Hey anyone still reading this,

Unfortunately I wont be able to keep up with the pace with my blog posts anymore due to various circumstances in my life right now. I'm still doing stuff behind the scenes, but right now there are a lot of other things I need to focus on and my blog sadly has to take a back seat.

I had a really good streak of posts going, but really I didn't imagine that I could keep it up forever.

I'll be back at some point! Thanks for tuning in.

I swear I have the worst habits with updating my blog. It's tougher to update these days when I'm working on stuff I can't share! This month is just flying by too.

Something I've decided to start digging into this month is more writing. I ended up stumbling across a really cool guy on YouTube when searching for more resources about dungeon or game mastering. Long story short I am still very, very obsessed with tabletop RPGs and at some point I'm going to be taking over the game master role for my core group, so I'm trying to download as much info into my brain as possible.

What's really interesting to me is that a lot of techniques of building out skills as a game master also seems to translate directly into constructing good stories. A lot of the resources I started digging through inspired me to acutally sit down and try to write some stuff!

I uhh am totally not sharing any of it soon though. So all the characters I draw (like the ones at the bottom of my site right now at the time of writing this post) are part of some sort of story in my mind that has been changing every year since I was 11 or 12 years old. I've tried writing it down a few times, but not for a while now. With all of this new information dumping into my brain about creating stories and leading tabletop players on adventures I feel like I'm hopefully able to make a big breakthrough or something like that.

Some cool people have been trying to encourage me to maybe do a web comic at some point, but I think in order for me to feel comfortable doing that I'd have to iron out a lot of the details about these characters before I start drawing anything.

So a lot of nights this month I've been trying to write for an hour or so. Mostly just general thoughts on potential character motivations, backstories, and the overall rules of the universe everything takes place in. It's been a lot of fun!

Okay whoops this is already way longer than I thought it would be. Other than that I'm trying to keep up with my art skills mostly. I have another backlog of doodles to post as I need to hit my quota of 12 posts for the month, whoops.

I finished listening to Creativity Inc., which is a pretty dang good book. It goes through the founding of Pixar and the techniques they employ to help foster a creative environment. I feel like I learned a lot just listening to it, and it also makes me feel a little bit less anxious knowing that even the best of the best go through the same problems that I do when faced with the daily task of just making things. I'm not sure how it is to read, and I do a lot of work that lets me listen to audio in the background, so my experience going through it may be way different than reading it.

I also feel like I may have gotten a few fresh ideas to finally finish off Sky Sisters. I'm excited to jump back into it but right now my time is a little thin and I'm totally brain stale on the codebase. It will take me a little while to get used to it again.

Speaking of that I don't know if I'm going to ever get back to dev streaming this year since a lot of my work is just not streamable. I was thinking about maybe still streaming games, or doodling maybe would be fun. We'll see.

Also I've been trying a new diet these past few months and I need to post about that at some point!

Hopefully some more concentrated posts about some of the stuff mentioned here coming soon.

Hey! It's me! The person who is supposed to be updating this blog a whole lot more. I really need to break the habit of totally ignoring my blog at the start of the month and then developing crazy anxiety about making a new post.

The majority of my time lately has been going toward stuff that unfortunately I cannot share with you at this time. It sucks, I know, but trust me when I tell you that it's a very cool project and I'm really excited to be a part of it. I wish I could go into any more details here, but maybe by the time PAX rolls around again this year I'll be able to talk about it more.

Other than that I've been tinkering with just some basic stuff for the next version of Otter, and working on my Pathfinder Character Sheet manager. I'm still finding time for doodling of course too, and for now I'll have to use my doodles as the primary feed of my blogosphere.

I'm also realizing that it has been many, many years since I've updated my website. I think my website has looked like this for about six years now which is actually pretty unbelievable to think about. When I was younger I wouldn't be able to tolerate a website design for more than a year at the most... but here we are. I'm an old man now and the years have all blended into each other. Obviously my art style has evolved a lot since I first put this site together, so it'd be nice to get something fresh running. I think I would be able to keep all of my posts in order, and maybe even still preserve this look somewhere in a different URL, but we'll see what's possible when the time comes. Not sure when I'd be able to squeeze in a complete redesign of my site at this rate!

Super Sky Sisters isn't dead, it's just asleep for now until I can find time to prioritize it again. I still want to launch it somehow. I'm just still being me and holding it back until I feel good about it.

It does feel weird not having my personal projects be at the forefront of my life right now, but I am having a lot of fun working on this secret game. I really really really want to post what I'm doing, but it probably wouldn't be cool with the other folks on the team. I tie so much of my self worth to my personal projects and sometimes that is tough, but I am making progress on things even though posts here aren't as frequent as they should be.

That's all for now! I'll check in again soon. Promise!

A few weeks back I played TowerFall at Genesis 4. I flew out to Oakland and drove down to San Jose with the California TowerFall crew and spent the whole day playing some pretty intense matches. I won't spoil the results here, but be sure to check out the full playlist provided by 2GGaming. Oh and I guess my name is "kpluv" for this tournament.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a48IBm3BXEc[/youtube]

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmZV3MvwfkU[/youtube]

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3V-BUIWZx0[/youtube]

I decided to purposely take a lot of time off after PAX, and this included posting on my blogosphere. I think I can still hit my goal of 12 posts of something or other this month, but four straight days of PAX ended up being more draining than I thought. I think I'm back and ready to rock for real though, so I'll start with a quick recap of PAX.

So I was able to set up a small demo station of Super Sky Sisters at PAX at a friend's booth. There was no big banner or fireworks display or anything, just me and a TV and two controllers. Sometimes I had a chair to sit down in!

I was fairly nervous about people playing the game but more confident than I ever have been. At this point the game is pretty far along and my real test was to see if people would understand what was going on without me interfering. My main goal for PAX was to see if I could in four days of constant play testing with new people playing the game all the time, and by that measurement it was a pretty big success.

Things got a little chaotic for me over the last two weeks and I've felt a little bit distracted and was kinda forced into taking a small break on game dev. There's also the fact that Summer Games Done Quick is going on and that is just a constant distraction for the entire week.

So I took a look at my Steam library and there were a couple of things there that I needed to still get through. One of them being Environmental Station Alpha! I've been meaning to play this game forever but I never got around to it until pretty recently. I was a few hours into it and so I started playing it again and took it all the way to ... almost completion? (Spoilers: It turns out this game has a billion hours of post game content, and I think I've done all the major things I can do, and found all the cool things I can find.) So I figure instead of talking about my own games for once I can throw down some thoughts about someone else's game.