Happy New Year Update! (Patreon)

Current CG Completion: 166/181

Year End Chart Update:

Happy New Year! What a year it's been...

It's a bit of a bittersweet sort of thing for me. I've both accomplished more than I ever thought possible and dealt with heartbreaking loss.

But the theme of this all is that time marches forward. I have to be ready for this new year and I have to put everything I have into my remaining work. I've come so far...

When I flick through my completed art folder for the game, I'm astonished at the seemingly impossible amount of art I've already gotten done. Many of the pieces are much better than anything I've ever posted publicly so far. [ at least in my own humble opinion haha ] It's such a strange thing to wrap my head around.

I've grown so much as an artist, and I think I've grown a lot as a person too. I've spent time resenting the Covid situation for keeping me from meeting more people in real life and making it hard to find a romantic partner, but I'm beginning to realize that all this time alone has changed me for the better in a lot of ways. Even though it wasn't my choice, I feel like I've been a monk sitting under a waterfall, becoming comfortable with my own company and learning to support myself emotionally and physically [ like learning to cook better, adopting better health habits, and cutting back on unhealthy habits ]. Even the process of grieving Aeris has changed me positively I think. I've had to think so much about death and how short life really is for all of us. It instilled a need to treat life and time more preciously. I'm grateful to her for that, and for all the time we got to share together.

I feel a new sense of gratitude towards how I've been spending my time as well. I know that a lot of people look at my situation from the outside and think I've accomplished the impossible in terms of art and self reliance and that I must be walking around with an enormous sense of pride. Unfortunately, that has been very far from the truth. I've always been so hard on myself. I considered myself a practical deadbeat, destined to fail with my weird niche game. Simply living on borrowed time. There were times that I felt so low that I wanted to die, reasoning to myself that I couldn't because I had promises to keep first. I treated my work like indentured servitude.

I regret that. Life is precious. Time is precious. This opportunity I have is absolutely priceless. I've been gifted a situation by you guys that money can't buy. Sure, enough money could buy time for game development, but you can't pay people to support yourself as wholeheartedly and genuinely as you guys have supported me. You've put your faith and trust in me. All the money in the universe can't buy trust like that. Thank you so much for trusting me.

Thank you for spending this year with me. Thank you for celebrating the highs with me and comforting me through the lows. Thank you for everything I've managed to accomplish so far with your help.

Anyway, I've really gone on too long ^^; Let's get to some art! Sorry for the censorship, I got two CGs and a sketch done as scheduled, but the completed CGs have elements of spoilers on them so the black goo's gotta come back.

And I don't usually show you guys my sketches, but I figure, hey, why not? This is a special update and I was actually quite nervous about this CG since it has 3 characters that I haven't drawn as much:

It's actually one of the very first CGs you can get on Derek's path, but I've been avoiding it because it's complicated and because it just happens to be alphabetically at the bottom of the list LMAO

But I've come a long way and I think I have the confidence to complete it now. It'll be a big job to get to on Monday! I look forward to it :)

Anyway, thank you for indulging my sentimentality and for everything else! I hope you have a safe and fun weekend and a great start to 2022! See you next Saturday <3