I owe him a lot and I'll never be able to thank him for it. From the work he put into the furry fandom to the art he inspired, a lot of current me wouldn't be without him. Hell, a lot of us probably wouldn't have been us without him. I've met some of my best and dear friends because of him.

You'll be missed dearly Dragoneer and thank you for all you did.

Hey everyone

Been a bit since my Furvana post and wow been a busy few months.

First off, Furvana was a blast and made some new friends! It was awesome getting to be on the beach and hangout with them. First con was also good too! Snapped some pics and gave away a fair few Polaroids. Very chill experience and left with some great memories.

Life then got a bit hectic with work and left with a few questions that thankfully cleared up for the better near the end of November. Which lead into another con!

I went to MFF! Met up with the con friends and just generally took in most of the con. It was awesome seeing so many furries on one place and I wish I could have met up with more furries there, but it was pretty overwhelming the first time. Got some merch and just took in the big con atmosphere. Really hoping I can go again next year 🤞

And then I got covid from the con. That sucked and work was moving me onto a completely new team at the sametime. Thankfully I was well enough and not contagious to fly to see some family and friends for the holidays.

Year started out very crummy, but the second half has been much better and I have more friends going into the New Year along with more cons to go to!

Not sure what next year holds, but I've got plenty of art commissions coming especially with Kara ;3

Thank you all for following this year and hope you all have a great New Year's!

Hey all!

Hope you've been enjoying Shark Week 2023 with Darci ;3

Just wanted to say I'll be attending Furvana this year! First time going to a con, I'm so excited!!!

Just need to get a con badge done now :3c

Hey everyone!

Been a bit since I've said anything here.

Just been taking it slow for the past *looks at calendar* half year. Haven't really focused on any creative efforts like games and stories. Some inspiration has come and gone, but nothing to sit down and really hammer out anything.

Mostly my attention has been on film photography. I've fallen so hard for it, to the point that I'm rolling my own film, developing it at home, and scanning it. There's just something about going through the process and not knowing how it comes out. Along with that, the vintage feel that comes out really hits a sweet spot in my brain. I really don't want to use the scraps here for them, it's not what y'all watch me for! However, if you think film photography is something you'd want to see, I'm starting to post more on my socials... which I need to update as well. *Sigh*

Anyway, I'll get back to stories and games sometime soon, I just am on a slightly different journey at the moment. I have ideas for things that I want to make and experiments I want to try.

I will also say there is a pile of pre-alpha games that I have put together, but none really had that game feel. Maybe I could res one of those later 🤔

Thanks for sticking around and I really hope y'all have been liking the commissions that I've been getting along with the adopts! More to come!

If it isn't one thing, it's another. Going to be selfish with this one.

Where to start?

I guess we need to start with a little bit of context. Lately, I've been losing substantially more drive. Started as a few minutes of a day here and there, but over years it's turned into days and weeks. It feels as if I'd been slowly eroded of all my driving force. Days will crop up now and then where I get it back, slam out a ton of stuff, feel great for a couple of days, and then fall into the rut of empty feelings again.

Initially, I thought this was burnout creeping in and out as I took breaks. Two days or heck two hours of doing what I like shouldn't be causing burnout though. There would be days when just looking at some creative effort felt empty. Even taking a simple picture felt hollow. Just no emotions to anything.

Constantly asking the question "Am I happy?" to be followed up with "Why shouldn't I be?" kept me from thinking any deeper for a long time. I had no reason, no right to be anything other than happy. There was nothing to be unhappy about; if there was, I was just whining. I always beat myself down and tried to count myself lucky.

I never wanted to burden anyone else with my issues. My issues seemed petty or childish. I didn't want to bring my issues up as I was always worried it would minimize others’ issues. So I just stayed in my corner and slowly piled up these issues. Keeping out of everyone's way so they can deal with their stuff or reaching out to share their load. Others have it harder and I should be helping out where I can.

But it's all gone. The emotional energy to help others has dried up. The emotional energy to help myself dried up with it. It's a scary feeling to come back from hanging out during the holidays to take a moment to think about "Am I happy?" to then be met with no feelings. Just sat there, trying to answer the question, but couldn't even answer with another question. Just everything was gone, the well had dried up. It stayed dry for four days and I knew there was something immensely wrong.

