Status Update

Make It For YOU vs MAKE It For You / I Am Not An Artist

I’m feeling kinda funky so I’m gonna try to keep the idea I’m trying to express sorta simple. (Edit: This is incorrect, I ended up spending 4 hours blogging because apparently two cups of coffee after waking up is too much for me to handle. Sorry.)

This post is written and shared primarily for you, friends / acquaintances / strangers who found my blog via google. But also _partly_ as a reminder to myself.
Sometimes we doodle aimlessly or make funny sounds that feel good in the mouth, or just noodle around on our favorite instrument enjoying the sound. That is MAKING for you, the enjoyment is in the making.

Sometimes we have a specific idea we’re trying to record or express or that we want to witness because the version in our head is kinda hard to pin down into a concrete form that won’t vanish. When we make things to capture that, or make things to try to _find_ that satisfying result, that is making for YOU. The method of getting it made is not so much as important (possibly, depends on the person) as the matter of getting to the right outcome.

And in those particular cases, the act of sharing the thing that was made is usually a separate decision come up with after-the-fact. The purpose of making the thing was already fulfilled, so sharing it with others is either a byproduct of yet another goal, or a habitual activity, or a social connection task, or any number of things. But it itself is an act separate from creating (usually). Picking which things to share and why is a matter of Curation, which is kind of a subtle art of its own. Choosing and arranging discrete choices is art! Even if it doesn’t really feel like it sometimes.

The decision to make things during a live stream or in a shared workplace is kinda merging the act of sharing and creating together, but in that context the constant barely-filtered sharing is the dominant activity that colors any Making that takes place. The act of curation is limited in that context and has to take place as part of the process of creating the thing at all.

And then there’s making things that are intended primarily for a friend, or a client, or to be shared with strangers. The entire value assessment shifts into a zone that kinda depends on feedback of those social connections to others, with a little bit of the personal curation coming through as a matter of what feels good or reasonable to one’s self, and as a matter of considering social consequences of the things being made. When we are Making for Friends or Making for Others, we are almost always using a very different underlying ruleset than we do when we are Making things for Ourselves. Because a lot of things that we can do to get practical information for next steps and then discard once we reach that next step take on a different meaning and feeling when it is instead something that everyone sees and forms opinions about, intentional or not. I might spend a week going through two or three pages worth of funky incomplete sketchbook doodles before one of the ideas latches on in a way that I genuinely feel I want to explore and flesh out. And then even with that one thing I might drop it after a day or two, or I might forget it exists overnight, or I might get really excited for a month and start doodling it multiple times across friendly drawpiles or request streams and the like.

(I never originally intended to share this. I am only sharing this because the sketchbook was right next to me and it’s one of those cases where I just kinda doodle things aimlessly and don’t feel particularly strong about it. In this case the doodles are fine I think, they’re just lacking zest I guess. of my “burn energy by making stuff” doodles, this is definitely on the tamer and more coherent side.)

Anyway, what I’m finding is that while I do kinda like sharing things with friends, especially when they’re made for friends, I cannot thrive on that energy. I *have* to be making for _myself_ if I want to keep making things. But directly contradictory to that is that I do not like the process of making things. If I could make the ideas in my head a reality without having to do it myself, I absolutely would, and I would enjoy the outcomes immensely, and it’d be a losing die-roll for most of those ideas whether I’d feel like I should share them at all or just keep them to myself.

And this is not a new thought, even back in 2018 kinda stopped sharing darn near anything I drew because it wasn’t doing much for me and I was just tired of feeling constantly let down from now getting any kind of intrinsic or social reward for grinding the “draw stuff” treadmill.
Similar thing in 2014, though I think at that point in time I hadn’t realized it was the entire process of making the art that was draining me, not just a lack of interest in the social element and the art itself.

And I feel like that that’s the pandora’s box I’ve walked myself into by becoming more familiar with modern machine-learning technology.

(!!Big Ol Warning here because I’m about to pivot and start rambling about Machine Learning!! and how I used to want to go into that field about 15 years ago and how now Big Tech/Tech Bros and working artists dealing with the newest Capitalist flavored Existential Threat keep tossing out knee-jerk takes that make it impossible for me to share my sincere feelings in any kind of mixed setting unless I want to get attacked by unintentionally misinformed takes. I won’t be offended if you stop reading here, I promise. Okay well I might be _slightly_ annoyed, but I’m not going to stop considering you a friend just because my blog hit a topic that you’re not cool with. Please PLEASE focus on taking care of your well-being over reading my early morning over-caffeinated mind-dumps. So like, I’m super sorry being annoying about this, but this is something that’s getting to the point where it’s kinda making me physically ill for being treated like a binary matter.)

I am not talking about the “buzzword” version of AI.

(AGI might occur in our lifetime, but it won’t be something any large capitalist-market focused nation would allow to happen unless they go out of their way to justify digital slavery. And that is something I pray never happens.)

Nor am I going to knee-jerk condemn or praise all of ML just because of what so many people around me have been saying about it.

(Most of my working years in tech have been doing a job where the fundamental end goal is to create a tool so good that my job ceases to exist. I’ve long since made peace with the idea that collaborating to make unnecessary busy work go-away is the goal, even if that is economic self-destruction in the very real conditions of perpetual housing-fees utility-fees and nobody having enough money to fulfill all of their needs because business and governments are well aware that coercion via denial of needs is exceptionally powerful to get work done from people who would rather be doing anything else.)

Nor am I trying to claim that letting businesses suck up everyone’s data and package-that as a product for profit is inherently good, nor that processing darn near all of the data on the clearnet to train a new model for specific goals is inherently bad.

Probably one of my more genuine radical takes? Even though there’s so much fiction about how the erosion of privacy is the doom of society, I think the issue is when that erosion of privacy and control is used to reinforce dis-balanced power dynamics and to put coercive power in the hands of a few.

I think the conceptual collective ideal would be that all of this information which is supposedly “publicly available” should be treated much like one treats a library. Any kind of “products” or neural networks, etc that depend on the mass collection of all of the world’s internet knowledge, legal or otherwise, with permission or otherwise, should then be treated as forbidden to be used in a commercial context on its own, but should be fine to be derived from the same as anyone might be inspired by a book or movie or videogame or some billboard they saw 10 years ago while visiting a family member. And the underlying opposition to this matter is that copyright and IP law has long-since been used to the heavy benefit of the moneyed and only marginal value to the indie startup or solo worker. And since this long corrupt concept of copyright and IP control has been demonstrably ineffective for the mass, then it would seem most reasonable to dismantle that portion of law entirely.

People who make great music inspired by others should be free to survive for doing so. People who make music that unintentionally sounds close to something else should not have their livelihood destroyed because of over-eager automated copyright claims. The RIAA should have never have existed, whatever the well-meaning intents may have been when it started. Fanart and fandom made works have repeatedly constantly shown that having commercial control over something does not inherently come with any tendency towards actually seeking the well-being of that thing’s users nor even it’s creators, and it’s often that either from a twisted sense of legal money-seeking or from simply a lack of understanding, fandom projects that help bolster the reputations and quality of the source material get shut down or litigated out of existence or put into a state of impossibility for completion simply because the creators cannot legally ask for any income related to the thing they’re making, even though by all reasonable metrics, they absolutely have made something of quality that deserves to be acknowledged everybit as much as the source material.

