I stumbled upon a commission price sheet from 2017. $30 usd for a shaded commission from one artist. I vaguely remember my early commissions being $15 per character.

Usually price sheets are deleted once they're obsolete, but I wonder if anyone has any old ones, preferably pre-covid, but the older the better.

Using the FA classic theme hides the banner without needing to download browser extensions or anything like that.

For those that use classic theme by default. FA changed the banner to a pride month banner with a bunch of babyfur stuff in it.

(I will do a proper post about what I've been up to the last few months at some point.)

With more social medias and chat programs implementing age verification via AI face scans, at least in the UK and Australia, there's a chance that FA might do so in the future. Or failing that, be blocked in the UK outright. There are ways around this of course. But if a bunch of UK people become less active all of sudden in the next few months. That might be why.

I recently heard that PE, as in Physical Education, should be taught in school and it would lead to a healthier population. I had PE all throughout school and ...I didn't really learn anything. As a grown up, I've had no reason to do roly polys forward rolls, jump a pommel horse, or play rounders. PE, at least for me, never seemed to be about learning things. It was basically just doing sports.

This makes me wonder if, in other countries, does PE involve learning how to eat right and set up a training regimen?

What are your thoughts on using the Steam Deck as an art device?

Drawing tablets are expensive. Steam Decks are cheaper and widely available. It has a touch screen, and works as a small stand alone computer.

Does anyone here remember Hotline Miami? Man, that was a good game with an amazing soundtrack.


Hard to think it's been 12 years.

A quick google search says they haven't released anything since. I don't know what the various guys who did the music are doing.

Sorry in advance for the wall of text.

Since August went well game dev wise, what do I have planned for September?

Well, for my next cameo project, I have a bunch of ideas, and also no ideas.

The main thing I want to achieve is a game where cameos matter beyond being an interchangeable sprite. I’d also like for multiple characters to be present, so I can add to a game over time instead of it being a throw away distraction. Ideally I’d also like fetish content to be part of the game as well, but I might have to let that go by the wayside.

For characters I’d like to add, there’s a bunch.   WolfN85   LQCTim are my current focus, but Isinia, TieraFoxGlove, Evangelios, DemonDante, Terra, Sedra, AJVulpes, and more would be nice to include, along with various well knows like Krystal, Renamon, Sally, and others. I know there’s a bunch I missed, but I don’t want this post to be just a list of names.

—

So, as said, I have a bunch of non-ideas. Broad genres I picked for various reasons. Starting with small ideas, and then some big ones.

-Space Shooter-
Despite the name, this doesn’t have to be in space. Games like River Raid and Chopper Command also fit here, along with games where you’re running on foot or in a vehicle. It would be simple to make relatively speaking. Cons would be limited ability for cameos.

-Platformer-
This covers everything from Donkey Kong to Contra. The main reason for considering this is the glut of stock assets available.

-Top Down Shooter-
Carrying forward the success of the last project. A top down shooter would work well. Different characters could have different sets of weapons.

-Atari/Game and Watch-
Simple arcade action games. Think things like Game and Watch or old Atari 2600 games. Cameos would be limited in number, but what would be included could be the focus of the games. There’s also a bunch of fetish potential depending on the fetish and game chosen.



-Racing/Car Combat-
For a while I’ve had the idea for a FMV heavy racing game. Imagine Gran Turismo meets Need for Speed Most Wanted. In that version you were a driver teamed up with a only fans streamer thot and would race against fictional influencers. A smaller version of this was going to use the greenscreen clips from RTGame.
https://youtu.be/Zg6I1z3-5Sw?t=3422
A simple driving game where everyone is a cameo could work well. Though there’s a lot I don’t know when it comes to making a racing game. A related idea is to add guns and make it a car combat game. It works for fetish reasons too. Things like a Buggy Heat style pedal cam could work, but getting pin ups of the characters you beat would also work.
https://youtu.be/ZzyYI2perhI?t=923
The problem is the scope of the game. Not only would it require making the driving game, and the upgrade systems, but also writing a story and putting cameos in it.

