1.2025
Hello all, and happy (late) new year! I’m always a bit shy about writing about myself, but I’m gonna give it a go. 2024 wasn’t my worst year, but it was by far my weirdest. I had a lot of personal learning to get through, but I was very lucky to be able to participate in some really cool creative projects like Kattabolt and CUSC as an illustrator. And toward the end of October I began to work on a tiny Guild Wars 2 fan game (first called Seitung Spring Clean and then Jade Spring), and finally broke through a big creative barrier I’d been encountering for a long time. In the past, starting a project would be easy and engaging, but as complexity and decision-making increased, the wheels would fall off relatively quickly. Not this time!
My first goal is to finish Jade Spring and gather feedback on it. It’s been a good opportunity to study beautiful environment and prop art from Guild Wars 2 and to produce assets of my own, and to experience the entire game development cycle. I believe I can have an early access version for a wider audience to try out in a month or two by keeping the scope aggressively low, before finishing and promoting it as a “tiny fan game”. There are plenty of fears swirling around my head: “what if the game sucks?” “What if nobody cares – and rightly so?” “Is this even a worthwhile ambition?” But I’m trying to remind myself, “what could I achieve if I moved forward despite those fears?”. Ahhh!
Set piece I've been sculpting for Jade Spring!! Baked down into 6.8k tris; gonna add some light rays as moveable decorations 🌸 #EnvArt #Blender
— Alec 🌸 (@slyllama.net) January 8, 2025 at 9:43 AM
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I’ve become certain that environment and prop art are the niches I want to hone and establish a career in. There’s some kind of magic in game-space – in places that don’t ‘exist’ but which do exist; places that convincingly convey weight, depth, and soul as you move through them. Jade Spring has been a great crash course in how environments go together, and I’m going to use it to continue to fill out my portfolio; I’m already thinking of some additional themed collections, like Mistlock, Elonian, and Astral Ward decoration sets.
After that, though, what comes next? The game industry is in a complicated position at the moment; and the bar for skill and talent is super-high; I’m lucky enough to have a secure job that lets me learn cool things, too. Where I ended up using 2024 to experiment in a number of areas, I really wanna hone in on environment art and sculpting this year, go deeper into fewer projects, and use my job as an opportunity to improve my discipline and ability to break down complicated tasks (two things I sorely need to improve, xD). To that end I intend to primarily focus on just one other substantial project after Jade Spring (aside from my job, freelance work/assistance, and any other fun bits and pieces that come up).
A few months ago I explored the idea of a Obduction-style game about my Call of Cthulhu character, Corinne. It’s a small dream sequence which blends material aspects of her life and setting with deeper, more abstract, and more cosmic thoughts, fears, and impositions. I really like the idea because not only does it offer an opportunity to produce some really neat, high-detail assets (think Steampunk and cosmic stuff) for my portfolio, it’s a very personal and artistic endeavour that will have value to me no matter what. Again, I think that a major key to success would lie in making sure the game doesn’t balloon in scope – and it would touch on one of my big insecurities, writing! – but the end result could be very pretty if done right!
As for those “other fun bits and pieces”; last year I began to play around with making environments for Myst Online: Uru Live, and to play those games and get re-invested in those worlds, before 2024 kind of collapsed in on itself a bit for me. I’d love to go back to playing Uru right through and making some maps and set-pieces! The community was so fun, helpful, and engaging; and I suspect there is a lot to learn from adapting props and environment art for an active yet legacy game and engine.
Some older #Myst things hehe, I've caught the Uru bug again... was gonna start playing around with the engine last year before things went downhill; this year I'd love to play right through Uru (and maybe End of Ages & Obduction) and perhaps give making a map through Korman a proper go!
— Alec 🌸 (@slyllama.net) January 15, 2025 at 9:52 AM
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Thank you so much for reading my personal rambling! I feel embarrassed talking about myself this much, so I hope I can use this writing as a reference to make cool things that other people will benefit from. There’s a second Jade Spring development log coming soon; areyoshi has helped me improve many aspects of the game for a 1.1a internal milestone; after that will be 1.2a which will fill out the remaining major features and progression paths. So I’ll be writing about all of these things quite soon. Thank you again!