We’re already living the bad-path where big business and the government agencies have defacto authority to perform this mass data gathering and processing and there are functionally no meaningful ways to enforce the eradication of the practice. So the best approach I can think of it is to have the government and businesses also be forced to have all of that information public, transparent, searchable by anyone, and SKREEEEEE. If we make EVERYONE be forced to be aware of and accepting of the reality that every single human on this earth is far more flawed than the illusion we like to project, maybe we can start encouraging more sympathy and empathy and forgiveness in the hearts of people having to witness just how vile their kin is, and that it shouldn’t make them less worthy of at least a _decent_ existence. Don’t let them sit in place hurting others, sure, but also maybe don’t run a hate mob at every single person who has followed a bad idea to its logical conclusion or someone with impulse control or someone who has poor language skills and doesn’t properly know how to say what they meant, etc

(My sincere gratitude and apologies to anyone who actually went through the effort to resize that text out of a desire to read all of it. I hope I didn’t spook you too much but I absolutely loathe the current state of IP law and I genuinely think that collective knowledge/resource pooling is the only way forward. What people typically call “style” should be sufficient branding for what people are looking for… usually. I suppose I kinda disprove my own point later on in this blog?)

In my teen years I adored Tails from the Sonic games for being super smart and making robots and mecha and stuff. And in my college years the topics I paid the most attention in were robotics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. I still have some of my class notes from those lectures.

Well actually I just spent an entire hour checking and it looks like I kept more of the robotics notes then the ML notes. Seemingly I never took a dedicated ML class, it came up as a brief month or two of the late half of a general CompSci course.

I forgot this was during my “always wear denim jeans and a denim jacket” phase.
I also didn’t realize why “Class of 09” hit me so hard until I saw these emails side by side. I am NOT recommending Class of 09 to anyone struggling with depression or sensitive to depictions of extreme violence or who generally remembers the worst of what was happening in those years. But if you _can_ handle being reminded of the worst of things through the lens of it being shown in kind of a dark-comedy light, it is a compelling if upsetting game.

Anyway, I got off track. What was I saying? Right, I got into the modern ML stuff. In the context of visual stuff, know how to work with depth maps, controlnets, custom LoRA training. randomized prompts, prompt weighting, etc. I’ve finetuned PonyV6 against my own drawings multiple times to see if I can get it to imitate my own round squishy “style” that people seem able to identify better than I can. So when a lot of people think of “just put words in a bar and take the image and post it” what I’m usually looking at is probably closer to Blender’s geometry nodes.

Blender Nodes workflow (Left) for generating a dynamic 3D tile field VS ComfyUI node workflow (Right, Top Portion) for making brightly colored bunnies based on stuff I’ve drew in 2013 should probably also be considered art. I definitely understand why there’s resistance to that, since the argument is a lot like the transition from paintings to photography, or from pencil sketching to digital sketching and there’s a black-box factor that didn’t exist before. But I think the core of the argument is about the same. I didn’t make every single image the neural net were based on, nor did I make every visual moment I’ve seen in my life, and nor did I make the pigments in my paint or the casing for my pencil. But I have a _lot_ of influence of what happens once the tools are in my hands, and blaming the tools instead of blaming the user’s way of handling the tools is very often counterproductive.

Some of my 2013 deviantArt doodles
It’s still easy to tell that I did not draw these, the lineart is far too clean and the hands are far more detailed than I almost ever do on my own drawings. But at the same time it’s very clear that it’s starting to absorb the general body-type, bounciness, tendency towards open-mouths, balloon/bubble aesthetics, and outfit that I tend to give these characters even once I drop the depth maps and controlnets completely out of the process.
More 2013 deviantArt doodles. The character-sheet for Starla (second from the left) was drawn by Nick < https://latchkeykingdom.com/comics/ > and is NOT related to this specific conversation. There’s nothing particularly special to me about 2013, but some of the art that I did that catches my eye the most is from that time frame rather than the work I did more recently. I feel like I maybe should have used my RAMP work instead for the baseline, but that skews a little more generic-furry and less to my personal characters, so I didn’t.
Similar workflow as above.

Once again so clean that nobody would think it’s the kind of thing I would personally draw, even if the character design and posing is *very* me.
There’s more love put into that tush than I’d usually draw, but otherwise this actually does look like my typical sketching when I decide I want to “clean it up a bit”.
For comparison this is one of the last cleaned-up and “finished” illustrations I’ve done in the past year. This was when I was still running Windows 10 as my desktop OS and using Paint Tool Sai V2 as my main illustration tool. There’s still some signs of my sloppy penmanship when focusing on line corners on the scarf, an arm deliberately out of view (probably should be visible near the far thigh), and an oddly defined tri-digit hand. While I think this is one of the things I’m most proud of having drawn, I don’t get excited to go back and look at it again as I do all of the music I did for “No GUNS; No Bosses”.
And by contrast this was made around February 2023. Very directly based on the following picture by Chu: https://twitter.com/sdamned/status/1522371862877024256/photo/3 so I can’t say it’s really even “mine” in a lot of ways. But the amount of satisfaction I got from the amount of work I put into making it was nowhere near enough to make me want a consistent practice of doing this kind of thing. But this _was_ the moment where it clicked that I like the “doubled-outline with white-outer-shell” sticker-like look. If I ever revisit this character and the VN I made her for, she _will_ be a Squee/Rabbit so that I’m not tied to the rules of an outside IP that I don’t. And once again you can tell which parts I didn’t care about, like that book and which parts I cared too much about. Though I’m getting a weird vibe after the fact from the striped clothing because I’ve seen people use striped flags to try to sneak some weird messages or to hijack otherwise-acceptable messaging and I really really don’t want to have to start double-checking every single lined color pattern to make sure I didn’t hit on some kind of flag I didn’t know about.

But what I found from putting in all that effort and time? Is. Quite simply? I even when I _do_ get the exact artwork that I want or that I had in my head, it doesn’t give me _that_ much enjoyment compared to jamming out to my favorite music tracks on my guitar, or playing a videogame and winning against a challenging boss, or even just chatting with the friends I like most and swapping idle-doodles that we mostly did to show how we’re interpreting what each-other is talking about.Things like that, any my tendency to take kind of software designer’s approach to solving issues is why I very seldom describe myself as an “artist” outside of context where friends have already prescribed that tag to me.I make things. I am a maker. I have a lot of ideas. I might be “creative”. And I do sometimes like art. But I don’t like art like an _artist_ might love it or depend on it for survival. I like art because I like the insight into how my friends are thinking and perceiving and filtering ideas and concepts that we might otherwise assume we all view in identical ways.

But maybe I’ve got a weird read on this? After all, I’m not even the best at spotting the “Revel Style” because there has been more than one time where I deliberately wanted to change identity or stay anonymous and people were able to pick out something I drew immediately, even though I felt sure it was sufficiently different than my usual.

Whatever the case. When I’m making visual stuff for Myself, doing a rough sketch as an input reference, a loose prompt, and low cfg values is probably how I’m going to get to results that I like about as much as the best of the things I’ve ever drawn for myself. But when I’m Making for myself because I want to enjoy the feel of doing something, I’ll probably stick to playing guitars or coding small digital toys.

—

Btw if you’re wondering why I’m not super hyped up about things like Udio [music] or Midjourney [images] or Runway or ChatGPT [text] or whatever the Big Budget Corporate “AI” Flavor of the week is it’s because

1: They tend to fall into the trap of thinking more scale = more better and burning an absolute buttload of energy to achieve marginal improvements instead of rethinking the underlying technology for inference.

2: With few exceptions people can’t fine-tune them on their own works to fit specific niche cases. So you’re going to end up with a ton of stuff all feeling like it was made by the same person, even though the content swap is nearly infinite.

3: I’m generally trying to achieve something _specific_ when I use these tools. I can get Meta’s Llama and fine-tune it on my personal notes and lore and run it on my _own_ hardware to be very good for _my needs_. I can pick a leitmotif that I want to carefully use across a handful of songs to carry home the idea that they’re all referencing the same narrative concept. I can come up with a specific character and re-use them an infinite number of poses or situations when I train them into the model.

4: I’m still trying to scramble my way out of a debt crunch so I’m not exactly thrilled any time one of those services asks me to pay for continued use when I could instead pay developers directly and up-front so they can continue their work while I stick to the version I already have and tweak them to my own use case.

