Current Goings On and Future

Hi! It sure has been a long time.

Kobold Cursed Sword? I hardly know... 

Ehgh, alright, look. I've been fairly dormant for a while. Life just kept happening and honestly things slipped. Despite all of that I just wanted to, type something out. Sorta train of consciousness and be upfront about what I want to do in the future.

I'm going to be honest but while I have a pretty good chunk of work with Kobold Cursed Sword already done. The chapter that I was hoping to release turning into something more akin to 3 chapters instead. And then I essentially lost my editor. I'll be honest I do want to finish the story, mainly just to finish what I have, but its a lot of work and I don't have much time.

I often grow enamored with the new projects, losing those that are more complete to them. Not only do I have KCS but also my gamedev work and the rotting corpse of the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon TTRPG. And in general I'm becoming more social in local spaces along with the two roommates that I now have which just takes up more time.

Despite all of this if my pastebins and other places are anything to go by Kobold Cursed Sword is my most popular thing so far. And to be honest that is something that I can recognize. Even then the story should be finished, finally put away and let rest.

The thing is, this blogger doesn't bring me any joy anymore.

Some part of me wants to simplify where I place my work. But I don't like destroying stuff on the internet. So I'm not deleting this blog at all.

My main aim is to transfer all my artistic stuff to something like neocities. The customization is nice and honestly I just need a vault of some sort to store my stuff. Newgrounds isn't a bad idea and I'll likely continue with using tumblr and bluesky for most of my social media stuff. Twitter is pretty much dead to me now with all the bs with Elon so I'm likely not to use it very much anymore. I just want to keep an online persona but with less effort. Not everything I know and say needs to be broadcasted out and such. But having my work actually be out there and accessible is important.

But then you run into the question of how I should post my work. Should I put it out on all the platforms at the same time, each time I make something putting it there? Or should I just keep one central repository and keep it there? Crossposting to the accounts when I need to?

Anyway I'll see what works for me. See ya.

Oh god, I left the heater on.

Hello, time for a status update and a bit of a info dump of what's been happening with me for the last 8ish months.

• KCS Ch. 4 - Finally out to my editor, current word count is about 5670. Likely to post early next month.
• PMDT:DX - Little work done since last, mostly polish and some mild overhauls.
• Bird Game - PC modeled, lots to do, but cut scope and still working on.
• Other Gamedev - Working on a small project to break up constantly working on Bird Game, that is a Tower Defense Card Game. (Publishing this or next month)

Anyway, I'll go ahead and elaborate under the cut.

Incredibly Belated Update

Hey all again, apologies for not posting something earlier but I'll quickly go over what I've recently been doing. If its not really obvious, I try to post once a month with something, but the last 3ish months I've been very much so leaving my blog on the side.

Gamedev has really ballooned in its time I usually spend on it. I am also heading the two locations where we post stuff related to our game for people to get to see, both on our tumblr and twitter which helps divert my time even more. Right now development of our "Bird Game" is pretty full force, we've recruited someone who will be helping us with the sound side of stuff and someone else who is helping by providing concept art for mainly me to turn into 3D models. Modeling itself takes a good amount of time, and I'm not just modeling but also doing ui and menus which exacerbate the work required on my end.

Yet Another General Update

And we are beginning to wind down to when I promised to start work again on KCS. The time I gained by dropping it helped out quite a bit. Recently I've actually been getting into the business end of the little studio I'm a part of, setting up and LLC for it, getting all the required details to open a business account, and likely later this week paying someone more legally inclined to take a look over a contract that I drafted for our expected contractor(s).

I did most of this "myself" with help from some people that were happy to provide a helping hand getting to know what I needed to do for many of my required steps. Thinking back on it, while I certainly think that it was a bit difficult it would be much easier if I needed to do it again. As the majority of the difficulty came from my inexperience doing it. I know right, what a surprise.

So how are the other projects I'm working on going then?

Current Plans

Hello all, so just recently the 3rd chapter for Kobold Cursed Sword dropped. This time the turnaround for the chapter was much quicker due to more focus on it along with a quicker turnaround by my editor.

Despite not having a concrete idea of an ending for this story I do plan on finishing it eventually, but right now I'm going to take a break to focus on other projects for about 3 months. I have 3 main projects that have been on the backburner for a while that need my attention. Those being the PMD Tabletop system I've been working on, the second being level design work for the game I helped make for a jam called Rogue's First Heist, and some cleanup on another game I helped make for a jam called Just Pong. 

I've talked about RFH before but Just Pong is something that I've never mentioned here. A quickie for RFH is that you lead a Rogue to steal valuables by placing coins for them to follow. As mentioned prior we have a much more expansive spritesheet that we want to use to make a more expansive set of levels for play. Which might take quite a bit of effort but is what we are aiming to do.

Just Pong is a version of Pong with upgrades and idle gameplay. There's a bit of a story in there and whatnot but recently its been the game that has been getting the most attention of any of the games we've put out on itch.io under Banished Crown Studios. The majority of the work we are planning to do is mainly cleanup and polish to a complete, yet focused little idle game. Given the game's simplicity, shouldn't be too long of a process.

