Weekly Update - 334 - 8/3/26 (Patreon)

Friday: Solipsus - Page 41

And Saturday marks the God Slayers Comic's 8-year anniversary. Doot.

Yet I feel... generally inadequate. In all things, in all ways. Of late.

Oh well. Isn't the first time. One fun thing about being an artist is the constant accompanying feeling of never being good enough at anything. Just have to let it ride and spend some time focusing on some of the things I don't feel like I'm good enough at until it passes. Which is everything.

I think I maybe just thought... dunno... I'd be doing better by now. Each anniversary that passes feels like it should be an accomplishment to be celebrated and yet it mostly just feels... disappointing. Eh. I'm sure it's just me. I know I've improved drastically since I started, and perhaps I continue to improve but only at a smaller scale I am not noticing? Who knows. There's more monthly readers visiting the site than ever before. That's not a metric I should ignore.

I'm probably overdue for drawing a new banner on the main site... But I still like the cute Riley vote button.

Anyway, there was some decent progress made on the TTRPG beta this weekend. It's still a daunting mess. I'm working on the GM sections and starting on the bestiary now. That's... pretty much the end of the "book," more or less. There's an Appendix, and I should probably do an Index... But that's way last. And I WILL be adding some of the monsters and characters from our playtests into it. Because I feel like they've earned a spot.

Our last playtest, probably months ago now, gave me some thoughts for how I want to approach the GM side of the game, and I've kind of been mulling on them ever since. The enemies I ended up throwing at the party were largely... simple, basic, and while I tried to scale up the difficulty many of them proved useless when thrown against an experienced party. Even the ones I thought would be strong. Except for Goremonger. He was pretty strong.

But we were also using an unbaked system for turn order that I ultimately felt crippled the NPC side of the table as well, and that's all changed. More playtests will need to be done once I'm happier with where the beta is at.

I'm CURRENTLY trying to come up with a good format for displaying all the relevant information for environmental hazards and traps. The content is all there but there's no consistency right now. And it's way too wordy, like I tend to be (as an example, see this post). Going through editing is giving me a headache because every third sentence is a hideous run-on. I think I tend to write a sentence, amend it several times to add additional information, then I never go back and realize I've turned it into a hideous abomination. Hooray for a creative mind trying to do technical writing. BLEGH.

Help me pick the thing.

Speaking of. There's still time to vote in the votey thing, but I do want to close it out sooner than later so I can get working on whichever wins. I want to put a non-trivial amount of art into the TTRPG. And since I have to draw it all myself... FUCK. It currently looks you guys want me to finish the main intro image, which... yeah that makes sense. I will allow your rational popular opinion to override my irrational hesitation and procrastination.

But there's also still time to give me an excuse to work on a different image instead. :P

What do you mean? How dare you accuse me of using a poll to further delay the work I need to do. I'm so offended!