confessions of the practically empowered (Patreon)

yesterday's progress: sorted out meteor trainers so it's a lot easier to work with them. previously they were jumbled through the text file, made it really hard to update teams-- i think none of them have 6th gen pokemon cuz i couldn't be arsed with that before-- still tedious since there's ~50 Meteor NPCs all of whom have multiple teams and often specific sets that need to be changed.

fun fact: the total number of characters we see in-game that are allied with Team Meteor is exactly 69.
i, for one, blame Terra.

also continued on the wailreel, started checking into some base script options for starlight's battle system, and cut down goals for the proof-of-concept release. i'll talk more about what that entails another time i think. 

on a different note, and as for the above sketch... in truth art is really not one of my strong points-- or at least it's not something that i'm confident in, which is unfortunate since starlight is going to need a lot of it (concept art, busts, backgrounds, any cienematic shots we want).

previously i had someone, Tofu, working on the character designs for me on commission, however she has since apparently dropped off of the face of the earth. this is a large part of the reason for the seemingly slow design speed. Will, who is also a very generous patron here, is also still working at his own pace on designs and weapons, but this isn't a one-person job.
and for better or worse, given that i am still losing money each month i don't really have the spare funds to commission another artist right now.

so i figure, i'll just learn to do it myself. probably best that way anyway.

for about the past month or so i've been spending a good chunk of time just practicing and improving my art to get up to Tofu's level and be able to match her style (I also have to be the art director here; stylistic consistency is important). although i still have a lot to learn, I feel like I'm making progress at least. 

the above sketch is something i just did as practice last night in about twenty minutes. she is a character in starlight, although i have not posted her profile here yet (soon!). i'll probably make an effort to practice with starlight characters more often, both for my edification, practice at drawing them specifically, and also so that I have something besides words to throw at you all for it. i'll start trying to match tofu's full designs soon.