightforward gameplay loop that’s not full of wish fulfillment and feature creep. So, I’m stepping back from working on pixel art until I have a face to face meetup with my programmer and learn some more Unity.
Life’s been unpredictable for the past few weeks with doing extra hours at my day job, getting work done on Flawless Extraordinary Super Heroes, and Adam’s doing his own freelance stuff. I even took a short break away from art and the internet to reground myself and organize.
At the moment, I’m stuck on some things with Blackmask. I’m learning more workflows and thinking of a direction for making the background tile assets.
Right now, I’m learning new tips from pixel artists like MortMort, CupOhJoe and LumpyTouch when I can. I’ve also been trying out converting my art into pixels from 2D Will Never Die, It’s promising, but I’m not as happy with the current results.
My Twitch streaming schedule has also started to slip. Sometimes, I have a hard time getting into a headspace to entertain and draw for streams after work. I did one game stream to shake up my rut, but my machine isn’t good enough to play often. It might be a productive way to relax, but I don’t want to make my Twitch about gaming considering people followed me for my art.
Besides this, I’m staying a float, sporadically posting on my Twitter and Instagram. Most of my sketches I post there are environment concept sketches for Blackmask.
Sketching has taken a bit of a back seat more toward thumbnailing and writing game ideas down during my bus driving.
Despite having not much going on, I keep feeling a pressure on myself to do better than I currently am. I never feel confident that these sketches are interesting enough to post on my socials because they aren’t characters. I have a bad enough time thinking about social media as it is!
Progress on Blackmask presses on as I’m still making environments. It’s an uphill climb, but I can’t get discouraged.
For a short moment, I’ve been learning Pxyel Edit as it’s makes it easier to create repeatable tile sets. The program’s missing so many features that I ended up going back to learning more tricks in Aseprite.
With the fruits of Adam’s labor reveals a new progress video for Blackmask!
This progress video done between the last video and now, includes new additions of Slopes, Dashing, NPCs, and Enemies. There’s some jank of course, but development still persists!
Things are good. I’ve been doing holiday stuff, Etsy sales, video editing and new progress on my indie game!
My thanksgiving was well and my holidays are going alright. I cooked a nice dinner for my family and stuck together, caught up on some manga that I’d been missing out on like Dr. Stone and My Hero Academia and even purchased new games like Hollow Knight and The Wonderful 101 to get myself back into playing and thinking about video games.
I’m continuing my holiday sale on my Etsy store! Remember that it ends on December 18th, a week before Christmas! It’s the final week for my holiday sale! Stickers and Comics are great stocking stuffers!
