What creative projects have you been working on?

I decided to take on Inktober this year! So far I've done every day. There were some days I did 2 days in a row because I missed the day before, but I'm not that strict on myself. So long as I get all of them done, what does it matter?

It's been a very interesting experience, in part because I've been drawing everyday and also in part because this is the furthest I've ever gotten. Before, I'd tried to draw for Inktober with minimal success but this year has been going great! The reason mostly being that I planned out most of my drawings this year. Pretty loose "planning" but I'm not like cold, trying to think of a new concept to go around the prompt everyday. It's something I've already spent the time considering and sketched out to a degree. Some I've completely ignored my sketched concepts and gone with something else but that's okay too!

I've been enjoying using the ink pens and trying to contrast the light and dark as well as figuring out some shading with the pen. It was really, really hard at first. I was so nervous with my first drawing and messed up a lot, and still messed up the next few in spots! It was from being both nervous and marginally careless. But not I feel I've gotten much better at just slappin dat ink on and lining my drawings! I'm very happy I've gotten so far with inktober and that I have yet to suffer from burnout. In fact, taking the 30 minutes to an hour a day to focus and draw and concentrate on lining is very nice and relaxing for me (though occasionally annoying when I mess up a line but it's not so bad anymore , I try to roll with it).

I'm hoping to keep it up and maybe next year I'll be able to tackle it again! As a side note, I'm not following the "official" inktober prompt list, I'm following one done by an artist I like! There are a whole lot of really good prompt lists out there so if anyone else ever does inktober as well, I would highly encourage you to find one that piques your interest!

I'm unexpectedly normal for a week past hip replacement, so it's time to write the "What is Cyberpunk" essay I'd promised @mrbig.

Other projects:

1. Halloween costume, Roaring '20's theme, though as the spouse griped, men didn't get good garb.

2. Crash course in interior design, advice from others welcome if you have experience. The house we're buying is a 1970's ranch done in dark shades of greige that's going to be a horror during the months without sun, and equipped with lighting and other hardware that looks like extra scenery from the Iron Throne room in GoT.

Not as much as I'd like with my comic. I'm pretty nailed down on the first arc, but my writing process is like making art with a lint screen, take in ideas and see what sticks until it becomes a solid unusable opaque mass of junk that needs to be removed in order to keep the machine running. And the issue that I never write anything down continues to impede my efforts of becoming a writer, and as much as I would like to stick a USB drive in my head, spit everything onto it and plug that into Word, I gotta continue to work on it, otherwise I'm just very imaginative, and not much of a writer at all.

There are two projects I'm focusing on right now. One, on the web side of things, is Intergrid, the name for which I came up hours after talking about it. The other is Frontiers.

I spoke briefly about making an RPG system. Frontiers is what it's for. It's an episodic story about a group of friends playing a tabletop RPG, and the in-game adventures of characters. Inspired by Critical Role, if you had any doubts.

Frontiers is set on Earth, two hundred or so years into the future, a long time after the Rain of Fire – a calamity of unknown origin which destoyed a lot of the infrastructure and killed, or led to dying of, a lot of people.

What makes the setting distinct is that it has Old Tech. Before the Rain of Fire, humanity has experienced a sudden jump in technological capacity and become able to produce items that exceed current scientific understanding. They might as well be magic – except they're pure technology, and there are a lot of people looking to harness the Old Tech itself or its working mechanism.

Which is why entities around the world – governments, corporations, independent groups of interest – gather search parties of capable individuals: to look for a potential powerful piece of Old Tech.

Oh, and there are eldritch, otherworldly forces taking interest in humanity – offering supernatural powers in exchange for doing their bidding on Earth.

So far, I have a handful of interesting characters that are rapidly taking shape, a general idea of what the major plot is, a few personal plot arcs for the player characters, and a growing base of knowledge for what the world is and what kinds of things it's filled with.

I've finally started my game project. I've had this idea for a roguelite for years now that I've sort of tried to start a bunch of times. It's never gone far because I've always gotten bogged down trying to do it "right". This time I've decided to just bang out the minimum to make it work. I've got the weapon mechanics mostly working and there is an enemy who just rushes at the player. Once I finish off the weapon mechanics I'll be at a stage where I can start doing the interesting stuff on my list like enemy AI that works in teams and messing with terrain generation.

I finally have an update to a project. The basic functionality is complete: you can move, jump, stomp enemies, hit blocks. All very Mario like. I'm going to brainstorm some power-up ideas, add a running function, and build out a nicer win-level/game scenario. Hopefully I'll have something this week to show.

If anyone has suggestions, or c+c based on the image below, let me know via comment or pm. Thanks! :D

Image
Website

finally found the cf card for my dslr the other night, so i've been taking it along with me the passed couple days. went into the forest preserve today and got some good shots for a little project. still need to figure out what i want to do with the photos as far as post-processing the raw images, and then editing. i might also do some more glitch-art stuff with them too, which would be fun.

other than that just playing my guitar, focusing more on old-school delta/texas blues finger picking. been combining pentatonic blues scales with some harmonic minor scale stuff i worked on before for a really cool vibe. not sure what i want to do with it yet, but i like how it's coming out and i got some good feedback. also started looking into combining that with raga/macca techniques, but that's some tough stuff to just jump into and it's going to take me some time to get that down. it's a really cool way to express musical concepts though, like, for raga/macca it becomes so much less about the notes and scales themselves, but it annunciates the space in between and how you move between notes and what that movement sounds like