Weekly Blog 12/30/22

Last blog of the year if I time things right. Despite being one of those weeks I got mostly fixated on one thing, I do have a lot to talk about.

Leading off the blog, Nintendo Fans Game Direct had their annual showcase and one of their early showcases may look familiar to you all...

Also took some time to update the Fan Game portion of my site. It should be a bit more organized and have more updated samples like videos to better reflect the progress on my projects. Just in time for anyone new that might stumble upon this site... you know...for reasons.

Golden Sun

Besides that news, I've also dabbled a bit in working on Dawn of Djinn second mix. I finished the last of the Jack Adept classes so I think I'm just about done with new classes which is great because that'd be a great step towards it's completion. I just want to spend a little more time with it before I officially say that part of the mod is done and I start sharing the fruits of my labor.

Besides I've spent a lot of time working on Sweet Expedition and I'm so close to reaching a point of progress in it that I want to focus more on that for a little bit.

Paper Mario

Wow, where do I even start? I just got a bug to work on Sweet Expedition this week and it just ate up all my free time this week. Tons of progress on visuals for the mod, especially with new items. Gonna wait a little bit longer before revealing those details, but after ages of back and forward I decided to give a bit of a redesign to Chai. It's not crazy different but at least more than just a pallet swap now. I haven't finished all the sprite yet, but here's a little preview of what I got so far.

Main difference is the tea leaf, you could kind of see this coming in the art I did for her partner bio, though I decided to make her belly green so I'd actually have colors in the pallet to work with for the leaf. I toned down the red so it would better complement this new green so hopefully it looks good. (Threw Rush's art in there too 'cause why not?) Gonna have to update Chai's to accommodate for her new colors but I think it'll be worth it.

Speaking of art and images do I have anything other screenshots I've been meaning to share... hmmm...... (Some of these are fairly old, but now's a good time as any.)

Beyond that, I know people have been waiting a long time to play this and it's taken me much longer than I thought to finish Sweet Expedition. I've felt bad about that, especially with teasing a playthrough of a beta and not sharing it. But I really didn't want to waste people's time releasing an unfinished version when I don't have too many plans to add many, if any new maps in-between versions.

However, this week I came up with a great idea that would act as a perfect way to demo some new gameplay features in something completely separate from the maps that make up Sweet Expedition. That's all I'm going to say until I spend a bit more time assuring it's possible to do. It's been a fun discration that's also been helping me refocus on Paper Mario modding...if my progress this week wasn't enough indication of that already. Hopefully it doesn't take me all of 2023 to finish Sweet Expedition. On one hand it feels like the majority of what's left is tied to updating visuals. But if I want to actually add any new maps from the orginal Game Jam release, then it could take much longer as I haven't even made any progress on that yet. At least if this side project pans out, it should be a fun way to fill the time until the mod is completed.

Videos/Streams

Really crossing my fingers this the week that we finish streaming Golden Sun Dawn of Djinn. On one hand, all that's left is Void Island. On the other hand, the bosses are no joke, I could imagine the final floor taking a whole stream on it's own and we still have at least two fights before that point. Would be really nice to end off the year finishing the game, but we'll have to wait and see.

Only other major things to note is that I'm gonna try to upload Sweet Expedition videos weekly so I can start sharing more screens of the more updated version and Game N Chill will be delayed a couple weeks as I'm going to focus any time I have to commentate on finishing up those videos.

Art

I'd love to spend a ton of time talking about art as I've still kept up with the Djinn drawing challenge and even squeezed a few mis. sketches, but this blog is running long as is so I'll just show a few sketches that I have handy for now....

Like the first page of my Djinn challenge....

And a Jenna Golden Sun to end off the year on...

(You know what? I have this one fairly handy too so sure.)

Mis

Didn't have too much time to play video games because I was so focused on Sweet Expedition. But one thing I did want to talk about was that I got Pokemon Cards for Christmas, it just seemed like a cheap easy thing that people could get me so I asked for some. Going through those cards inspired me to pull out my childhood collection and take see the value it has. I know I tried to sell them at a convention years ago so I doubt I still have any super rare ones left but there's a couple that have had higher numbers than I was expecting so I want to find some time to look more into them and see if I have anything still that's decent.

Oh yeah, and I've finally caved and bought a couple Everdrives and similar systems. So I'll be able to play mods on actual hardware and more importantly be able to tell people which of my mods are console compatible. A question basically everyone in the Paper Mario modding community asks sooner rather than later. I wouldn't be shocked if my mods were console compatible but without something like this I had zero way to tell, so I couldn't advertise any mods as console friendly or not. I'll be blunt I was originally going to just get the Gameboy one as I'm way more interested in Golden Sun than Paper Mario but I decided to save on shipping and just get both the N64 one and the Gameboy one at once. Guess it won't be too much longer before I can no longer pretend that I'm not a modder I guess.

Never used tech like this before so hopefully it won't take too long for me to get the hang of.