-Arcade Sports-
An interesting suggestion. Could potentially be light on sprite work depending on the sport chosen, and like racing, each character could have different stats and power ups. Fetishes could vary based on the sport, or be simple pin-ups for winning.

-Stealth-
Speaking of fetishes. A stealth game would potentially be fairly big in scope. However, this would work well with certain fetishes. Having to escape a building without being spotted in a state of undress being an obvious one.

-Strategy-
Finally we have strategy games. I’ve had ideas for “anime” and “furry” strategy games in the past.
https://www.deviantart.com/toughset.....Dana-302419364
Strategy games allow for a huge amount of cameo and fetish potential. Games like X-Piratez prove that much. One of the major problems is graphics. It’s potentially a lot to make. There’s also the issue of why make it at all, when it could easily be a mod for something like Popup Dungeon or Open Xcom.

I got a lot done this month. Mostly on a side project. I wanted to make a top down shooter featuring someone elses character. I set myself a time of six hours, blew past that. Twelve? Blew past that. In all I’d guess 24-30 work hours, depending on how you count.

There’s a bunch of stuff I had to cut or change for time, such as the setting and multiple enemy types, but I learned a lot, and the end result is actually fun to play, making it one of the few projects I’m happy with. Due to featuring art that won’t be public until October, we decided to not make the game public until then.

I've been tempted to get back into miniatures wargaming. There are a number of problems however, not least of which is that I have no one to play with, no place to play, and the nearest model shops are an inconvenient distance away.

That said, would people be interested in seeing my models if I got into them again?

Hopefully this isn't too soon.

Dragoneer died. RIP. I didn't know the guy and have no real opinions of him, positive or negative. But the question becomes who will run the site, and will it change, for better or worse?


The advice I've seen on Discord is to start backing up everything. This is good advice generally and Dragoneer's death shouldn't change that. eg. Users who get banned or delete their galleries. But if you've never backed up your favourites, do so. If for whatever reason you don't keep local copies of your own work, do that too. If you don't have one, you can get external hard drives from Amazon for about £40, which should be more than enough for still images. That way, if a hard drive died you don't lose everything.


As for changes to FA. It's out of our hands so not worth worrying about. However, if the site goes to hell, there's always Weasyl, InkBunny, Pixiv, and NewGrounds.

In the unlikely even someone who is now running the ship is reading this, one of the reasons FA lasted as long as it has is because the FA hasn't been constantly updated and changed to chase every new design trend. Plastering the site with data collection bullshit, ads, subscriptions, politics, or AI would be a bad move imo, and of course, the constant UI churn and enshitification of big tech should also be avoided if at all possible.

The other concern is that, like YouTube, allegedly FA has never been profitable. I'd have to know the details to say how I'd turn it around. But the same advice applies. No use us worrying about it, and if someone reads this, avoid chasing current trends. What I will add to be careful with direct support since payment processors like PayPal and MasterCard threaten cut services to sites that have "porn" as a means to get them to do what they want. You don't want them forcing FA to commit Tumblr.

July was a month that happened. I did some work, but not much really to talk about. I was trying to get something done on most days, even if it was just a line or 2 of code. This worked. I even achieved a milestone of sorts without noticing.

This achievement was getting the main enemy of the game full functional. Now, that doesn’t mean complete. It’s still lacking sounds and certain effects, but the actual behaviour is all in and working as intended. A gun turret might not sound special, but there’s a lot going on code wise to give it the behaviour I want. Polish stuff like losing track of the player, but not the frame they break line of sight. It also has a number of parts that can break in various ways, such as shooting the camera will make it unable to track you, disabling the gun stops it from shooting, etc. If you’ve ever played Receiver, it’s that kind of behaviour I’m going for.

And even though this is technically from this month, I might as well mention it now. I got the leg for a kick attack rigged and animated, and now I just have to texture. It’s all crude, due in no small part to it being a first attempt. But if it works I can start expanding on this in future.

