Hey everyone! It's been awhile since I've done a proper status update. I just wanted to touch base on what's been going on, the game update, the process ect.

First of all, I wanted to say thank you to everyone who is still following and asking about the progress and is still here...and to all of the new people too!

TLDR: I'm retarded and dumb

First of all - Is the update coming out soon?

It's getting there! (That's the tldr) I'm working hard right now pushing too make up for some time that I've lost earlier this year. It's still definitely coming out this year and I've made a lot of progress on it but there's still more work to be done. It'll make more sense when I go over my process.

So what's the excuse this time?

I was having a really strong start this year pushing development forward but progress was halted for a lot of the first half of this year right when my momentum going strong. Within 2 months we had 2 family deaths. We spent a lot of time dealing with that. My sister just had her first baby so a lot of the first half of this year was with family.

The second excuse which I'm glad now I finally fixed it properly, is apparently this entire time I've had sleep apnea and didn't really realize which was degrading me mentally and really messing with my cognitive functions and I'd work myself into burnout constantly. I thought I fixed it a few years ago with this off the self solution (cause I don't like going to doctors if I can help it). Anyways that helped a little bit but apparently not good enough and the same thing started happening again, but now after getting the proper treatment and a CPAP machine (I look like Darth Vader when I sleep now), it's brought me back to how I used be and it's fantastic, I just got this very recently. I feel smart again.

Now, enough with the personal mopey stuff.

Spoiler alert! - You might see some spoilers moving ahead

I don't really like doing spoilers but it's also been forever since you guys have seen anything. At this point I'm just going to share everything lol. I want to show how much work has gone into this so far.

So....you said process, WTF is taking so long?

So, I have this utter fascination with retro anime and that whole animation process. I took a gamble when I started the development path for this update to go through the full pipeline that those Japanese animation houses used. I really wanted to learn the process and get better (always trying new techniques). I got in with some private discord servers for professional animators working in Japan and learned a lot.

I applied that process to my workflow on this game and let me tell you...it's awesome, but there's a reason there's a whole team of people doing this. I wanted to really push myself and improve the artwork do as much animation for this update as possible. And that's where the gamble failed in improving the speed. I'm not going to lie though I'm still glad I went through this path because of how much I've grown as an artist from it but it's a fuck ton of work.

If you're into taking a peak behind the scenes, I went to a very traditional and analog approach. Typed the script, marked it up to separate and plan the scenes.

From here I'm using a bought a light table and drew all of the scenes. It was a lot.

Though this phase was a lot of fun, I picked up an animators punch to be able to set paper up properly and flip them. Honestly for this phase, it feels faster to draw this way when you're just trying to get the initial layout in. You don't have software and UI getting in your way, it's just you and paper.

I even made a little outdoor setup so I can look at some grass (couldn't quite touch it).

Scanning all of the frames in and setting up the digital packets for them too a bit of time. Then work out the timing and layering ect in clip studio. (If anyone is interesting in seeing how I setup my layer structures and timeline, let me know and I can go further into that).

So...saying this, this doesn't mean that I just made "Lyla's Curse" the anime. Lol. It just a has a lot more movement and dynamics to the scenes. A lot of custom assets I probably didn't need to make but will make the scene sit in better when seen in the game.

This has always been a struggle to with see the development with this game, because I'm taking so long with it, my skill level is constantly improving, so a lot of the art assets in the game look very bad to what I'm drawing now. Heck even doing these animations, by the time I'm getting to finishing them, I'm at a much better skill level then when I penciled these in and I'm like...fuck these look bad. (at the time I thought I was the shit).

There's so much work that I just haven't shared and nobody has seen since it just spoils everything. So I try to draw other things that I can at least post publicly, but the dilemma is, any time I spend drawing other things to share, is time I'm not working on the game...lol. But sometimes I need to just pull back too, I've always struggled with essentially running full steam until I burnout, then I need to recouped, then repeat the cycle. (I'm hoping now with the CPAP I won't have that problem anymore).

But yeah a lot of these scenes I think turning out fantastic...one of my concerns though is when you're playing through these they might go by pretty fast as the story advances -_-. But it is what it is, it'll look sweet. But yeah the scenes are coming along nicely. I have one more to draw and I've been working on backgrounds already.

Speaking of backgrounds, I picked up actual "Nicker Poster Color paint". These are the paints used by pretty much all Japanese animation houses and Studio Ghibli for painting backgrounds traditionally. I've been learning how to paint with gouache/ poster color and watercolor. So I'm doing these backgrounds as a hybrid, painting them traditionally and digitally.

Now you're probably asking, if this is so hard, why the fuck did I continue with this process if it's taking this long. Well young padawan, it's because I'm retarded.

I'm not going to lie though, this has been grueling and I know my development track record has been pretty lame. I don't like giving up on things and by the time I realized how long it was going to take going this route, I was already in too deep, I might well just continue down this path and not leave it all hanging. That would have been a shame.

Also look at these finished cel's, they're looking fucking amazing! Wait till you see some of them move!

In the end I think it will be well worth it...I hope. Anyways it's getting there! And sorry for this taking so long and for how long I go silent. I don't really mean to do so but I don't like to constantly egg people on. Anyways, I'm going to keep working, I have a really good momentum right now!

Also one more thing, if you guys aren't already following me on X or discord, that's where I put a lot of my art that I'm working on. Links are below, I've been really struggling to get any growth on my new X pages so some follows and shares would be much appreciated ^_^

Till next time peeps.

X Accounts:

SFW - @Voodoomonkey_2

NSFW - @VoodoomonkeyALT

Linktree: All the links