Anyways, 2020. The year that seemed to go wrong on so many accounts for me. March was the pandemic and the lockdowns and the closure of every single event (including the six conventions I was planning to go to this year) and turning every holiday into yet another basic day with nothing special. September was the death of my second Mac OSX and the loss of all my art, WIP's, sprites, music, documents, and con photos thanks to a mostly botched and incomplete hard drive recovery that couldn't pull most of the data to begin with (because Mac hardware is too "exotic" compared to the more widespread PCs). Being told it was a full recovery beforehand before receiving the refurbished, upgraded Macintosh didn't help in the slightest, but I'm sure you all know that by now and now I'm taking extra steps to make sure I don't lose more of my projects.
2020 was a bad year for art for me all for one simple reason. SRB2Kart. The indie kart-racing game starring Sonic the Hedgehog and co-starring characters from all sorts of different fictional works swallowed me up tenfold this year from the desire to add new racers and update existing ones and things just got really messy and started taking me too much time. Thus I'm taking a slight semi-hiatus to go and do other things so I'm not making characters for that game practically 24/7 but if you know me I tend to adjust my schedules and plans on the fly.
Believe me, I tried to start on full art renders for a character or two but I just couldn't do it or get it to look right. Plus making characters high-definition didn't do any favors and it just turned me off from doing more arts in that style from how much extra detail and zooming-in I have to do. Thus I'm thinking of going for a size inbetween the high res and the low res images I made in the 2010's so I don't feel like I'm pushing myself hard. Of course I'll still be going for making everything clean and sharp as I can so the renders still look good resized. For what I'll be making, the goal is to get one or two more renders for Aozora (one was being worked on before the hard drive failure) and resume making character renders for other characters in the project, starting with Ptolema. There will (hopefully) also be more of an effort to balance making art with making SRB2Kart racers along with trying to doodle out more sketches and non-Aozora creations, maybe. Fanart is still out of the question for the time being but depending on how I'm feeling I may be willing to take a venture and draw some art featuring others' characters.
I made a blog post on the Aozora blog detailing game ideas and concepts and the like. Due to just how bloated the series have become I've trimmed away some of the ideas that I deem lower priority or too complex that it may take them longer to get made. The revamped list ended up being mostly just 2D-based games with only the occasional 3D-based game joining the roster. For non-Aozora games there's Otaku-Ball, which is currently on hiatus until further notice (my last attempt at working on it didn't go so well and overall not a lot of progress was made) and atm I'm not planning on much else. And to further these goals I'm seeking to get a brand new Windows 10 computer for my birthday in June so any game-making software I try out is up-to-date, provided I have the funds necessary.
Sprite-ripping is on hold especially since I lost the font pack I had used for most of my rips for the Spriters' Resource. Most of the games I've always wanted to rip from are now all ripped with only a scant few left, though I may do a surprise rip here and there for the heck of it. No promises but don't count it entirely out, even if you only see a few new rips compared to prior years (doing rips fulltime stopped being interesting as I started to run out of material I wanted to rip quickly).
Custom content for other games is uncertain. I recently began to develop custom content for DX-Ball 2, a game I got for Christmas, and there's also the remainder of my Mari0 mappack "Special Something". Whenever I decide to resume that is pure chance but it might scratch the itch for wanting to make games that I've been craving since mid-December.
Anywho that's all for now, I'll keep quiet and let you enjoy the new years' celebrations.
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