Finally, at the start of June, I learned of a level creator for Godot called Cyclops Level Builder. Still not tried it, but might do. I’ve been struggling between tile based and brush based since I started the project, defaulting to tile since that’s what Godot supports, but going brush based is tempting.

As you likely know, for PawDay 2024 I threw together a quick GameBoy game in a few hours using a friend’s OC as a super hero. It was surprisingly popular by my standards. Getting 24 downloads, which is 23 more than I expected.

Since then I’ve refined the game a little. I’ve drawn a game over screen, added a ranged attack, redrawn the sprites, and am in the process of making a second stage. In theory, this stuff can be done fairly quickly.

I’ve had requests to add colour and a boss battle. While technically possible, might be more work than it’s worth for such a silly little game. Maybe for a sequel. There’s also the question of if I should stick with GBStudio or move to Godot. I remove the technical restraints, but risk feature creep.


As for June, things were good. The horror FPS is coming along slowly, but it’s getting more and more complete. Getting to the point where I can start showing things and they actually look like things people want to see, and not weird programming experiments.

Related to this. I’m putting serious thoughts into making a Goldeneye like FPS. It’s clear after Perfect Dark Zero and the recent reveal of the reboot that we’re never getting a worthy successor to those games. And with Agent 64 in development hell with a “this year” release date since 2021, maybe I can make something small.

A while ago I saw a furry pron comic, and I want to know if anyone knows the name.

I think the main character was a rabbit (though I'm not sure of that.)

She finds a cursed item in a dungeon that talks to her telepathically. The rest of the comic involves the item talking her into having sex with the various monsters in the dungeon.

Thanks.

Haven’t done a game dev update in a while. I’ve not done much, but also not been completely lazy. So not much to report, unless things like a “I modelled some shelves, and a nail” are of interest.

Instead, today I want to talk about an opinion I read online and how that might change my development focus going forward. It’s a dumb opinion, but a surprisingly popular opinion too.

The gist is that game devs who want others to play their game are posers who are just in it for clout. Game devs that go for a pixel art or low poly art are lazy hacks trying to cash in on nostalgia. Game devs that focus on graphics over gameplay are also hacks.

To some degree, these people are right. The end user doesn’t care about how a game is made, just that the end result is fun to play. It doesn’t help that some games really are lazy nostalgia bait.

But this puts devs in a catch 22. If you don’t have professional quality graphics, you're a lazy hack. If you do focus on graphics, you’re a clout chasing hack. No option is acceptable, and examples of “how to do it right” like Darkest Dungeon are chosen after the fact.

I could go on at length, “debunking” the argument with examples of low poly and pixel art hits, but that’s not the point. Again, the end user doesn’t care.


So what’s the take away from this? How will it change things going forward? Well, in the same way the soft one-hour asset challenge greatly sped up my workflow by removing perfectionism. I’m thinking of using more programmer art and shortcuts. Ie. Becoming more lazy.

To give a simple example. Weapons in a FPS. Normally I’d model and animate a gun. Makes sense. But in future I might just have an image of the gun at the bottom of the screen. Not like Doom, but like Resident Evil Survivor, or the original Rainbow 6. Is this what I want? No. Will it work for the sake of gameplay? Yes.

The month went quite well for the most part, though there was a week or more where I got little done. I did start keeping a loose journal of my progress.

One recurring thing is dumb solutions being the right ones. I talked about this last time I think, but one example was I was struggling to get raycasts to work right. I think there was some confusion about how global vs local coordinates are calculated. In short, it would shoot off at weird angles. After spending what felt like hours trying to fix, I set it to shoot infinitely forward, and had a child of a generic node and used the look_at command. This worked perfectly every time.

February was a month of nothing much. I was mostly lazy, and what little work I did do didn’t really pan out.


So, while I’ve not achieved much, late January.and early February marked the continued collapse of AAA gaming, while a number of indie and middle market games were surprise smash hits. The big one being Palworld, a game made on a budget of $10,000 and from a team where most of the people had never made a game before.