Sought help, getting help, and learning that I have depression. I would say what do you do with that kind of information, but my first response is always "How do I fix that?" Everything can be fixed eventually. The well can be filled again, but with just myself, it is going to be a long time.

Everyone always talks about reaching out to your support network. All I have to say is, what support network? I've been everyone else's support, but the crushing reality for me was that no one was willing when I needed it most. "No one wants to help the helper." Why help someone that is helping you? Obviously, they have their stuff together if they're extending a hand to help right?

I should have known much sooner no one in my life would be willing and I guess I did but never wanted to accept it. I've experienced deaths in my life, deaths that impacted my life in very negative ways. Through each of those, I was always expected to help everyone else. No one asked how I was, no one checked in on me. I was left to fend for myself, to keep myself together, and to keep others together.

I gave up my 20s in service of others, a decade of my life with little to show. Friends that called me a brother ran away and stopped communicating whenever I needed them most. So, it's just me, fighting with life alone. Fighting and starting to lose my footing, but I'm still fighting. I'm starting to hear the encouragement from my corner and see the individuals that are really there for me, I just need to make it through the round first.

This journal is temporary and potentially be deleted at some point. I just needed to scream into the void because screaming into reality got me nowhere.

Hey there everyone!

Been a bit since I've provided any updates on what projects are being worked on. There have been some changes and expectations for myself have changed a fair bit.

Old Projects

Bigger is Better - Shelved
This may shock literally no one, but this has been completely put away. I couldn't concentrate on fixing what was there and I was having paralysis on starting over with it. One day I will revisit this concept when I can filter down the mechanics into something more streamlined.

OC Sona - Shelved
This is disappointing, but it was going to happen when you try to freehand make a character in 3D with no references. Currently this is on hold, I've made some progress, but I need some help with figuring out the details of this design. This is a call for help with designing a Protogen that is more angular and industrial. If you or someone you'd think could help design this character, please let me know! I will say a requirement is to have a portfolio of past design work.

New Projects

A Date with Fang
So, this is something new! If you've not seen it yet, I've been working with  dragonien for a bit now and we have a prototype out over on their Patreon! The idea is to be more than just an interactive fiction. As you play, you're generating a story of getting into a date with Rain's character Fang. It's a bit more than interactive, as the game runs, random passages will also be generated of things going on top of what the player is doing. Currently it has the cleanest UI I've made for any game and is also mobile ready! This will be on and off development. I hope we can get an official non-prototype release out this year.

Kaiju Game
Taking lessons learned from BiB, reducing complexity of systems, and being on a kick from reading stories I decided to take a stab at a kaiju game. It's still in the earliest of phases, but I wanted to share a little bit of the early concept ideas. It will still have combat like BiB, but it will focus on rock, paper, scissors style to reduce the amount/complexity of attacks. Stats will be reduced, items will be removed, but the plan is to include multi-character battles. The main focus will be to get DNA to evolve your kaiju from a small fry to big beast that will destroy the planet.

I want to have something ready to play by July this year.

Eva Sculpt
While I don't have my OC ready, I do have plenty of sonas now that I do have refs for! For starters I've commissioned a Freya 3D model, but I want to take a crack at sculpting another one of my sonas. I choose Eva because I really want to sculpt her muscles and work on how to make big amounts of fluff. That and I plan on using that model for other things that are not yet ready to discuss.

Commissions
Pretty obvious I've commissioned plenty of art over the past 2 months. Still exploring what I want to have done with my sonas and characters. These will keep a steady stream for a bit.

So yeah, that's where I'm sitting with all my current projects. Reducing scope on games and resetting expectations on 3D modeling.

Made it another year! Wish I could be on a hike today :3

Hey everyone!

Hope your holidays are going well!

You might have noticed a bit of a take over of the page this week. Truth be told I was a bit surprised too! Comms came in faster than expected for me and well, here they are! Might have to make it a yearly tradition in the future if I can remember lol.

