I guess I didn't really get past that fear of oversharing last year, eh?

2022 was a lot of things for me, a focus on pushing ahead in other areas of life but also trying to steer the creative ship in a more hopefully fruitful direction. It's something I still haven't completely set in motion, just a plan I keep building on. After years and years of organizing my characters and universe, putting together a game plan and formulating exactly what I wanted to make, I came to a realization I needed to start even simpler and there may be a decent compromise in there.

So, I've had to re-think where I'm putting my creative energies when it comes to my projects. The big stuff is pushed even further back, a goal I'd like to strive for later on down the line, but what I have in mind now will hopefully be more achievable in a shorter time. I just want to start putting things out there, and while I know I'll always keep being 'me' and trying to overdo it, I think I'm finally down to a point where I might actually be able to make good on the promise of making something playable, tangible, maybe even good~

I feel like a lot of my indecisiveness has led to better and better outcomes, being able to recontextualize ideas and come at them from a fresh perspective later, but I'm also pretty scattershot, unable to really hone one particular area down to a fine point. It's probably part of why I have nothing to show - it's all sketchy, concepts and ideas not fully fleshed out, and all over the place. This year I hope to work on that, and get focused again.

It often feels like I've wasted my time and energy, making all sorts of designs that I change up massively, even had an entire finished 'species guide' for my crow-like race that I scrapped before it saw the light of day because I wasn't super happy with it and their whole design has changed enough to invalidate that work. I've put weeks into models and animation I probably won't even be able to salvage because my needs have shifted. I have two characters in particular who I've never shown off once, but I've radically redesigned top to bottom like 3 times each. But it all serves the purpose of learning, improving, honing and fleshing out designs.

I really should find more to share, though! xwx It's all a process, and everything's expected to change, but there's still something worth sharing even if it isn't stuff that's made for posting.

I know I haven't been posting much on here yet, but it's not for lack of stuff I could toss up, for sure. For more than a year now my game's been sitting around as a half-finished prototype (the prototype being half-finished - not the whole thing! It's sitting at like... 1%, if that~) collecting dust while I work on worldbuilding, story bits, trying to wrap everything together and flesh out more of the universe. I spent a few days this week designing a species that I'm certain I wouldn't even be showing in my first game at all. It's just that the scale of this universe is such that I kind of need to know more about these little odds and ends so I can better understand the characters I actually go into detail on, and where they came from, and where my story will eventually go. I'm sure I didn't need to spend the time coming up with their appearance, but that's part of the fun~

The weird thing for me is, I'm still in this strange spot where I know I've shared so much stuff that I now consider half-baked, or in some cases just straight-up raw, and I stumble a bit with how to manage that. The familiars have changed a ton since I originally decided Bit wasn't just a glowy one-off half-computer thing. I feel like I give people the wrong expectations when I just show the things I'm drawing, like I start to feel like I can't change them.

But I can, and I should! Heck, I recently had more revelations for the familiars and how they work which explains design elements I previously left to pure aesthetic, and in doing that I've gone back and touched up the newest designs once again to make sure they line up with that logic. I've had finished refs for a lot of characters waiting around, but if I posted those months ago, they'd already be (sort of) outdated. I'm not sure it matters at all, but for some reason I get tangled up inside thinking about how I need to change a character I just got done changing and posting, like if I put them out there for the world to see then I'm putting my 'finished' stamp on them and that's that.

That's all to say nothing of spoilers, which I'm still sort of internally grappling over. I'd love to open up all about the familiars and what they are (so people can make their own and they would fit the universe), the different categories and how their powers work, but then how deep can I really go without giving away everything? How much am I going into the nuts and bolts of my universe which would give away secrets that make the systems so much more intriguing? The familiars tie in deeply with a 'magic' system which subtly influences pretty much everything and I think that's one of the bigger things my universe has going for it... which is definitely something I don't want to give away.

I guess when it comes to this stuff, I'm lacking a point of comparison. I don't have good examples to follow except for big game studios, who basically just coldly keep every single thing tightly under wraps until the whole project drops in finished form. That's not what I want to do. I want to share things, but I need to get over this strange fear of letting people see 'too much' or 'unfinished' stuff.

Ha

get it?
Because I do game dev?

The two 'c's in my username is kind of a disaster but the internet's too popular and some randos already have Devcoon taken on Twitter and Insta so we're just gonna have to lean into it.
I'm not really doing anything on those sites yet but go look for Devccoon around those parts if that's where you like to be~