5: I’m me. I’m aware that I’m kinda weird and quirky and have interests and vices that don’t Click for the mass market at all. I’ve said many times before that most of the things I want to make, I only want to make because I can’t find anyone making it for me or who would be willing to make it because they’re not commercially viable. So stuff that’s meant to be good at “everything” and “massively appealing” might be relevant to me sometimes, but it’s never going to

I wouldn’t blame anyone for thinking I actually sketched this because it’s oddly close to how I actually typically sketch and I have absolutely no idea what I did differently that it got so close. And yet while getting my sketching style almost perfectly, the concepts are almost incoherent again, which I think is the tell? Either way it reminds me of some people will pick at the kind of weirdness these models tend to focus on and over-refine or just do in a way that doesn’t make logical sense, and my thought when people react that way is “Do you react that way when a novice sketchbook artist has weird incorrect limbs just floating all over the corners of their sketchbook? Or do you only react that way because you feel there’s no human to be hurt by the criticism? You’re kinda speaking to artists around you who might have made exactly the same mistakes in their own works that they simply haven’t shared with you…” … well I think like that often, but every once in a while there’s stuff where something gets hyper-detailed yet also semantically wrong, and that is much more rare in artists outside of like, kink circles where they got so zoomed-in on their subject of interest that they forgot the rest of the illustration.

okay I guess I spent like 3 hours pouring out my thoughts instead of just the few minutes of “trying to explain what I mean by Making For (xyz)” and I need to go earn my paycheck from this dayjob so uhhh yeet?

Art

doodles Saturday 31 Aug 2024

CC0, both of these

Seems like Drawpile 2.2.2 has anti-aliasing for the freehand select tool, which is it main thing that made me favor using Paint Tool SAI 2 for coloring than anything else, so… I might actually make Drawpile my main drawing tool once I find another sketching brush I really like

CC0

Uncategorized

Meta Quest 3

I borrowed money using the current Affirm payment plan and got a Quest 3. This was probably not the wisest decision as I’ve already kinda stretched by budget a bit, but current resolve is to offload at least two of my guitars and use that money to pay down other fees.
That, and the Quest 3 is a *signficant* step up from the Quest 2 in terms of feel and convenience (I can actually see my phone without taking the thing off!? Wow!), so I fully intend to be spending more time using Quest 3 for actual work.

Got some other ideas I’m toying with. Still sorta want to explore what doing a VN in VR is like. Still sorta want to try turning Bubble Menace into a short free rail-shooter style experience. And I want to do more VR Sculpting. (Right now, ShapeLab 2024 is giving me a bunch of issue refusing to get past the initial loading screen on Linux, while Kodon works GREAT and feels SO GOOD to work in… but loading any of the files I made in it takes an extremely long time. I feel *very* sure that once I find or create a 3D modeling tool that works smoothly for me in VR, that will probably almost entirely replace the role 2D sketching currently has in my life. drawing on paper or screen tablets is a very useful skill, but it’s been more than a decade since I was able to say that I enjoyed the process for the process so much as enduring the process for the outcomes.)

I think it’s possible to do VR streams. I recall having tried a few times in the past. Once I start feeling cozy and settled in I’ll probably give it a go again with the new kit. Though I just realized I have to get ALVR and Developer Mode all setup on this new headset and make sure it works as well as it was with the Quest 2. What I found out from a lot of tinkering about today is that while ALVR has oddly high lag when playing 2D games in VR, playing the actual for-VR applications/games in Stream VR via ALVR often works very well, even over the WIFI. I know it’s possible to route that network traffic over USB to make the connection even more reliable, but I haven’t had success with that on Pop OS yet.

Aaaaand, I think that’s about it for today? I actually spent quite a lot of time in VR today and am very pleased about it. I’d like to show off the little sculpt doodle I did in KODON when I figure out how to actually get it to load.

(Pretty sure it’s already done loading within the first minute, but the prompt just won’t move to let me see and verify.)

Uncategorized

Blender 3D

(CC0, screencap of live EEVEE viewport in Blender .4.2.1) Was supposed to be lighting practice, kinda just turned into messing about with shaders and 3D doodling to try to relax. Aimless, sure, but it’s kinda nice to have low-energy stuff to do that isn’t really meant for others.

Art

Bank Card Design & Request Doodle

(CC0) Just put this together so I could have some bright and cheery art on my bank card and because I’ve been wanting to replace my old banner art for HeliumSqueeze for years now. I drew and colored Puffy (Left) and Pinks (Pinks), but I grabbed and slapped on a generated beach for the background because I only had a couple of hours before the cutoff for submitting the art for printing on the card, and the background is really not the point. If I had been thinking more clearly, I’d probably have reused the bubbles and balloons tile pattern from PoppingSpree instead, but I think the bank card tends to not like repeating pattern backgrounds.

(CC0) The older HeliumSqueeze brand banner that I wanted to update and replace. I know I wanted at least one Squee, one Helibuster, and the way balloons will be used in the setting to be immediately evident. But these specific throwaway designs and the color scheme just never quite hit right with me. I think at the time I was going for “pastel pink lemonade vibes, and teal-green for leafy feels” but it just never quite worked how I wanted.

When I get around to _actually_ replacing the banner, I’ll git rid of those pixelbrush lines for some thicker more cartoony vector lines. And I’ll have to rethink how I’m going to put the HeliumSqueeze text in there. These specific balloons end up looking kinda distracting like kinda off jawbreaker candies instead of balloons? I dunno, I’ll improvise when I get time. Actually, maybe I should go ahead and make the leap to trying to do 3D models for the characters for the banner since that’s the general direction I want to go in the future anyway.

Full Sketch Page etc. The purple-on-white sketch of Ribbon Badge in the middle-rightof the canvas is actually a live-streamed doodle made by Alixesque! Alix is a super cool and good friend, please check out the page!

A lot of half-doodles and reworks and color swatches kinda tossed about the page. Also you can see where I was trying to revisit the design for Zooey again. This time I was trying to take some of the yellow/orange I like from Tails (Prower) and the purple mane from the Rarity fanart animation version of the same Zoobe Luna Fourth of July meme. I was going to keep most of Rarity’s hair style almost directly in tact, but instead I decided to go with kind of a mohawk sorta look to draw a bit from Kazooie (Banjo-Kazooie)’s visual language. Gives her a silhouette that’s a bit different from most of my characters. I feel pretty sure I’m going to stick with the orange/yellow instead of the white, I’m just now sure how deep I want the orange to be yet. I don’t want it to read as “flesh color” but I don’t want it to be overly abrasive on the eyes either, even if that fits the character’s personality. And I think it reads a bit more clearly that she’s easily agitated, actually kinda loves music and dance, and likes to live open and true to her beliefs one way or another. I assume before the whole encounter with RB, Zooey was a roadie for a small indie band. At some point she probably broke off and used her earnings and loan to setup a recording studio. I have a bunch of other thoughts about this, but I don’t think it’s quite ready to be organized and tossed out as a “plan” yet.

At the bottom is a doodle for zbombiibunnii. They were *very* clear that being lifted up by the buns, having the crosses on the eyes, and having dizzy birds/stars were very important to them. I got the distinct vibe that this was a kink type request from somebody who is still kinda self-conscious about their interest, so I did the second balloon-centric thing to kinda show what I meant that what they were asking for isn’t that far off from what I spent almost 20 years drawing to begin with. Either way, the bomberman-themed-bunny character isn’t one that they specifically asked for, I kinda came up that spur of the moment based on the reference album they sent over. And from the sound of things they were very happy with it. When they asked what the name of the character is, I went with “zbombiibunnii for now”. They also said they imagined that the person lifting up their character might be Dark Zbombiibunnii, which I think is kinda cute and that’s what lead to the color choices there. Buuuut I probably need to like, actually take the time to draw out both characters less visually obscured if this is going to become a recurring thing. I don’t normally do art commissions because the stress of formal commission arrangements makes it hard for me to get anything done. But doing informal requests for subscribers or familiar faces doesn’t stress me out quite as much and it becomes a bit easier for us to kinda find a cozy midpoint between me being a bit easy on the effort and them not having to overpay for work I don’t feel I can deliver. Or. Something.