There’s a lot that could be said about it, but for the purposes of this post, it’ll suffice to say there’s a feeling of positivity and optimism when it comes to indie games. That as long as a game is good and has an audience, you could find success.

My plan for the new year is basically to keep going with my current plans. I don’t have any sweeping changes or major new years resolutions or things like that. The closest I have in a plan to make more, smaller games for friends, but that’s more a new idea that happened to line up with the new year, so let’s get right to it.

-Smaller Games, For Friends-
For a while I’ve been coming to the uncomfortable realisation that my hope of making some classic game or creative work that would live on for years after I’m gone is unlikely. So I’m leaning towards making smaller projects with high turn around times, made specifically for certain friends or my own amusement.


-Film Making-
For years I’ve had ideas to make a feature film. I won’t bore you with the detailed backstory, but the short version is I saw some ultra low budget films that shocked me with their low quality, and big budget films and TV shows that seemed to burn through money with nothing to show for it. This got me wondering if I could do better.

This has been on my mind on and off for almost a decade, and each time I pass on it. I don’t have the friends or connections to make a film, and the cost to make a film I’d rather spend on other things.

Recently I’ve been putting some thought into making some short films. This would have a number of benefits, mainly it would be cheaper than making a feature length film.


-Music-
For a long time I wanted music to be something I remained ignorant about. A medium I could enjoy with my analytical brain going nuts. But unless I want to stick to stock music like everyone else, I’m going to have to learn it at some point.


-Videos and Blogging-
I might get back into making YouTube videos. I’d like to finish my reviews of the Simple Series. Recently I’ve been watching the 1985 Twilight Zone series, and writing reviews for each of the stories.

Been a few months since I did one of these, but instead of doing a month by month break down, I thought I’d combine it with a review of the year.

-Procrastination and Laziness-
Despite having a lot of time on my hands, I struggle with actually getting off my arse (or should that be on my arse) and making things. Even people with less time on their hands seem better about getting things done than me.

I’ve been trying a few self-help techniques from around the internet to see if they help. From trying to do a little each day, to having fun for its own sake without excuse or justification. While it’s too early to say which help and which don’t, I’m continuing to try different things to see what works long term. Speaking of which…


-The One Hour Asset Challenge-
One of the biggest revelations of the last few months has been the one hour asset challenge. As the name implies, this is a self imposed challenge where a single game asset can’t take more than one hour. There are a few exceptions, but generally speaking this has been very good at getting rid of perfectionism and streamlining my techniques.

A great example is a white metal texture from ScreamingBrain’s CC0 texture pack. I use it as a sort of swiss army texture. It’s stood in for plastic, dry wall, and of course metal with some simple vertex colour changes.

While “one hour code” doesn’t work, the same mindset does apply. An example was I had problems getting projectiles to fly straight. After spending far too long trying to get it to work “the right way”, I just stuck a character node on it with no hitbox and used that. Worked perfectly.


-Back to Basics-
Another big revelation this year was my interest in low power consoles. Be in modern tools for retro consoles like GBStudio, modern mod tools for old games like Doom Builder, fantasy 8-bit consoles like Pico-8 and TIC-80, or even videos about old games like Behind the Code.

While I never used the Pico-8, the tutorials for it were something I learned from when it comes to how a game is constructed outside the default workflow of specific engines. Eg. Godots scene system can get fiddley when it comes to simple practical problems like pausing a game. In Pico-8, it’s common practice to have a game state variable. Pausing the game is as simple as changing the game state.


That seems a bit brief for a year but I both did a lot and not much. There was a racing game that didn’t pan out. The Game Boy game and the Doom map were both a success. The small FPS game is going slowly, but at least it’s going.

I do have plans for next year, but I’ll talk about that in another post.

I did little the last week or two of October. But in November I’ve been making slow, steady, consistent progress.

I’ve not been working on assets much, it’s been mostly code. I got the tileset working, and I got the basic turret AI working though I have not made the assets yet.

