What creative projects have you been working on?

I made and ran my own Rules-Discovery Diplomacy Variant.

For context - Diplomacy is a 1959 negotiation-based board game, where players control different countries and try to expand. It's set in the first world war, but its ruleset isn't dependent on its map at all, so people have made thousands of variants for it set in different eras/regions/worlds.

I made a variant called CuriosityDip, which looked like it was just the standard Diplomacy board, but with a few oddities that stood out - extra neutral units sitting around, numbers on the units, and an extra player who seemingly broke the game rules by having a unit they didn't have the territory to support. And when the players tried to check the rules to see what that meant, they were met with the message 'The rulebook has been lost. You'll have to figure things out yourself.'

The game was designed around being able to figure mechanics out by experimenting or interacting with the board's oddities - for example, if a player attacks the aforementioned neutral unit, they get the message 'The rocket launches' and their unit gets shot into a new map called Space. It was a blast to watch them slowly figure the whole thing out (and especially have revelations about certain things)!

My friend and I commentated the game on our YouTube channel if anyone is interested - it was a one-shot because once the mechanics are known it can't be played again, but it's been very cool to see the positive reaction to it and it's been well worth the effort of making and running it imo.

Been trying to work more on some gouache illustrations and possibly turn some into riso prints. Also do my first open mic and it went great!

Mentioned it two weeks ago but I am planning to create a 2D puzzle platformer/Metroidvania inspired by earlier Wario Land games (immortal playable character, you use transformations, upgrades and treasure items to progress.)

You play as a thief who washes up on an island. The game world has about 12 different levels (including a city hub) which seems like a small amount until you consider how huge they will be. Each one will have about ten treasure chests to unlock where you need to find the corresponding key.

Upgrades will be a mix of temporary and permanent things. Temporary upgrades are the kind you'd find in a box which you'd lose upon taking damage. Permanent ones are found in treasure chests. Some examples:

• Knuckle dusters which let you break stronger blocks with punches
• Boots which let you jump higher or dash.
• Grappling hook which lets you climb up to higher areas.
• A horned helmet which allows you to break stronger blocks with a headbutt and also impale ceilings.
• Jetpack
• Protein Powder, which temporarily transforms your character into a gigachad that can easily bust down walls.

I'm drawing my own tarot deck! I found a book of games to play with tarot cards (which I posted about elsewhere on here), but discovered my Shadowrun Tarot Deck wasn't very convenient to play games with. The book intro mentions they made their own titular Dealers Tarot to play with, and suggests print and play or to draw your own!

So I'm making my own deck, based on me and things in my life. I've assigned each suit general themes to help inspire myself, but besides that I'm just doing whatever makes sense to me. I've completed and colored two cards already, and sketched/planned a few more.

I'm drawing them in the notebook app on my Boox Airnote 5C, which limits me pretty severely in terms of colors (16 total, 5 of which are black/white and 3 greys), and I'm not a very technically-skilled artist to begin with, so I'm keeping it intentionally abstract, which I think fits tarot vibe better anyway.

It's been interesting, trying to dig up my personal history and life to draw cards has been tough at some points, it's sort of a mini-reckoning of my life choices and the people and things I've kept and those I've left behind. I'm not in a rush, and 78 custom art pieces will take a long while, but I'm excited to have something deeply personal both from a creative and a historical standpoint at the end of it.

Here's an example of one of my completed cards, the Three of Cups. I didn't even want to attempt to draw people, so I made what I've dubbed "beanpoles" to be super simple versions instead