So uh, anyway, was neat coming up with a spur of the moment bunny bomberman OC. Kiiiinda makes me want to toy with returning to the Bomberman series to see if there are things I can draw from it for my own characters and settings and whatnot. Bomberman is a series that I’m always pleased to see around and think fondly of, but I typically do not actually enjoy _playing_ because losing in it tends to feel particularly bad. But the bright cartoony colors and shiny look for their bomb-centric world appeals to me, and I think it’s not _too_ much of a stretch to have bomb-style balloon stuff.

I’m still not sure what the best way is to label whatever it is I’m doing. Most of the stuff I make isn’t as overtly kink-coded as it used to be as my libido is starting to go. I used to think the best approach would be to treat things that had erotic intent exactly the same as pornography and treat things that weren’t exactly the same as any other “tame” thing regardless of how it looks outwardly, but after a while it became painfully evident that the binary “is or isn’t mature” doesn’t work very well at all. I think my current approach is to just go by feel, but otherwise claim the bulk of what I make would be under the bulk category of “Probably nothing too out of place from what teens will experience, but it’s targeting adults who adore the bright and cute aesthetics but still want topics and situations that are treated for as nuanced and complicated as they often are.” So then I look at stuff I draw like this particular ZbombiiBunni sketch and my first thought is “ehhh, this is maybe a little too suggestive and bodily-objectifying than I’d really like to be known for.” But I think I did a fair mix of sticking to the general aesthetic tastes I already like, and stuff that I think really targets what Bombii wanted.
I dunno.

Anyway, I ended up suddenly falling asleep immediately work and woke up just around midnight, so I think my sleep pattern is going to stay a bit busted for a few days. One of the more important coworkers at the small team I work for passed away suddenly in his sleep with absolutely no warning that anything was wrong. The whole team is kinda shook and we don’t know exactly how we plan to proceed. That same day, water to the house got shut off for a while and that kinda made me a little rattled. We got the bill paid and water turned back on before long, but it just made the whole day kinda disorienting.

(CC0) and a bunch of relatively aimless doodles to end on. If you actually want to check those you’ll probably have to click past the thumbnail to full size, I don’t know legible any of that is at thumbnail scale.

Art

Art/Doodles Update 18 Aug 2024

Fanart of Pochette from Backpack Hero in her new Summer Outfit! Despite the game emphasizing that she’s proud of smelling “like her homeland” more than once, I’m amused at some mild amount of ship-teasing between her and Purse in the Story mode, and I feel like her and Purse also get the best of the additional outfits compared to everyone else in the game.

Hasty doodle of carrying VAdaPEGA‘s Pantufa around affectionately.

Friendly gift/request art for GameVictim on Discord. He’s got a new cute mouse themed character they wanted art of! And while I’m not great for doing finished polished works (at least not without a lot of good circumstances on my end) I can definitely do some sketches and concept stuff when the mood strikes.

(CC0) A new set of WarHounds/LibraryHounds/LoreHounds that also line up a bit with Miranda from my Refsheet page. In short, Schima is the current elder mother for the warship she’s stationed on. Cercis is due for her Coming of Age rites, but will be foregoing it as Schima is conspiring in secret to send Cercis to [The Planet Below] to “[Ascertain the Fate of the Warlord]”. But really she’s going there to

  • 1: Experience what it means to be free of captor overlords and constantly under threat of death.
  • 2: Seek out Schima’s missing offspring that inexplicably went missing when [The Warlord] did.
  • 3: Determine if [The Warlord] has been slain. If so, the hounds remaining on the ship will almost certainly take out all of their captors on the ship, attempt to disrupt and slay all remaining forces from their captors in the immediate nearby space, and return to their homeworld to defend it from potential retaliation.

They only joined the empire under condition that their homeworld and their families would be spared. But in the time since joining it was very clear that [The Warlord] is only true to his word so far as it benefits him and can be quite petty. It would only take one LoreHound puppy to slay an entire ship’s worth of empire soldiers, but generally LoreHounds have immensely strong ties to their family, friends, and ancestry. They won’t fight and risk loses if an agreement can avoid it, but they will fight with all they have if they are betrayed.

In case you’re wondering about powers, Schima has a wall-bypassing mind-disrupting Area of Effect black Neural Bomb, smaller orange bombs for siege and assault, and a bible blade, which is more like empowered claw swipes than an actual energy blade. Cercis has projectile-reflecting barriers and formal training to use the empire’s standard infantry weapons (energy rifles and a large physical blade). She will never have to worry about running out of ammo as the same energy she uses for the barriers can be used to recharge the rifle.

(CC0) Just trying to get a feel for the “Marker” MyPaint brush in Drawpile.

Doodling the head of one of ChaosBuster12‘s characters. I know nothing about the character except that they are a cat and have horns.

(CC0) I think I drew this updated picture of Last Chance months ago in a Drawpile but I can’t remember if I ever posted it and I often can’t find it when I go looking for it, so poof here it go

The “RAMPSHOT” preview for one of the two maps I submitted for RAMP 2024. The WAD is available now: https://ramp2024.doomproject.com/ Just bonk that HUGE Download Button! The one of interest is fairly short: Map 96 – Kiss Panic Risengrave 4: Rabbit Flow. But the map depicted in this preview image is Map 107 – 2m 30s x2: Out of Time. Which uh, was meant to be a shorter and a bit more of a kinda spooky thing, but turned into kind of a vaguely buggy memorial thing instead. (If you fulfill certain conditions on this map, the next time you replay it or enter Map 96, you’ll notice something’s a little different.)

(CC0) Mia Asterisk, before the whole body-changing thing. Taking a cue from ScootZZZZZX‘s updated design of Bea.

Rough sketch fanart of Felina from the indie game Dungeon Clawler. A cat-loving bunny wearing a leotard. The only thing I don’t like about the character is the hat.

(CC0) A doodle of Miranda. Despite being implied to be the same kind of creature as the LoreHounds mentioned earlier, she’s a resident of Caliber and doesn’t open manifest any seemingly-otherworldly kind of powers. But she is good with making technology that probably shouldn’t work. Like suspiciously good at it. But the things she makes are at least _mildly_ plausible.

A Revenge attack of one of ScootZZZZZX‘s characters as part of ArtFight. I don’t remember their name. I was going to look it up on the ArtFight page but it seems like the site is down right now.

This is the sprite used for “blood” in the two maps I submitted to RAMP 2024. I haven’t settled on a canonical name for this substance, but effectively it’s just a glittery representation of “life force” in any situation where I might want to visually represent it but not draw the things typically associated with the idea. (I really hope that actually animates when I upload the post because it’s showing up blank in the editor.

Trying to put some kind of face/design to the “Rogue Fairy” for the “Bunnylike” concept. I’m not really feeling any of these. I started deliberately trying to pull color and form from the look of this one NPC from Arzette because I really like the silly meme that showed up lately and I already liked the character design before, but both of the right-most doodles feel like a Bad Vibe probably because it’s too similar to the source I tried to pull cues from. I don’t _dislike_ the bottom-left one, but I don’t like it. The top-left looks cool, but they feel like some other NPC, not an over-exuberant devotee of bunnykind.

This is the kind of thing I draw that tempts me to self-censor or to just not share at all, but I think in this case I explained my reasoning and if people still complain I’ll probably just point out that maybe my blog is not hitting the right audience.