The whole “one hour asset” mindset works well for code too, though without the time limit. For example, I was having trouble getting a projectile to work. All it had to do was move on the local z axis, but for whatever reason it kept flying off in odd directions. After too much time fiddling, I said sod it, made it a character body 3D. Worked perfectly. I still haven’t figured out what I was wrong with the “proper” way of doing it.

Speaking of code, I recently watched a bunch of Pico-8 programming tutorials, and was surprised that the standard way of doing things was just many if statements and for loops. A whole game was made this way and it barely registered on the “3Mhz” processor.


I’ve learned a lot doing this project so far, and it’s been fun, but I’m wondering if I should continue. If I had to guess, I’d say I have 50-100 hours of work to finish the game, maybe more. At an average of one or two hours a day, that’s still several months to finish it.

So I’m torn. Keep chipping away at this one game, or work on other things that interest me, like an 8-bit game, or trying to get back to my fixed camera survival horror game.

Which brings me to a problem with the consistency. It comes at the expense of other things. I bought a film for Halloween I’ve still not watched yet. A game I wanted to finish playing after Summer I still haven’t gotten back to. Things like that.

Another day, another bit of drama making people leave a platform. It's not FA or DA this time, which makes a change.

Discord recently announced a global filter on certain words and topics. If it'll actually happen and to what extent has yet to be seen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6A.....hannel=Discord

Telegram has been mentioned as an alternative, and not for the first time. There's an artist I'll not name I've not talked to in ages that prefers it. I've not looked into it however, so was wondering who actually uses it.

So after some initial success, the challenge hit a bit of a stumbling block. Modeling a door.

Making the 3D tileset for the concrete hallways was fairly straight forward. Until I got to drawing a door.

The problem is a clash between the rules of the challenge, the spirit of the challenge, and the software I’m using. See, to make a ps1 style low poly door normally, it's basically a rectangle with a door drawn on it, maybe with a 3D handle if you’re being really fancy. Drawing a custom texture was against the rules, so that meant trying to model the details. Trying to do so in Crocotiles tile based system was a clumsy and tedious endeavour that took a long time and resulted in a bad looking door. I tried again, and while I did better, I wasn’t happy with the result.

I’ve decided I’m going to stick with the general theme of the challenge instead of treating the advice as strict rules. In the case of this door example, I’ll use the current textures for a base texture, and draw on the details I need. The handle can be a tile with a handle drawn on it. It’ll look better and be quicker to make than the current method. I’m focusing on the speed part of the challenge over the texture restriction, in part because I think the texture restriction is meant to be faster than creating custom textures for things.

Making matters worse, a game I looked up the night before for ideas called Lost in Vivo had the same broad gameplay concept of a horror game in underground train stations. That’s a real game though, not junk made for a self-imposed challenge.

I decided to try a challenge based on the advice I talked about in the previous post. If you missed it, the advice is this.

1- No single asset should take more than one hour to male, preferably less.
2- There should be a small number of textures used for almost everything.

To this end, I created three texture atlases using an online tool. The textures I used are Screaming Brain’s Tiny Texture Packs. It covers a broad range of general textures like wood, metal, stone, and grass. Numbering almost 500 in total.

That sounds like a lot, and it is, but the advice never said what a “small number” is, and many of the textures are similar or things I’ll likely never use. Eg. There are 25 variants of “grass”, and 24 “terrain” textures that are views of islands and countryside.

I’ve scaled the textures down from 128x128 to 32x32 to make working with them easier and keep the PS1 look I want. I can scale them up later.


With that done, it’s time for ideation.

After some thinking, considering some options and rejecting others, I ultimately settled on remaking (or reattempting) my failed horror FPS project from last year. It’s a horror FPS set in the maintenance tunnels for an underground train.

However, many of the same problems I had on that project are still a problem now. Mainly, getting enemy animations to work. Something that will be worse given I have to model, rig, and animate, all in a one hour time limit. It’s just not feasible.

