2020 is (almost) over. Happy holidays everyone…! I’m so tired. In order to recover from my holiday-induced insomnia I slept for over 14 hours today and it felt great, but now I must suffer from the staying-too-long-in-bed curse of continuing to be tired. Anyway, I hope everyone is enjoying themselves, or has at least managed to carve out some happiness for themselves this month.
The good thing that came from being excessively sleep-deprived during christmas is that I thought of this incredible idea: writing a monthly newsletter. It was such a good idea to my brain that it was the first thing I thought of when I awoke from my post-christmas coma.
Here’s a tweet I wrote at the start of 2020:
Wow look how optimistic it is! At the end of 2019 I had just crawled out of a years-long burnout that was pretty deep in my bones. I was so tired, but so hopeful about my creative future. I thought 2020 was my year. I was going to get over my hangups and anxiety, make what I wanted to make and finally start sharing my work more frequently. I am an optimist like this.
And then 2020 yknow, happened…it pushed me back into the burnout zone pretty quickly and I slipped back into old habits, one of which is “never sharing anything I make”. I did this for years as a recovery mechanism. Social media is really stressful for me and the many bad habits it encourages was preventing me from focusing on my creativity, so I would make things and only show my friends, or even just tuck it away into a folder just for me. It’s good, but it does eventually get very lonely.
And actually, it turns out that people enjoy seeing what I make. Weird but ok!
Jokes aside I’ve been pretty lucky to have a community of cool people who’ve encouraged me this year and while that’s been great, it’s not shaken my inability to use social media to share my work. I desperately want to stop hiding things in the depths of my computer, so here we are. I am trying out a monthly newsletter.
As this is my only 2020 newsletter I am going to try and briefly write about everything I made (that I can remember!), so this’ll be longer and more vague than usual…anyway, enjoy!
MY ART WEBSITE – In the spirit of “sharing my work more” and “I hate social media” I spent a portion of this year building myself an art website from scratch. I’m not a professional artist and I don’t need a portfolio, but I grew up on deviantArt and really wanted a gallery where I could gather all my art in one place. I was actually inspired to do this after seeing a friend do the same: PLEASE LOOK AT SIDNEY’S COOL WEBSITE
They did such a great job of organising and categorising their work, I love being able to browse an entire collection of art…it’s so satisfying, and just really cool.
My gallery isn’t an exhaustive collection of everything I draw, but I update it frequently and put all my favourite stuff there. It’s definitely improved my relationship to my own art and I love to visit just to look at everything. Highly recommended.
You can look at it too, by clicking on the leftmost navbar icon at the top of the site.
I made this with jekyll, github pages and several months of staring down CSS in some sort of death battle. There’s not much to elaborate on but if you’re curious just message me on twitter.
BIOME GHOULLERY HAUNTED HOUSE – I’m part of a freelance collective, Biome, made up of many incredibly cool and talented people. A few of them made an online space, the BIOME GALLERY, so we could hang out, express ourselves and showcase work. It’s very cool and fun and has been invaluable for keeping us connected this year. It even got into the Leftfield Collection at EGX!
But I didn’t do any of that. No, my contribution came later in the year, when I became obsessed with haunted house walkthroughs on youtube and offered to add a haunted house to the gallery for a Halloween event. The BIOME GALLERY became the BIOME GHOULLERY and the other members were kind enough to help implement my funny little animated skeleton pictures, create a haunted ritual, compose a spooky soundtrack and decorate the rest of the gallery in the spirit of the season. Then on the big day we all got to hang out and walk through the haunted house together. Definitely a highlight of my year…
I really like the idea of making an online haunted house park where multiple creators can get together to make some spooky houses for people to visit during October. I’m thinking about this a lot so it’s on my 2021 list. Here’s hoping I can get to it!
ARCADIA – I was completely surprised and totally excited to be invited to speak at ARCADIA. I’ve not done a presentation or talk since I graduated years ago and was completely terrified. But it was great actually, I talked about the many cool hats I own and my ever-present imposter syndrome. It was pretty cathartic for me, and apparently people really enjoyed what I had to say. I was joined by many great speakers as well, who all had really cool things to talk about, so I highly recommend you check out the other talks too!
(All the talks are currently in the process of being edited and uploaded, so I’ll link stuff once it’s all ready to go).
I was too nervous to notice that my taskbar was visible the entire time. But hey look at my hats.
ECTO-DETECT-O…2 – I actually started this Halloween 2019 but I didn’t get very far. I spent a lot of this year elaborating on it, stretching my code legs and having fun. The bulk of my work was spent on shaders, NPCs, quests, interactions and doors. I was so satisfied with my door mechanics that even now I will sometimes load up the project so I can walk around opening and closing the doors. I like to have fun.
This is now at a stage where I can focus on populating the level with characters and implementing fun little quests for the player.
I stalled on progress because I couldn’t think of a good “main quest” so I’m taking a little break from this to watch cartoons and refuel my brain. Maybe it’ll be ready for Halloween 2021.