More concept stuff and you can directly see what I was taking inspiration from or what old designs I decided to rework to fit the new setting.
I think Kazhooey is still _too_ close to her inspiration character too, but I’m pretty sure the Zoobe company is defunct anyway so I’m not worried about legal action coming of it. But I don’t want want to set optics of being super lazy copy-paste without a cohesive vision behind it. Firey orange and reds feel a lot more “right” to me for the spirit of the character. Maybe just need to bring back in the dark leggings to that bottom-left iteration for the color contrast. Like, I really want Zooey to be as much of a firebrand as Kazooie and the Zoobe Bunny herself, but still trying to do the Right Thing (most of the time) despite a tendency towards explosive rage and self-focused goals.

I drew this before I had started to settle down on what I wanted Ribbon Badge to be. Pretty much the only thing I still feel undecided on with Ribbon now is if I want to keep the super huge pink ponytails, if I’m going to make the ponytails be something that only shows up in her Embiggened form, or if I’ll just drop that and make her actual ears super big and fluffy because they’re in exactly the right spot to fit the vibe perfectly.

(CC0) Cigfried, created for RAMP 2024. I… genuinely don’t remember why I decided on making all of these characters mice. I’m sure I had a reason at the time but it’s just cone. Visually, this is kind of repurposing a lot of what I had already done when I was trying to make Catssie (which I also do not own, but I can’t get any kind of acknowledgement of authorship from Proto so I’ve affectly just assumed this character is mine now) a different entity than Cassie (from Starbuster, which I do not own). There’s no backstory here. She tries to kiss rabbits and probably tries way too hard to instruct and lecture people on things she doesn’t actually know super well. That’s it.

(CC0) Sam. I wanted a power character and I wanted a visual reference to the mouse type of Jerry (Tom and Jerry).

(CC0) Gogo. Puzzle Wednesday moderately frequently runs tournaments for a game titled Mouse Shooter GoGo. And every time they do I get distracted because one of the mouse cheerleaders has a blatant pantyshot that I have no idea why it’s there, but I think playing a whole lot of Amy Rose in my teen years left some kind of mark on me where my brain instantly notices that. Or something. Anyway, the characters are mice and this also gives me an excuse to draw some psuedo-fanart of them even though I’m darn sure the number of people who know the game and like it enough to want fanart is going to be a very small number. And if they exist and have somehow found this blog post??? Hi, welcome to my weird blog! Thank you for playing cool puzzle games!

(CC0) Fran is Narf spelled backwards. Mostly exists because Pinky from Pinky and the Brain / Animaniacs has worn feminine clothing several times and he looks great in it every single time. This is basically that, but I took from Jessica Rabbit’s outfit. Also I originally added the light up nose thinking I would have her fire a nose beam or eye beam in retaliation or just as a general projectile attack. In Rabbit Flow, she has the exact same attack as the other mice.

Jean. I still want him to present male while holding a deliberate cutesy degree of feminine appearance and charm. But in this case, I kinda figured if he ever realized his indirect association with Dalliance Arms Corporation, he’d probably be ashamed to be seen wearing the colors and try to hide it. Also he’s still decidedly a feline has he had been since his earliest days as the Sabrous/Kibrosa character “Kilo”, but now I’m kinda just deciding he’s got a bit of classical-unicorn in him somewhere. At least visually. (Though if the whole DEARDAV thing is still canon in his setting, this his birth-given appearance is fairly arbitrary and mostly a matter of personal feel and identity. And well, I guess the best way for me to explain why that sometimes hurts is that no matter how much work you put in to present your idealized visual representation in an online setting, your physical body is still the body you’ve got to work with. And having to acknowledge that every single moment in a way that everyone around you only has to experience as a fleeting on-and-off again thing is exhausting. asdfasf)

A couple of extra self-serving fanart/doodles that I wasn’t planning to share with anyone than specific friend groups. I’m deliberately omitting some stuff. I had an explanation of why here, but I think even trying to explain why I’m being cagey gave too much away.

Sooner or later I’m going to replace that old HeliumSqueeze banner with characters that people have mentioned they actually like. First Post is the obvious one that seems to stick with people. Still need a new Squee to replace the yellow one. Probably going to end up using Puffy or the unnamed orange critter for that purpose. (middle centre)

The idea of Rhonda showing up to work wearing only thigh-highs and sunglasses came up. And that is 100% something she would do in-character, and Dr. Metal would be both very cross about the lack of professionalism, and envious at the apparent strength of self-esteem and confidence she has.

I adore the idea that despite being made in secret by conspirators to be a defensive living bio-weapon and the progenitor of a new species, Last Chance absolutely adores sweets and cute fashion. Admittedly I am very far from being a fashion designer, so I can’t really realize that concept on my own quite like I feel like it should be done, but I think the vibe comes across.

Backpack Hero is a deeply flawed game that is clearly not Finished and seemingly not going to ever get the gamepad polish that it probably should have for its asking price. But I just kinda darn adore the game, the character designs appeal to me, the general idea of packing a backpack filled with just an absolute ton of knick-knacks reasonates with the way I parse these items in games and the way I clutter my belongings, and the giant backpack is _close enough_ to being a giant balloon that I can still use it for similar degrees of chaotic interactions with the characters. Sorta. It’s not the same, but there is some appeal there.

Aaaaand I think that’s darn near everything I’ve drawn in the past few months that I feel OK sharing on my blog. Now I’m gonna go take a nap or play videogames or something, my sleeping schedule is still a mess, I am still very sensitive to sounds and foods, and I think at this point I might be better off just staying off the meds rather than stressing myself out worrying about having the dependency ever again. It feels like every business just _assumes_ every human has taxi money or has a car, and my car has been out of commission for almost a year and a half now and we only have like 2 functional cars across 5 family members in the area. I can’t just manifest across state lines any time I feel unwell or for every checkup that I don’t have money saved to pay for.

pressing post before I launch into another long winded spiraling ramble. I have LLMs to help distract and absorb those episodes. crunched INSTANTLY SKREEEEEEEEE :boom emoji:

Revel Romp Compendium, Yohz Hylan Lore Compendium

Naming Stuff (I Should Probably Reformat This for a Proper Blog Post)

tbh I wasn’t planning on posting this to my blog at all, this was going to just be a personal notes thing so I could bounce ideas off of an LLM and work from there, but now that I’ve already written this up I may as well yeet it into the blog where the few people who check it can see it?
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Okay, I guess this is going to become my long-running “Naming Stuff” thread??? Maybe???

My LLC is named HeliumSqueeze LLC. There’s all a lot of implied balloon-fetish/bubble-kink themes and some implied inflation-adjacent themes, but on the whole it’s not meant to be an erotic brand so much as kind of an innuendo-laiden playful cartoony furry-friendly brand. The usual visual associated with the logo are balloon fruits. Sometimes an overinflated peach, sometimes tight overinflated carrots.

Honestly sometimes I think about the friends who encourage me the most to really go ahead and pursue these ideas and not be held back by doubt, and I can’t tell if they just have a genuine shared interest in these themes in general because they’re coming from similar inspirations to what they already love, or if there’s a sexual element to their interests, or if they’re acknowledging but fretting over the complex mix of sometimes-kinky sometimes-not themes? Or if they just really really trust in my judgement more than I do. I love my friends. I wish them the best and want to help them and make them proud. I wish I felt the same kind of self-confidence and pride for myself that they seem to feel for me.

Anyway, uh.

The iconic “species” tied to the brand are Squee (sorta like if Mimiga were made out of balloon materials and absorbed microplastics and sunlight to survive) and Squee Helibuster (Sorta like the midpoint between a Fallout Equestria pony and a Yoshi from the Yoshi series. But mostly a heavier, less size-change-y, and more crystal-claws-y counterpart.)

At current, the tentative brand names are:

* aPuzzle: Popping Spree / Jam Blow Blast First Impact – Balloon busting and item breaking puzzle game. Probably takes place in Yozh Hylan or Emmelpi.