Also, keep your eyes peeled! I have two more sonas coming down the road, one is almost done and the other is still in the creation phase. On top of that I have a pile of lovely characters that will be getting debutes over the next month or so. This next year will be a whirlwind of art and games which just jazzes me up something fierce!

Anyway, I hope you like them and we'll have one final image before some presents on Christmas!

- Kara ;3

Hey everyone!

You might have noticed a couple changes, if you hadn't you can check out the new me :3 https://www.furaffinity.net/view/49978375/

I've also moved all the old build submissions for BiB to scraps. Really, they're only there for change log info and I'll be keeping the most recent build info in the gallery going forward.

- Frey

Hey everyone,

Been a bit since the last update and figured it might be time to say something.

Bigger is Better:
Passion is gone. Hard to work on it now. Thinking of scraping everything outside of the battle and vore mechanics. While I'd like the writing to be done, the game just isn't there yet. This will be a project for a later date though. Something needs to click in my head again for BiB to comeback in a steady way.

3D Modeling:
Had to wait for a long time to get new PC hardware. Finally got it and relearning Blender for the 3rd time in my life. It's getting there though, but probably won't be done with this for several months.

Other Games:
I've been quietly working on other games in the background. Some scraped, some maybe coming out sometime in the future, some rising from the ashes, but something will be coming out from these. Just have to find the right one that won't end up like BiB.

Life:
Busy and stressful. The company I work for is being acquired and I may not have a job this time next year, so that's awesome. Just trying to stay all in one piece while figuring things out.

I'm grateful for everyone who has stuck around and will eventually come back with content. Not leaving, but it will be some time before anything makes it to the surface. If you want to keep up with what I'm doing, click the Twitter link below (for however long that will stay up).

Thanks ya'll,
- Arti

Hey everyone!

Thought I would drop a journal here. Back from the break and have a couple projects lined up.

As for Bigger is Better, development is going to progress at a glaciers pace. Several reasons:
- I don't want to drop it just yet, more ideas to finish up
- It needs to be more stable than it is
- I have other game ideas I want to explore

There will be another update for it sometime this year, but it is taking a back seat to other projects. Hopefully in the future I can talk a little more about the other games I'm working on, but at this moment they are still in the earliest of stages.

For the 3d modeling, I'm hoping to finish that up in the next month or two! This'll be my first real sona and I'm pretty stoked at how they are turning out. After they are finished, there should be a small animation to introduce you to them. Hopefully by the time I get to rendering the animation I should have beefed up my PC and have quick render times.

There are a lot of things coming down the pike and I'm excited to get them to you!
- Arti

Hey everyone!~

So this is coming out right on the heels of Bigger is Better v0.10.0 and if you are seeing this first, I'm burnt out. It isn't just one thing either, it's everything hitting all at once. Job, amount of time put into BiB, and not really growing past being just a developer.

Work wise, just released a fairly large piece of software. Runup to that was not as bad as it could have been, but it did eat a lot of my patience away. I was pretty short with everyone and mostly on edge. Not a great time.

Game wise, I couldn't get anything out. I would open the source code, pick a spot to start, and my fingers would just hover on the keys. I couldn't for the life of me, will anything into existence. I was like that for 8 days, then started talking with friends and came to the realization that I've been cranking too hard on my personal projects. I'd spend half my day on work, then the other half pretty much working on personal projects. Mind you all of these personal projects are software of some sort. The reality was that I had been spending 60-80 hours a week since December 2021 doing nothing but coding.

I've neglected a lot of other things about my online presence. Still don't have anything as a sona or mascot, had to put social on hold, and just generally not really living my life.

With that, I'll be taking a break from BiB and my other coding adventures from now till the end of July. I'll still be here to fix any major issues with the recent version of BiB, but I'm going to be working on other skills like 3d modeling and getting the house in order so to speak. When I start up again, it'll be under a more sustainable pace and with more outreach (hopefully).

Thanks again everyone and I hope you have an awesome summer!
- Articus

TL;DR I worked myself to burn out and now I'm taking a break until the end of July.

I hadn't checked the watched counts in a while and WOW! Thank you to all of you that are following here on FA and to those that are watching on Twitter!