I have a few ideas for dealing with this. Having mechanical enemies so they can be animated with code (which is cheating), or brute forcing it via blender and automatic weights (pushing the time limit and would look bad). But the tactic I’m settling on is having the enemies be 2D animated sprites. It’ll look weird, but it’s the option that makes the most sense.

I made the player’s primary weapon, a nail gun, in 35 minutes and it looks …bad. But it’s recognizable.


Next step is more planning. I want to lay out the game’s levels. Once I have that I can model rooms and assets. I think I can save some time here. Most of the rooms will be concrete hallways, and most detail items like barrels, crates, and toolboxes should be easy to create. Still a lot of work to go after that but one step at a time.

I heard some advice recently when it comes to making art for indie games. I want to give my thoughts on it.

First is that a single asset should never take more than an hour. As someone making a fixed camera horror game, the idea of modelling, texturing, rigging, and animating a main character in an hour is a bit silly.


The second is that you should have a small amount of textures you use for everything. Though the definition of a “small amount of textures” is vague and up to interpretation. I use Crocotile 3D, which uses a tile based modelling and texture system. I don’t know how well it would work to set up a single generic tileset and use that for almost everything. Might be worth a try.


I could even combine these challenges, as they complement each other. 1 hour or less per asset, made entirely (or almost entirely) with a single texture atlas/tileset. The question is what to make.


I’m tempted to return the horror fps idea I tried to make last year. That challenge involved using a limited palette. This time I’d create a texture atlas/tileset from stock textures and use that for basically everything. It would require more detail on the modelling side however. As before, my big stumbling block would be animations, and possibly music.

If, like me, you turned on your computer and found discord blocked by cloudflare. You're not alone. Discord is having problems at the moment it seems.

I can still be reached here (though if you read this, then you already know that) or on Steam.

Once again, the first two thirds and last quarter of the month were a wash, due in part to me being sick, and me doing other things, like cleaning and playing Remnant 2. I did practise some 3D character modelling, and while I didn’t get as far as I liked, something is better than nothing.

Most of game dev work I did was mostly focused on a racing game. A YouTuber I like put out a bunch greenscreen clips with the intention of his audience making funny edits for him to watch. Some were racing related, so I thought it would be fun to integrate into a racing game. I’ve wanted to make a FMV racing game for a while so this works as a test for that.

While looking up racing game tutorials and dev logs, I noticed two distinct methods for doing things. Either they do the box with raycast method which takes a fair bit of work and maths but offers more control and knowledge of the underlying systems, and what I’ll call the “black box” method of just using stock assets with no idea how it works.

At present, using the stock Godot vehicle body system which seems to be a cross between the two, being both a black box in some aspects, but a little more developed version of the raycast system in others. I might switch it out if I make something more serious.

Finally, I’ve been tempted to learn Aseprite properly. I’ve had it for a while, but I always default to using GIMP since it’s what I know and I can just get things done. But using proper tools might help with quality and speed in the long run.

This post is a week late. I had it drafted by the end of July, but then a week went by without me noticing.

July was yet another month where I didn’t get much of anything done until the last week or so, which is strange because I felt rushed.

There are still a few things to talk about though.

First is the drama stuff some people might be interested in. The Doom map I’d mentioned previously as part of a community project. Well, I was banned from the Discord server because, during a conversation about the Michael Jackson accusations, I recommended Razorfist’s documentary series. This started a purity spiral which resulted in me being banned. I had a feeling something like this would happen when other entries were including pride flags and people were putting pronouns in their usernames.

I still think it’s strange that Doom, a game that was known to be edgy back in the day, would end up with a community that was so pearl clutching.


As for my own projects. I had been struggling in limbo. I wasn’t sure how to proceed. I made a sprite for a game boy game I had no gameplay in mind for, and my fixed camera horror game project has been stuck with me not being able to make progress in one part of the game without the other parts being figured out.

I have since started to make progress on both fronts. Mainly, I’m slowly working on a character model so I can figure out modelling, rigging, and animation. The rigging and animation I’m going to do in Blender, which means re-learning that program. Urg.