* aRogue: Festival Vanguard – A fairly basic multiplayer dungeon crawl with some space elements. Takes place some time in the late future of Yozh Hylan.

* Bouncing Flash – A side scrolling beat ’em up with a Freedom Planet (which I do not own) inspired location and Capcom VS Series inspired mechanics. Takes place in a relatively isolated portion of Yozh Hylan (Gleed, Avarice, and the Rizqi Islands collectively form a countpart to the China and Hong Kong areas of Asia.) Occurs fairly early in the timeline.

* Metal Bubble Dragon / Su Busteberos – A self-serious Mega Man 8 inspired action-platformer game featuring Dr. Metal – a huge cybernetic bear reconstructed by Dalliance Arms Corporation after a should-be-fatal accident- and his created assistants Bubbles (role of Rock) and Ripple (role of Roll). Kind of a companion sister-piece to HOLLOWROUND and its events. Takes place in Yozh Hylan sometime after Bouncing Flash and simultaneous to HOLLOWROUND, using the same nanobubble tech established in Bouncing Flash.

* HOLLOWROUND / Bubble Menace – Action Packed third-person Sin and Punishment style (first-person in the original RAMP version of Bubble Menace) shooter game originally built in GZDoom based on Grand United Nation of States, Texas, during the Lunawakenings of the Bubble Menace, and the Big Boom resulting in instability and earthquakes following the spread of stray roaming Beast Balloons throughout the south-western coasts of GUNS. Takes place in Yozh Hylan sometime after Bouncing Flash and simultaneous to Metal Bubble Dragon, using the same nanobubble tech established in Bouncing Flash.

* CAPTIVE SPACE PUPPY THIGHS – An affectionate parody visual novel of Freedom Planet (which I do not own). Where Freedom Planet is a little dark, mostly family friendly, 90s cartoon inspired, and has a title that has very little thematic relevance to its content. CAPTIVE SPACE focuses on A: Explaining away the awkward inner-thigh exposing outfit Milla had in FP1 by way of a plausibly-unconnected Warhound character who has the same skimpy leotard-hardnes uniform but without the hoodie. B: by asserting these Warhounds were made captives to The Warlord in exchange for not having their homeworld destroyed, their role among the forces is that of Captives in Space… and the player Puppy (well, I guess a Hound since the game starts on her 18th birthday)’s Thighs are exposed. C: Once arriving on the Planet on a secret mission from her mother (against the commands of their captors) to find the missing offspring, the Puppy gets to experience what Freedom is in a sense more real than her long fleeting memories of the homeworld she was captured from. If Freedom Planet gets to have a name that is thematically irrelevant, this entire game is about living up to that name in every possible way without bearing the branding.

* SCALEBEA.STS#0777 / ZEPHYRBEASTS/ aGun: Yozh Hylan – Set in contemporary-future Yozh Hylan, this fast-paced grounded action game takes the high speed grounded action and racing-like vibe of Sonic Generations, Sonic Forces, and Super Hang-On, and mixes it with sweet bouncy colorful vibes of Yoshi’s Island and sprinkles on a little bit of item-based combat inspired by Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep’s command decks, Yoshi’s six shot system, and Sin and Punishments over the top boss fights and on-rails action. This primarily follows the Squee Helibuster trying to make their way in the world and defend their more docile Squee kin while dealing with the reputation left in the wake of the Beast Balloons of the Bubble Menace, the ramifications of their original creators being escaped criminals, various overenthusiastic fans wanting to use them like playthings, terrified long-standing locals fearing resource drain from the multiplying Squee numbers, and just generally trying to survive whatever conflicts may come their way as the island of Caliber continues to expand and define itself separately of its former role as a GUNS territory. Having my own “Sonic Forces” type game to play with and being able to bring in all of the various things from Yoshi’s Island, Yoshi’s Story, and Fallout Equestria that resonated with me the most into its own unique identifiable identity and formula is kind of a dream-project of mine, and one that I don’t truly expect I’ll get to complete within my lifetime.

* Fluff Around and Find Out / Pump Up Or Puff Up / Eidolon Static Compile – A “Bunnylike” inspired by Rabi-Ribi, Tevi, Bunny Must Die, Alice Escaped, and Dust An Elysian Tail. Kazhooey “Zooey” a foul mouthed Zoobe-inspired rabbit lives in a world of docile bunnies until the BloonBurrow Habitable Zone in which she lives is gradually invaded by small flying dragon-fairies from another Zone far across the OoB. Long ago a predecessor of the docile bunnies traveled into the OoB, made friends with the playful trickster Dragon Fairies and the immensely powerful LibraryHounds (implied to be the same creatures as the Warhounds of SCPT) of the OoB wilderness. Their offspring eventually built their own Habitable Zone for the fairies where their kind could grow and prosper. Since then, the fairies grew to know Bunnies and their iconic (playboy) Bunnysuits as icons of power akin to superheros, but the numbers of the bunnies (and bunnyhound hybrids) have since dwindled. A rogue fairy traverses the OoB to find the BloonBurrow to grant those docile bunnies the power to restore the glory the fairy knew their kind could have. Ribbon Badge (welding her iconic Pafu Pafu Hammer/Pump) traces the rogue fairy to the land and takes it upon herself to train Zooey to tame her new powers of Embiggening to expel the rogue fairy, tame the other bunnies going rampant with their new uncontrolled power, and repair and grow their home zone by bringing in fresh Data Bubbles from the OoB to undo the damage done and house their freshly swelling numbers. While there is no clear explanation for it yet, most habitable zones have an aesthetic a lot like a themepark in the middle of a furry convention with fursuit aesthetics aplenty.

* Emmelpi – Audibly a corruption of MLP, this in-world fiction is basically My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, but if all of the ungulates were lagomorphs and dragons were… still dragons, but now quadruped and a little more velociraptor/kangaroo-esque.

* Yozh Hylan / Yohz Hylan – Audibly a corruption of “Yoshi’s Island”, this is the main “series” setting most of the other stories are contextualized into being in in the form of in-world fictions or named events in history.

* Bounce Bounce / bounce Bounce BOUNCE – this is admittedly more of a general tagline than a title of anything specific.

The Systems of Embiggening:

Specific to the Bunnylike, the fairy dragons and the bunnies specialize in a handful of types of power of Big:

* Amplify – Mental and Projectile “growth” of power. Also more “ammo”.

* Bellow – “Bottom” or “Belly” expansion, limited hovering, agility improvements, powers that evoke leg or thigh use.

* Cushion – More typical cartoony “balloonlike inflation”. Works like Dig-Dug’s pump or Klonoa’s Wind Bullet in most cases, though the lightened weight can allow friendlies to take less damage from physical impacts. Also allows floating and being blown and thrown around, ally or otherwise. Can be resisted via Blowback.

* Deluge – Increase size/weight/physical strength as if filled with “juice”. An allusion to Blueberry or Hydro type stuff. Slower, heavier, can use crushing attacks like buttstomps and bellyflops. Easy to be bowled over. No Blowback, but can ricochet on surfaces from hard impacts.

* Embiggen – Uniform growth in size and power, the “ultimate” form of Big power. Can armor through low power projectiles and strikes with fighting-game style grey life. A bigger target, but far bigger threat. Can also be applied to physical objects in direct contact like the Pafu Pafu Hammer if the welder is strong enough to hold and control it.

