Friday Rambles (+bonus art +gamedev updates) 2022-02-24

It's already Friday...

I was gonna make a comic about Penny doing nothing but working on her project all year (standin for me just working on Game all the time), and then it having the same punchline Penny comics always have, which is she draws a cute Tiger-chan, except this time updated for the year of the rabbit.

It would have been something like this:

Bunny-chan! Rawr! (or whatever sound bunnies make)

I sketched a bunch of characters last night because I was so tired of writing dialogue and drawing backgrounds. It was the first time I'd drawn non-game related stuff in months. It was fun letting off steam. 

Some of the sketches turned out okay, like Bunny-chan, so I was gonna clean it up a bit and post it on Twitter maybe with a comic or whatever, but then I decided not to because it's a bit (okay, quite a bit) boob-y, and I'm supposed to be in wholesome Game Marketing Mode. But Twitter's loss is your gain, my Patreon friends!

(Still might finish it up later if I want to procrastinate more on working on Game...)

ANYWAY...

I made sprites for Skye's phone calls. The phone calls are important storywise, but you can also just not call her. Or anyone. That's fine too. But then you won't see any of these sprites that I worked hard on.

Here's what she looks like in game.

Some sprites (not all) for other characters so far:

I'm probably going to take the lazy route with merch and print a few of those character expression bubbles as stickers. Let me know if you like any in particular and I'll print them too. Or maybe I'll just print all of them, in a big ol' sticker sheet.

I also wrote a crapton of dialogue, working through the outline, but I still have a bunch to go. <Tiger-chan-says-youll-never-finish-this-shitty-ass-game-lol.png> And drew a couple backgrounds. The list of unfinished things grows smaller, a little bit, each day. 

Every update from now on is probably going to be more or less like this, because all that's really left is just "finish dialogue scripts" and "finish backgrounds" Of course, ideally there won't be many updates from now on left, anyway.

I've been planning (daydreaming about) the next game I'll be making when Dreams and Deadlines is a smash success and I can safely do this full time. (lol...........) It's basically "Skye's Airfryer Microgames" except expanded to be about all the Endless Monday characters trying to start and enjoy their respective weekends, but of course they have to suffer through a bunch of microgames to be able to achieve this goal. Yeah, this is actually going to be like Wario-ware or Incredible Crisis with little story stuff in between the segments. I wrote down a list of like 20 situations/microgames I want to make already. Hey! Stop that! Finish this game first!

Speaking of gamedev, gamedev also has a lot of non-game-dev stuff that's been taking my attention, which is the stupid marketing that I need to do to make sure people know about my game and buy it. There's a whole bunch of arcane lore you need to know about how Steam algorithms work and whatever. For example: The number of wishlists your game has affects whether your game is listed on the "Popular Upcoming" list, which in turn gives you multiples more wishlists in the weeks before your game launch, which translates to multiples more sales on launch, which gets you on "Popular and Trending" which in turn translates to multiples more sales on top of that! Which is why you see game devs begging for people to wishlist their game on Twitter, like, all the time! And which is why if you really support a game, you really should wishlist it, and tell your friends to wishlist it too!! (hint, hint...🥺)

Okay, whew, I'm finished typing this post, which was a nice break from typing dialogue. Now back to typing dialogue. Or drawing more Bunny-chan. Or maybe I'll take a nap. 

Anyway, thanks for your support, as always! See you next week, when I'm done with dialogue, or in a Bunny-chan drawing shame spiral.