Hey everyone,

Thought I would try to start blogging about my adventures and discoveries while making games. I've tried to in the past, but well it was one time.

Anyway~

Topic for this blog is how much should you simulate before it becomes untenable? How much do you worry about the sim part before the game is less focused on the actual game part? This is something I've been struggling with on Bigger is Better since starting the game. I came in with lofty expectations and ideas of simulating everything about the character. Body weight, height, capacity with how much they can eat, time, etc...

I never really asked the question of whether or not it would be fun. I just knew I *needed* to track of these things because that's what a size vore game *needs* to track. They need to be tracked to the letter and not deviate from the hard math. At least, that's what I thought.

As time went on and everyone started to play the game (thank you!) I started to see feedback and questions on capacity. At first my answer was pretty much, "the math says this" which while true seems extremely disconnected now. I couldn't give concrete answers as to why the math was that way and what made it "fun". Fun being very subjective, but as you play something you start to see what isn't fun. Fighting, eating, reading the text: fun. Keeping track of how much a small creature's mass will add to your available capacity before someone starts to notice: not fun. There might be some individuals out there where keeping track of hard numbers like that is fun, but they are few and far between. I myself am not one of them.

So, what's a pile of sentient code to do? How about, and this is just a wild idea, we DON'T sim all the body math? What if, they were just static values from a chart and stayed BELOW 50 so you can at least do mental math? Crazy right? Well maybe not so much. Gamification of numbers and the ability for quick maths go a long way to keep game flow going. Think about if after every turn in D&D you had to calculate what the impact of fighting was on your exhaustion along with wounds? As a player, having to do more than subtract one number from another would be miserable to do every single turn. Anything harder than extremely basic arithmetic would keep me from wanting to play more.

The solution for capacity? Whole. Numbers. No more body mass calculations and decimal values. Micro character = 1, Macro character = 9. Full stop. Is it realistic? No. Is it substantially easier to fix if it stops feeling fun? Very yes. Since we are also not having to do extreme math to keep that in order, we can have some additional fun. Why not hold onto characters that were consumed until they are actually digested? Have the ability to write about consumed characters moving around occasionally? Maybe even add events for one of them trying to escape? With reducing complexity we can add more fun game ideas with less maintenance.

Alright, I think that's done. There is more to be said about this topic, but I'm still on the journey of understanding. Honestly this all comes down to game feel and what feels fun!

I'd like to hear everyone else's thoughts on the matter in the comments below! Do you think simulating everything is the way to go or do you think some things can be gamified?

Back from my break and with more in-depth twine knowledge! Diving in today to get the ball rolling!

Hey everyone!

Thanks for all the feedback so far on v0.8 of BiB! That combat update took a little more than I was expecting, and we do have a couple bugs that I'm sorting out. Thankfully they aren't too game breaking.

If you've noticed my development calendar on my profile it shows "Additional Training" and that v0.9 timeline has been pushed back by a week. I wanted to take some time this week to work on my 3D modeling skills (currently at 0) and learn sculpting. Would be nice to have a more artistic skill in my bag of tricks lol.

No worries though, I still plan on working on BiB! We've got plenty to work on there and have a ton of ideas rattling around my noggin!

On the topic of v0.9, the main line of work for that update will be a (hopefully) improved combat screen that portrays more information with less large text boxes. On top of that, the big backend piece will be getting attack/skill requirements back in and way more configurable for the future! Before I was having a hard time implementing new requirements, but the ideas I have to make them more adaptable should also make them easier to develop with. Other than minor tweaks, those two avenues will be eating all of the v0.9 development time.

Thanks again everyone and if you want to keep up with me daily, you can follow me on Twitter at @ArticusData!

Caught something at the post office, down for the count today. v0.8 might be a day or two late.

Plans for a release today are not going well. I've got about another 5 hours of work, but currently not feeling well. Going to take the day to recuperate and if all goes well, will get v0.6.0 out tomorrow.

Hey everyone, just wanted to give a small update! Apologies for the radio silence, been busy with the new update and work. I'm looking to get v0.6.0 out this week, but there aren't too many gameplay updates in it. Mostly there are updated screens, new UI interactions, and finally some vore dialog with eating. There was a lot more frameworking than expected which caused the slow down, that and work getting in the way.

