ARTIST UPDATE

Hello everyone! I'm currently in the process of rising from the dead to work on projects once more!

All jokes aside, I've had a mentally rough two years. I'm sure many of you can relate that it's been a challenging time to exist and persevere. As part of that, I watched my creativity and artistry drain away, leaving me, well, fucking depressed among other things. Having had enough of it (and my wife having enough of it as well), I've been working on getting my mental health back to a place where I can exist beyond myself again. I'm working with a variety of folks, and if nothing else, it is beginning to help my mood and motivation. 

One of my weaknesses as an artist, and someone with ADHD, I like to over-promise and under-deliver. So up front, I want to acknowledge that. I get an intense drive for an idea, and then it tends to slip away over time, leaving me with a lot of half finished products.  Closing my Patreon over the last year helped reduce some of the pressure I felt from this, as I was disappointed with my ability to put out consistent work.  Moving forward, I will try to share less until I feel a project is close to wrapping up.

With that said, I will continue to make and update stuff I am passionate about.

ART UPDATES

Pixel Art Town Builder

I did want to discuss my art journey a bit, as I haven't put out anything new in awhile. After Pixel Hex 1&2, I really wanted to find a nice city builder solution for folks- pixel art assets that let folks create their own cities. I saw this as another way game masters could share maps with their players, and help guide ttrpg gameplay.  I'm not exaggerating at this point when I say that I've gone through at least 6 or 8 different iterations, trying to find something that 1) works for gameplay, and 2) meets my pixel art standards. 

The closest thing I've gotten to it is by using an isometric style map and bumping up tile size (Think SimCity 2000, lol). As a test, I spent a week or so making assets for a post-apocalyptic city, as shown below:

This work, although rough, opened some really cool possibilities in my head. The major downside, of course, is that it's 4 times the work (moving from 32x32 to 64x64). In addition to the size increase, assets in isometric must be made with front and back facing sides. Anyways, it's an incredible amount of work, and I couldn't sustain the amount of time needed to keep this up. Could this be done for a fantasy setting? 100%. What's the realistic time commitment if I did so? Hundreds of hours, if not thousands. So that's why I've currently tabled this.

Someone did suggest on Twitter the other day that I should create the city assets for Pathfinder Kingmaker, and perhaps that might be the halfway step to getting started on a larger project like this. I did some pre-production work and wrote out all the building assets, as well as some rough pixel art drafting. My main concern is creating building assets that are differentiated enough from each other you can kind of understand their underlying purpose (blacksmith vs. alchemist vs. inn). It's a pain in the ass, but as a whole the city building thing will most likely sit in my mind until  I eventually do it. Hopefully that's some minor consolation.

Pixel Hex Battle Tileset 

I created the pixel hex battle tileset with the goal of using hex tiles in a smaller setting that aligns with fantasy combat. One of the things I really like about this set is that I've confined myself to a smaller color palette, which is a bit more cohesive and also a bit more saturated. I put out a small set, with the PROMISE that I would update it and raise the prices as it got bigger. And yes, I did get called out for not having an update in the past year. The good news is, I do have more content for this pack. I'm continuing to expand out more monsters and characters, and I'm looking into how to expand the terrain options. I'll either post two smaller updates or one bigger one before the end of the year, and will bump the price up to $6. It's starting to feel a bit more like  a full set, but I still want to continue to flesh it out. Maybe force some buildings and ruins into the set at least, to make it feel a little more accessible to the dungeon crawling crowd. Open to suggestions and needs!

Backpack Merchant

As I started coming out of my fugue state the last month or two, I had a cool idea for a solo ttrpg game called Backpack Merchant. It's an inventory management game mixed in with some optional travelogue mechanics. You travel town to town collecting items and selling them. Each road between towns has a certain amount of stops, and at each of these stops you'll get the option to pick up an item. Courier packages are required items you must put in your backpack, and valuables are optional items you can pick up that are worth money. 

The gameplay mechanic revolves around grabbing enough valuables to sell, while avoiding overfilling your backpack. You see, once an item is in your backpack, it doesn't leave until you make it to the next city. When your backpack gets full, you run the risk of landing at a stop that requires you to pick up another courier package, thus causing a disaster (meaning you lose stuff out of your pack). 

You operate off of a character sheet, which has a gridded backpack (think diablo inventory). Different items have different sizes and prices. And of course, if you make a couple of successful runs, you can upgrade your backpack space, get some trinkets or food items, etc. It's meant to be pretty chill, with added depth depending on how much you want to play. I wanted to make appropriately sized backpack item cut-outs for folks that want to play using the backpack grid in meat-space (real life), and will also provide them digitally in case folks want to make it work on a virtual table top (VTT) or photoshop or something.

The great news is I've already written all the rules (minus the finer details of the rollable tables). I've already proceeded into layout, and I'm hoping to get it out, again, before the end of the year. It'll probably be $5, and I'll look into offering community copies if possible (I've done some research on how to do this on itch). Here's a piece of art I've done for the first page:

Comic?

Yes, I would like to draw a fantasy comic. I don't know what to expect out of it, but I'd like to do it. My goal is to create an entire comic issue (26ish pages) before I even attempt to share it- which will give me the time to develop my style and share pages consistently while I create more. This is a long term goal of mine, so who knows when it'll happen. But if I do, I'd love to bundle issues on itch and share pages for free much like what Abbadon does for Kill 6 Billion Demons via Twitter.

Website?

Ah yes, the bane of everyone's existence. I dislike my old website, but don't have the time to redo it. It'll happen someday, but in the meantime you can still send me an email from my website and I'll get it (if you ever have the desire).  If this new itch blog thing keeps going, I might use this instead considering a lot of folks follow my itch account.

TL:DR- Apologize for the very long post, will be shorter in the future. Life's getting better, currently working on a few projects, with the caveat that I offer no promises on when things will be done. I'm always open to feedback on things you'd like to see. Keep an eye out for future blog posts here on itch.

Later nerds,

Zeshio