Last is the work on the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Tabletop system I mentioned. This has been mentioned as well before, but essentially its a rework of this system: link. I played this about a year ago and had a lot of homebrew that I made, even talking to the system's creator about the system. The whole thing struck me as a system with an intriguing core ruleset but lacked enough polish or balancing to use that core to its finest. My system that I've been working on quite a bit aims to fix many of the problems I faced when playing with the other system. Along with a more fleshed out content base I want to get it to a testable state to then test. Hopefully iterating on it until the final product is well polished and up to my standards before "publishing" it for players. I have no doubts that I will be unable to finish it given these three months, but hope to progress with it during the time after the prior two projects are finished.

Anyway, thanks for reading. My focus with this post is to be as transparent as possible to readers and people who enjoy my work. Thanks to everyone who has enjoyed my writing and I hope you all have a great day.

Oh! And I'll try to keep up with a post here a month in the meantime.

Current Goings On

Allllright update post to provide something of interest for this blog. I'll keep this short and sweet.

I'll start with the elephant in the room KCS. Currently the new chapter is about 3k words into development. Plans are to hand it off to edit next week, but I'll be able to focus more on it this week than ever before. I'm hoping to either top or get close to the second chapter's around 5k word mark before sending it to be edited. If my editor can give me an estimate of the timeframe for review I'll make sure to post it here.

The majority of the viewing of the new and old chapter I've been getting have mostly been on the pastebin where they are also hosted. I would prefer more people to care about this blog than my pastebin but for most places where my story is linked to the pastebin version is much easier to access and whatnot, so I really can't blame most people for doing so.

The Pokemon Tabletop System I've been working on has mostly flitted to the backburner, current progress is much slower than when I last talked about my work with it. I just think that it's gonna be hard to focus on with the other stuff I'm working on right now. 

Last is the video game dev stuff I've been working on recently. About when I posted KCS Chapter Two here about two months ago I took part in a game jam that produced a game called A Rogue's First Heist. A small topdown game where you guide a rogue with coins to collect treasures while evading capture. While the only updates to the game are small ones, I've recently finished a huge spritesheet for our expansion of the game. Along with writing making levels with the new sheet are my main focus this week.

At the end of this week I'll be hosting and taking part in another game jam, The Mashed Potatoes and Cramberry Jam. I imagine that this will be a great time sink given its nearly 9 day time frame but during that time I expect reviewing of the third chapter will be in progress so I'm not going to worry much about that. 

Hopefully the expansion of A Rogue's First Heist and the third chapter of Kobold Cursed Sword will be coming out late December. I also look forward to spending time on my tabletop system over my winter break but I'll try not to make promises on that front to maintain my sanity.

Current Goings On

Hi All.

God, the last 2 weeks have been quite the experience. Right now I'm tired and really burnt out honestly. I participated in a Game Jam that had 2 weeks to participate in. I did a heaping amount of stuff for it, setting up menus, doing the level design, and providing some images for flashbacks. I am just credited for the level design but I can fix that sometime today to at least note the menu work I did. 

If you want to take a look at the current creation you can do so here.

The studio that the game is under is actually one that I had a hand in founding. We also did a rather bare bones DigDug clone here which I provided pretty much all the assets. It kinda contains Kobolds.

Updates

Pokemon Stopgap

Hi all, in my attempt to keep to the pattern of monthly uploads with at-least some useful content I'm making this post.

I'll start out with the most obvious thing to talk about, how the Covid-19 virus has been effecting me. I'm good, however while many people might be using the time they gain from being in effective lockdown. I really don't have that privilege, the company I work at due to being a military contractor is considered essential. While they have authorized employees to do what they see fit to protect themselves and have opened up vacation hours to go to negative I have things that need to be finished. Both related to work and other things I have been working on. I have been working from home so I'm not really in the line of fire for this new virus however.

Now getting to the meat of this post one of the things I am working on is a Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Tabletop campaign that I am running. I'm currently working on a homebrewed version of the homebrew the system already is and am working in a reasonable capacity to expand it with its developer.

The link to the PMD Tabletop System is here.

However due to not really being finished with it and wanting to work with Kovaid, the dev of the system to produce a 2nd edition before I start spoiling my work means that this is likely to show up in the far future. But! Due to the pandemic I needed to get my hands wet with roll20 for the session that happened this week. Meaning maps, getting familiar with the system, and needing to find tokens for the game.

What I landed on was the icons for Pokemon Shuffle for the characters. However I had a hard time finding a good rip, and personally needed to categorize these icons for my own use. As you might expect this is the thing that I am putting in this post to make it partially worthwhile.

A well sorted, categorized, and high quality rip of Pokemon Shuffle Pokemon Icons.

With that out of the way current progress on KCS Ch2 is going ok, I've began getting into the editing process and hope that it will be released next month. I want to make sure this isn't undercooked however so take my estimate as an estimate.

In the meantime I hope you are being able to weather out this pandemic and look forward to seeing it blow over.

A small update

Hi All, 2 of you. While I greatly doubt that anyone is really interested in whats happening with my life, I thought it might be a good idea to provide this post to let people visiting my blogger here a bearing on what I'm currently working on and what has been "preventing" me from working on my stuff recently.