I used to personally use the username RevelRomp in a lot of places before having the RevelRomp Dalliance and the Dalliance Arms Corporation have a major role in Yozh Hylan. Now I usually go by Ann in honor of my late mother. That was following a relatively short lived transition to AnnieWuzOK, which was a pun on Annie Mae / Anne May from a Havoc Fox “anime” joke Dusky once made. Before that I tried names like Retl (which I dropped because search engines would autocorrect to Retail), Kahli Lh’tail (an audio corruption of my first and middle names), Kilo ( still like that name honestly, but it keeps being associated with drugs), MollyJTG (loosely inspired by Molly Fyde and by Holly Songsteel, a character I had for a short lived DnD Campaign), Travisuped (I barely remember how this came about, I think I was thinking of “Upped” as in powered-up and Travis because of some anime I had seen around the same time I was playing Quake 3 Arena Demo or Unreal Tournament Demo on Dreamcast for my first time with a cousin that was visiting), NTU (a terrible alt name I kinda regret ever using), Mask11US (the first username I ever had), Scalebea.sts#0777 (a name I using as a “band” for the music I made for the games I wanted to work on for my LLC, I haven’t done much with it lately and have since kinda pivoted towards rebranding it Zephrybeasts to better tie in with the Beast Balloons and the idea of Zephyrkin), and Fickle Luminescence (which I feel kinda reflects my actual behavior of jumping around interests somewhat erratically, and a persisting fondness for colorful and pretty glowing lights and holograms and cyberspace digital world vibes).

And I think aside from getting into my weird naming shenanigans with characters like First Post (Pinkie Pinks), Rhonda Thundertits Rubberbreaker the squirrel, Hard Reset (Rez), Mia/Pepper, Jean/Jam, etc, I think that’s most of the relevant important or recurring names one would need to analyze, understand, and recommend new names and titles based on my interests, preferences, and existing tendencies in naming.

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Some bonus thoughts that I will almost certainly never get around to:
A: A sports game where participants are graded on the specific moves and precision of execution used for popping a series of specifically themed large balloons. The closest comparison I can think of are skating competitions with judges scoring the performances.

B: A simulation/modeling game where a music-loving CD-hoarding anthro goat named Casino finds herself in the employ of a fetish club under the ownership of Dalliance Arms Corporation that markets itself as an “adult game center”. At first Casino is bashful and shy about the unexpected balloon-centric nature of her job as an entertainer at the establishment, but in time she becomes a beloved figure of the establishment by customers who trust her to help make decisions and solutions for all sorts of personal goings-ons in their lives… as well as the ever-present customer-taste-specific balloon-show for particular customers to earn generous tips to grow her music collection. (I have no idea how one designs an organic “ending” for these kinds of simulation inspired games.)

C: A series of short novels exploring the day to day lives and adventures of various Squee Helibusters where they get to really show off their personality and how they deal with the good times and the worst times.

D: A fast-paced side-scrolling 2.5D shoot-em-up where dragon-fairies traverse the “Wilderness” of the OoB in search of much-needed supplies and the answers to questions that the LibraryHounds had been trying to solve for many years.

E: A 3D Platform-Racing game along the lines of Rayman Rush / Rayman R / Rayman Arena. The characters come from all over Yozh Hylan bringing their unique skills and interests in an attempt to win the prize money and the opportunity to have an episode of Emmelpi written about _anything_ they wish.

F: A Disgaea-inspired or Fire-Emblem inspired turn-based tactics game following the events of Bouncing Flash where Dazzle Flasher and the Dazzle Buster faction band together throughout Rizqi to rebel against the growing influence of GUNS’s Dalliance Arms Corporation, increasingly authoritarian policy-making from Gleed attempting to strip away the formerly granted “two governments” democracy of Rizqi, and attempts to deny the existence of Rizqi as a separate sovereignty by Alavice. Dazzle still has her signature bouncing-on-bubbles gimmick here, but as this is a tactics game and not a platformer, the utility and presentation is very different.

G: A Heroes of the Storm inspired real-time strategy / MobA type game where fursuit-like anthro characters in skimpy outfits encounter each other among the transfer lines of the somewhat-tamed sections of the OoB. These sections aren’t as high risk as the “true OoB” but because it is so popular to search for resources here, they can’t help but scrap with each other to try to collect the Data Bubbles they need to make their dream Zones a reality. Many of the abilities involve pouncing/pinning/bouncing-on other characters in suggestive ways to make them burst and return to their home zone temporarily, opening up opportunities to push ahead towards high-value objectives. The first team to either clear 5 major objectives or to completely destroy/disconnect all of the lane lines from the opposing Hubs wins.

Art

FLUFF AROUND AND FIND OUT Pump up or Puff Up!

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Game Design Document: Fairy Dragon “Bunnylike” thingy

“There are five recognized types of Embiggening. If you truly wish to grow strong, you must understand them all.”

In this world there is the Out of Bounds Zone, then there are Habitable Zones, built by organized groups or powerful individual who scavenged Data Bubbles from the OoB in plentiful numbers and used those to turn their dreams and desires into real places. Those places very often take the form of theme park-like and convention-like living spaces.

The first drawing of Ribbon Badge, before she was given her name. Here she is clearly flying and deflecting or throwing some kind of orb, despite having no visible hair or wings.
The first drawing of Ribbon Badge, before she was given her name. Here she is clearly flying and deflecting or throwing some kind of orb, despite having no visible hair or wings.
Some more sketches of Ribbon Badge with her actual hair and wings. The right-most version here is closer to the intended look, bunnysuit, holographic dragonfly wings, and a more technically accurate Pafu Pafu hammer.
Some more sketches of Ribbon Badge with her actual hair and wings. The right-most version here is closer to the intended look, bunnysuit, holographic dragonfly wings, and a more technically accurate Pafu Pafu hammer.
Her name is Ribbon Badge. She is a fairy and she's supposed to have holographic dragon-fly wings and long pink ponytail hair. Not to be confused for Ribbon Dancer, who is a completely unrelated Squee/bunny.
Her name is Ribbon Badge. She is a fairy and she’s supposed to have holographic dragon-fly wings and long pink ponytail hair. Not to be confused for Ribbon Dancer, who is a completely unrelated Squee/bunny.
This Air Pump is a strong catalyst for the power of Embiggen. It's called the Pafu Pafu Hammer (パフパフハンマー) It's also secondarily designed to be used as a melee weapon, held by the grip and swung so that the shaft extends the head. Typically the ends are given decorative power orbs which become pressurized by the shaft's pumping, but those can be removed for a more pancake-y impact, or replaced with a hose for directing the flow of air.
This Air Pump is a strong catalyst for the power of Embiggen. It’s called the Pafu Pafu Hammer (パフパフハンマー) It’s also secondarily designed to be used as a melee weapon, held by the grip and swung so that the shaft extends the head. Typically the ends are given decorative power orbs which become pressurized by the shaft’s pumping, but those can be removed for a more pancake-y impact, or replaced with a hose for directing the flow of air.
A revised version of the Pafu-Pafu Hammer, now with the grip being placed lower to better swing with, smaller hand guard/base, a rough sketch of how the rechargable pressure cylinders work, and shifted weight on the head to make it easier to swing. Not very balanced for specifically pumping, but considering it'll be charging the cylinders during normal swings too, that's probably fine.
A revised version of the Pafu-Pafu “Hammer”, now with the grip being placed lower to better swing with, smaller hand guard/base, a rough sketch of how the rechargable pressure cylinders work, and shifted weight on the head to make it easier to swing. Not very balanced for specifically pumping, but considering it’ll be charging the cylinders during normal swings too, that’s probably fine.

