Honestly, I just made this to replace the last post, so let's just do a recap of my year as an artist.

100 FANS

Starting it off with a bang, I celebrated a fan milestone of 100 fans. Despite having been on the website for 6 years at that point, I only really got popular during the last few, when I chose to join art and animation collabs.

I'll take an excerpt out of my artpiece description to describe how I was feeling back then:

Crazy how I got to 100 fans without quitting, especially since most of my fans only came in the last year or so. Thank you Shal for being fan #100

If this was on Twitter or Instagram, I'd probably quit after the first few years, due to no attention. I heard the algorithm can be that way.

However, the combination of collaborations, competitions and lack of algorithm made me resilient.

MOLLUSK MOON

I worked on this game. It was actually the second game I made as part of "Boss Club"- a small gamedev team started after releasing the game Kawaii-Chan the Girlboss. I think the game was based off an old shooting game build @Gavmcool made in Scratch, and I was just eager to work on any game at that point. Anyways, I did the designs for the Iocts(Io octopuses- I think I had a more scientific name for them) and Gav made minor changes(i.e. giving them clothes) before drawing the sprites.

I wanted to make a 3D model for the gun, but I don't remember if I ever told anyone before working on it.

Anyways, this was also my first time working with a voice actor(Brian Vaughn) which taught me that I should learn the difference between "for hire" and "for collaboration". I think the guy must've felt sorry for us because he didn't take any payment. Recently, I was searching him up online and I found that he was the narrator for the DND Reddit channel. Used to watch that for a bit a few years ago during my reddituber phase, so it was definitely a surprise

SPOOKY GOD FEAST

What else can I say?

Except that this was based on those shitpost animations where a character does a cute dance(usually a PNG flipping right to left or changing to another PNG to the beat). I made it harder for myself by wanting them to shift between 4 poses and needing to move them in a straight line for half of the frames.

ART COLLABS

I'm more used to art collabs than any other medium, and the first one didn't even release publicly, so I'll just put all of them in one section.

This one was made for the Sonic Art Collab: an art collab primarily featured on a Discord server because they couldn't find the password to their collab Twitter. Using strictly warm colours for highlights on this piece gave it a nice, consistent colour palette.

I originally made this as as an example of what a Loss comic could look like without relying on the same poses as in the comic. I just refined it later on- rather than making a new one- because I was unmotivated to draw anything else in time

I decided to make two different cogs in two different programs(one in Pixel Studio, the other in PICOCAD) and send them both in because I could. The first cog was in the ZXSpectrum palette, but unfortunately it didn't look too good. The second was composed of multiple coloured shapes, since I didn't want to import any textures from phone to PC and back again.

FROGGER TOWER DEFENSE

Honestly, I'd consider this my greatest accomplishment of the year to be honest. It was really fun to work on it over the weekend for the GMTK Game Jam, and it felt like a relay attempting to work on the game for as much time as possible, whilst being in our own time zones(I had the advantage since it was the afternoon(GMT) when I got the prompt). We spent hours on different ideas around the prompt "Roles Reversed" before settling on a reverse-frogger game where you keep mutant frogs away from you with cars, logs, traps and a trusty gun. Unsurprisingly, there were multiple games based around "reverse-frogger".

The game unfortunately didn't qualify due to an error with the web build, but that didn't stop me from seeing Mark Brown play the game live, as well as its success on Newgrounds.

I don't want to repeat anything that's been said before, so any other details would probably be found in Gav's post

https://gavmcool.newgrounds.com/news/post/1399526

MADNESS: EXONERATION

We were planning to get a game out for Madness Day, but the lack of a prize in the games category was a real demotivator. I was antsy about getting it out, and Gav told me that I should just upload the art I made for it.

FROGGER TOWER DEFENSE: HALLOWEEN PATCH

While the rest of Boss Club were working on Monster Tavern(which I designed the logo for and nothing else), I decided to work on my own fan-update to Frogger Tower Defence. I based it on a combination of the Snowgrave Route and the Strangled Red pokepasta(but without the meta aspects of the player being separate from their character).

I had to study the hell out of my own game in order to make the mockups look authentic, since I didn't want to just take screenshots(out of a mix of pride in being an artist and pride in not relegating it to posts, which would've been left unseen by most fans). I asked @Rileyverse to draw the shopkeeper afraid- since I wasn't too good at anatomy- in the style of of GetterRocka's drawing of the shopkeeper.

It was fun, and I want to do more like that in the future, but it didn't seem like anyone really cared about it when I posted it. I also missed out on making a game with APLove, and he makes cool games.

GRINCH'S ULTIMATUM REANIMATION COLLAB

My final project of 2023 was doing the first shot and bumper of the Grinch's Ultimatum Reanimation Collab. I based the shot off educational games and a scrapped animation I had about mobile games.

(Originally made for the animation Live Action Jam, but no actors came)

As for the bumper, I made it for @GoofyNutNightmare in exchange for an anniversary gift

GENERAL THOUGHTS

Over the current year(and maybe previous years) I've struggled with motivation. There's a lot of ideas I want to get out of my head, but I want them to be perfect(or good enough) so I don't work on them unless I'm certain that the final product will be high quality. I'd say being descouted may have contributed to it, but I don't want to start complaining about stuff which shouldn't matter.

THE FUTURE

I'm currently working on an original animation right now, with voice acting rather than just reusing a meme clip. It's probably going to take a few months though, so you'll have to wait. I'm also working on a few other collabs on the side, one of which will come out in January

I'm still going to work with Boss Club on games, but I might want to work with other people on other games to be more independent and less overreliant on the same guys to make games with. Frogger Tower Defense is definitely going to get more stuff added to it, both in and out of the game.

I don't know what else will change, but I'm hoping it changes for the better

What a surprise! I left this post for so long it became New Years Day as of the time I'm posting it