DANTE NO
COSMO – Wow this is so weird for me. I’ve been working on this in private for years, and now I’m finally…talking about it? 2020 was the year that I made enough progress for it to be ‘playable’, so now my work consists of figuring out what the hell pixel art is, making levels, items, enemies, dialogue and, idk, actually designing it? Completely wild to me, a person who has spent years worrying about functionality and bugfixing.
I don’t have much I want to say about actual game content just yet, just know that I’m working on it when I have the time/energy and one day it’ll be ready. Please do not message me about how it’s a fools errand to make a larger game by myself. I accepted my title of “fool” a long time ago, probably the same time I decided to make this game. I am haunted by this game concept and must carry on.
ARTWORK – Hey I drew stuff this year. I’m not gonna dive into this too much because you can just go click on my gallery. But I did a lot of fanart (mostly Devil May Cry) and I indulged in a lot of purple/pink/green/blue colour palettes.
Anyway, I’m unbelievably happy with everything I drew, but here’s my favourite thing from this year! It’s HELL VANGUARD, an enemy from DMC3. I tried out “Slow September”, an art challenge designed to combat the usual October Happenings by suggesting we all just slow down and draw like 2 things a week max. I decided to spend this time drawing DMC enemies because that’s just who I am. I love everything I made that month, but this is my favourite.
Wow! Look at them go. A big purple screaming skeleton. I love them. If you click on their face you will see a bigger version that’s better for looking at.
I posted a little graphic over on my twitter (or I’m going to, if I haven’t yet) that summarises my year in games. Here it is:
My first thought when compiling this was: “did I really play Luigi’s Mansion 3 in January?” because it has been about 6 whole centuries since last christmas. My second thought was “wow I really did a lot of demon hunting this year.”
The copious amount of Devil May Cry is a completely normal occurrence, because if you didn’t already notice I am a bit of a Fan™. The Vergil DLC makes me very happy and I’m currently working my way through the higher difficulties (sorry to my flatmate who has probably heard Bury The Light a million times this month alone).
I played a lot of DMC5 outside of the Vergil DLC as well, because I love to be a queer-coded demon killing machine that says funny phrases and does cool flips. I was super happy with DMC3 on switch especially, because I was always really bad at that game as a kid and the new features have given me the opportunity to be a little better at it. Also it’s just one of the best gaming experiences I’ve ever had. Temen-Ni-Gru iconic.
I got extra anxious when lockdown kicked in and spending hours watering flowers in Animal Crossing each day just wasn’t cutting it, so I fell into a DOOM-shaped hole sometime in April and resurfaced just after October. DOOM 2016 was fun but Eternal’s intense combat loop really provided the “unable to maintain coherent thoughts about current events” experience I was looking for. Definitely a strong recommendation from me, I had a tonne of fun.
Around the same time in April I tried out PREY, which has been sat in my library for years. In 2017 I accidentally decapitated myself on the helicopter blades during the tutorial and decided I would not survive well in space, but this year I figured I had nothing to lose. PREY is definitely one of my top picks for the year, seeing as I played it twice in a month for like 4-6 hours at a time. It’s just so nice to wander around accompanied by the sound of humming machinery…and the enemies are all pretty Casparcore. Void creatures AND they’re named after ghosts? A game after my own heart.
That’s all my top favourites for the year! For the sake of keeping the word count down I’ll spare you my thoughts on everything else; just know that I had a lot of fun playing these games. You can always message me on twitter if, for some reason, you want to know more of my gaming opinions.
🚨 WAIT THERE’S MORE 🚨
Hi sorry there is one more game I played this year. It looks like this:
I backed this on kickstarter in the before times and typically it arrived during a time when I am unable to subject my friends to it. The good news is that it has a single-player mode, which is enjoyable if difficult. I am a person who likes to collect toys and figurines and I am happy to say that this game has blessed me with an army of DMC5 miniatures (these boxes are 90% minis, 10% game decks and tokens). I use them to create funny little dioramas for Nendoroid Dante, who is woefully lonely on my figurine shelf.
this man has no friends
Wow that’s it! For now. This is what happens when you use your first newsletter to do a 2020 summary. I hope that this becomes something that is helpful for me, and enjoyable for others. Future newsletters should have a bit more focus and a bit more room to chat about things. If you ever want to ask anything or suggest stuff you’d like to hear about from me, feel free to message me on twitter dot com.
2020 has obviously been a really stressful experience for everyone, and I’m grateful for all the cool people I’ve spent time with this year. It’s been good. So shoutouts to Biome for all the collaborative projects, sharings and game nights, and thanks to my cool friends for all the chats, games and bad film nights. I will never forget DOOM (2005) and its bootleg BFG.
Despite everything, I’m looking forward to 2021. I’m looking forward to making things and having fun. I have ideas and motivation and I am determined to keep going. Writing this was so cool, I got to look back at everything positive from this year that was at risk of being drowned out by all the negative. Hopefully I can keep this going every month, whether I have stuff to share or not.
If you read this whole thing, thanks! I have a holiday present for you, are you ready? Here it is. It’s a picture of my cat. His name is MERLIN and he is a good boy. I did not get to see him at all this year, but I sleep easy knowing he is being spoilt and cuddled every day.
See you in the new year!
Caspar 👻