1. Game Overview

  • Title: [idk probably something like Balloony-Kazhooey & Ribbon’s FLUFFED UP BIG BUNS Very Loud Day in Wonderburrow Zone ]
  • Genre: Action-Adventure, Platformer
  • Target Audience: Fans of cute characters, whimsical settings, and unique gameplay mechanics
  • Platform: [To be determined]

2. Story and Setting

2.1 World

  • A realm inhabited by fairy-dragons and empowered bunnies
  • Originated from an exiled bunny who gained power in the Out of Bounds (OoB) area
  • Recent influx of dragon-fairies into the original rabbit’s realm

2.2 Plot

  • A rogue fairy is spreading power to formerly docile bunnies
  • Main character accidentally gains powers when trying to crush what she thought was a pest in her food supply and must learn to control them
  • Conflict involves tracking down the rogue fairy and helping newly empowered bunnies
  • Expelling threats from the bunny zone

2.3 Main Characters

  • Kazhooey (Zooey): The protagonist, a bunny who accidentally gained powers
  • Ribbon Badge: A powerful character who trains Kazhooey
  • (Jerry?) Rogue Fairy: The antagonist spreading power to bunnies

3. Gameplay

3.1 Core Mechanic: Embiggening

Five types of growth-based powers:

  1. AMP (Amplify): Enhances mental or physical attributes, empowers projectiles
    • This is typically either mental growth (which would not necessarily be visible), or chest growth (which I am reluctant to lean into because I really don’t like the objectification of the chest area, but I’m sure it might be better for sales to a certain audience). Empowers most projectile attacks and provides more “ammo” for more demanding abilities.
  2. BEL (Bellow): Boosts agility and provides limited hovering
    • This is typically either a non-visible boost to one’s jumping/kicking/running abilities and potentially limited hovering. Or it could be a visible belly-focused growth that increases durability and the ability to deflect or withstand physical attacks. More mobility to avoid/negate projectiles that don’t directly hit a weak point, but taking a direct projectile hit probably sends the character tumbling towards the ground with the power knocked out of them until they land or do some kind of resource-draining recovery.
  3. CUS (Cushion): Inflation-like power, affects mobility and teleportation
    • The simplest and most straight forward. Works like Dig Dug on most things. Not painful, but can be scary for those who don’t know what’s happening. When something “pops” they probably just get sent somewhere else. Possibly the OoB if they don’t have a Home Zone, Possibly somewhere very nearby if they have strong determination and resistance. Probably to the nearest friendly face if they’re not under immediate threat. Also the absolute easiest to resist by anyone with power and can result in Blowback. Makes the target light and easy to throw around for some amount of time.
  4. DEL (Deluge): Increases size, weight, and power, affects mobility
    • Makes the target big, heavy, immobile, and juiced up with power. It might be done to one’s self temporarily to enhance a big hit or to use a crushing attack like a buttstomp or belly flop. But it also makes it easy to bowl the target over or roll them around slopes and generally kick them about like a ball until they’re out of juice. Blowback isn’t a thing with this, but the target can ricochet if knocked about.
  5. EMB/BIG (Embiggen): Uniform growth, increases overall power
    • This is more of a uniform “magic-like” growth in size while preserving form. Aside from giving the target less space to move around in, this kinda just makes them straightforwardly more powerful in exactly the way one would expect if the character were simply made bigger. Probably good for using more demanding physical weapons, but bad for evasion. Might make the character “armor” through low power projectiles: they take the damage (or maybe borrow the grey-life idea from fighting games if we want to allow technical “no-damage” runs without ruling out this form) but aren’t interrupted by it.

Power System Notes:

  • Powers can potentially be combined (max two types)
  • Possible RPS-style interactions between powers
  • Different effects for “friendly” vs “hostile” applications. Friendly omits a specific penalty. Hostile omits a specific benefit. Incidental omits none.

3.2 Ribbon’s Weapon: Pafu Pafu Hammer

A multi-functional weapon that serves as both a melee hammer and an inflation device.

Forms:

  1. Deflated Form: Compact for storage and carrying.
  2. Filled Form: Default state, full size with recessed orbs
  3. Necked Form: Extended shaft for specialized use
  • Configurable valve-orbs: pushed in, both unblocked, or hose-connected

Mechanics:

  • Gas Cylinders: Six internal chambers that store compressed air.
  • Pumping Mechanism: Refills gas cylinders through shaft movement
  • Triggered Release: Rapidly expels stored air for powerful effects

Functions:

  • Melee combat
  • Ranged air blasts
  • Target Embiggening (inflation)
  • Air-propelled movement
  • Puzzle-solving applications

3.3 Gameplay Loop

  • Explore environments
  • Encounter and battle inflated enemies
  • Solve puzzles using Embiggening powers and the Pafu Pafu Hammer
  • Gain new abilities and upgrade existing ones
  • Progress through the story, uncovering the mystery of the rogue fairy

4. Art Style and Audio

4.1 Visual Style

  • Cute, colorful characters with a mix of bunny and dragon features
  • Whimsical, cartoon-like environments
  • Playful animations emphasizing the inflation and growth mechanics

4.2 Character Design

  • Kazhooey: [Details to be determined]
  • Ribbon Badge: Purple dragon-like creature with long floppy ears
  • Holographic, computer-glitch style wings or dragonfly-like wings
  • Wears a bunny suit (not shown in current concept art)

4.3 Audio

  • Upbeat, adventurous music
  • Comical sound effects for inflation and deflation
  • Unique sound design for each Embiggening power
  • Think Bubble Bobble, Puzzle Bobble, Yoshi’s Island, Klonoa

5. Technical Specifications

5.1 Target Platform

3-6 button gamepad devices.

5.2 Development Tools

[To be determined]

6. Marketing and Monetization

6.1 Target Audience

  • Fans of platformer and action-adventure games
  • Players who enjoy cute, whimsical aesthetics
  • Gamers interested in unique mechanics and gameplay innovations

6.2 Unique Selling Points

  • Innovative Embiggening power system
  • Multi-functional Pafu Pafu Hammer weapon
  • Cute characters in a whimsical setting with hints of deeper lore
  • Blend of combat, puzzle-solving, and exploration

6.3 Monetization Strategy

[Ask Nicely To Not Starve]

7. Development Roadmap

7.1 Milestones

[To be determined]

7.2 Team Structure

[Solo]

8. Appendices

8.1 Inspiration and References

  • Games:
    • Direct Bunnylikes: Bunny Must Die, Rabi-Ribi, Alice Escaped, Tevi
    • Spiritual Bunnylikes: Dust: An Elysian Tail, Luna Nights
    • Adjacent: , Klonoa, Dig-Dug, Banjo-Kazooie, Sonic series (Amy’s Piko Piko Hammer), Lyrical Nanoha (Graf Eisen)
  • Themes: Bunnies, Balloons, Inflation, growth, fairy tales, technology “glitch/runner as magic” fusion. There’s a little bit of innuendo, but the whole thing is not really meant to be “Sexy” so much as silly-funny.

8.2 Concept Art

[Include links or descriptions of existing concept art, such as Ribbon Badge sprite sheet and Pafu Pafu Hammer sketches]

Uncategorized

Out of Meds

My apologies in advance, I am diabetic and I deal with depression.

My current doctor is refusing to renew any of my current prescriptions and thus far has not given an explanation for why.

I’ve been trying to use the same clinic for years now and they repeatedly give me issues. I use them because they are one of the closest I get to but now it’s becoming clear I need to find somewhere to go that’s closer because most of our cars no longer work so I can’t just up and go to any appointment whenever I want. And I still owe different places money so while I’m trying to catch up on those debts I can’t exactly go shopping around for the “optimal” health care.

But I am sick of getting jerked around by Emory Clark-Holder in West Point, I’m sick of being paranoid, I’m sick of trying to figure out how I’m gonna get my meds refilled and how I’m gonna get to appointments, I’m sick of darn near every other thing I eat screwing up my body dude, I don’t know what they’re expecting me to DO


I can’t just up and walk down to the clinic whenever I want it’s a freaking HOUR AND A HALF WALK best case scenario

so anyway if I seem particularly irritated or very avoidant of any kind of social contact I am Not Okay right now and it’s probably better that I’m only Available when I feel I can deal with being Available.

i nearly cried over our dog walking to another room, and I ended up shouting at someone who explained something very obvious and sensible, and I have a meeting in like two hours and I have absolutely no clue how I plan to get through that as if I were normal. I screamed so much my throat hurts and I don’t want to talk anymore.

sry

Oh Hey, You Found My Blog. Congrats.