Again, sorry for the radio silence, working my hardest to not make this another time where a furry game loses traction!

Took a few days off from active development to gather some thoughts. This update may take a bit of time, work has ramped up and I have less time to work on the game. I'm hoping to get v0.6.0 out in 3 weeks!

Recent release you guys were growing big FAST! Broke all speed records getting large in many ways, so much so I might have to scale things... AGAIN!

Heya everyone!

A little late, but happy new year! Hopefully everything is going well so far!

Kinda wanted to take a minute to do a small retrospective on the latest build of Bigger is Better (BiB). Couple of things really stuck with me through the development of v0.4.0.

UI Layout
This one goes without saying it, but UI is important. Not just player UI, but development tooling UI. During the past two(?) weeks on v0.4.0 I had to build out some rudimentary testing tools and let me tell you, they are a nightmare to look at. All my fields are just splatted on a dev page. Don't get me wrong, they are super useful! Infact with some of the recent issues with the mirror and the stores, I was able to quickly debug them using my dev tools and throw a fix together very quickly. However, there is some work to be done on it to make it look nicer and easier to use.

Battle UI got a major overhaul, instead of just text on a screen I opted in for more of a button layout/dual panel screen. Testing that out was a lot nicer to work with and really started to make me think about other areas of UX improvements around the game. At first I didn't know if the battle UI would work well enough, but as I played around with some pieces there were opportunities to use the UI to clarify some battle data. Color coding damage, misses, and keeping text in line with each other in the combat log seem to give a good way of describing the flow of combat.

Growth Scaling
Scaling everything dependent on growth is kind of a nightmare as well. Do you scale parts differently? How do you store size information? When a character gets larger in general, does everything? How do you describe how large assets are? Do you describe them in relation to the character or with the world?

The approach that was taken in BiB was to move assets over a percentage/ratio based measurement. In relation to the character how large are some of their assets? This way, I think, allows the player to visualize how large they are and gives the bonus of feeling like you are actually impacting the size of the character. I think if things were to be described in relation to the world, that might feel more defeating early on for smaller characters. Also with moving everything over to a ratio based measurement, scaling off of size allows the description of the character to stay mostly intact. Don't really have to put in edge cases for when a character is X size.

These were just some thoughts I had rolling around and wanted to put on "paper" during development. For the growth scaling, it's not something I really thought about when consuming creations and was surprised with how much time I spent thinking of the logistics of it lol.

Thanks again everyone and hopefully we'll see v0.5.0 in two weeks!

Hey everyone!

First off I want to thank everyone, once again, for all feedback and support on the initial releases of Bigger is Better! Without it some issues may not have been resolved in a timely manner.

Kinda wanted to discuss what I'm thinking the initial v1.0.0 version will be and potential release schedules.

v1.0.0

So for the v1.0.0 release the plan is to have the base sandbox mode with difficulty setup. This would include a larger set of enemies, more items, more attacks, skills, and potentially random encounters. The random encounters could happen anywhere depending on if a certain stat is above a dynamic threshold. Still vetting that idea out on the whiteboard.

Along with the additional features, there will be a lot of cleanup with the way screens look. Right now the tables for the inventory and the store are non-existent, the combat screen jumps around a lot, and general readability is pretty poor. Same goes for the written content..

Release Schedules

The past three days have been insanely quick turnaround and hopefully I didn't set expectations too high for new release/bug fixes. In the future I'm looking to maybe do a 1-to-2-week release cycle so I can polish features. Right now, though, I will most likely be releasing quickly before the New Year because of the time I have while being on vacation.

Looking ahead the goal for this week is to get a combat rework out that will allow me to add more attacks dynamically and make some stats actually useful. On top of that I'm hoping to add more enemies, items, and ways to get experience to level up the base stats.

All in all, I'm super happy with where BiB (Bigger is Better) is at the moment (v0.2.2) and look forward to sanding down the rough edges! If there is anything you think the game could benefit from, please let me know through DM or a comment on the most recent releases of BiB.

Thanks again everyone!