Oh hey, I'm still alive. Neat! Just in case that changes soon, some updates:

Latecomer Games and Hedge Maze Beta Testing

You might be wondering where I've been for the past few months (Sorry @marandal)! Early last year, a close friend of mine reached out to ask for help on a passion project of his. After reading through the material he had, right away it was clear to me just how much effort he'd put into his project already and how close he was to making something amazing. I know how hard it can be to get projects like his off the ground (since I have one of those, too). I genuinely loved some of the ideas he had going on, and so decided to prioritize working together with him on illustration to help his project shine.

And well, here it is:

The Hedge Maze of the Crescent Queen is a D&D 5e module built to scale with you and your party. It's an 80+ page module filled with a creative world building and characters, complete with a loose campaign you can customize according to your party's needs. The setting and campaign focuses around a new mechanic, the Lostness, which faces players with the threat of losing their very skills and identities as they try to escape the plane of the Crescent Queen, a mysterious hedge maze between the Material Plane and the Realm of Faerie which is filled with both friend and foe. The module comes with original characters, creatures, bosses, and the setting of the hedge maze for players to explore, as well as the Lostness mechanic and how it interacts with the base of D&D 5e.

The module already has some solid feedback behind it, and if our play testers have anything to say about it, it's a ton of fun. But we still need more beta testers! If you or a friend is thinking about doing a one-shot soon, or starting a short campaign but don't want to put together an entire story from scratch, this might be a good fit for you. And I'm not just saying that because I did a lot of the illustration. :)

We're also in the process for building up hype for the Kickstarter coming up in a few months, so we'd love to work with DMs and other D&D creators to get more feedback.

He and I are still working on community stuff for it, but stay tuned for that in the next update coming shortly!

Want to be notified of the Kickstarter when it launches?

https://www.latecomergames.com/

Want to follow Latecomer Games' other stuff?

https://www.youtube.com/@LatecomerGames/shorts

We'd love to hear from you!

Project Recordkeeper

I'm still hard at work on it!

Pre-production is well under way. I have a detailed story and side-quests most of the way finished, and clear vision for what the game is going to look like from a mechanical perspective. Whenever I explain the core gameplay loop, it seems to get people excited. It's essentially a 2D top-down shooter that'll take mechanical inspiration from Borderlands (when it was good, anyway) and Pokémon. The core conceit is that your "weapons" are creatures that you can construct and breed using parts you get from killing other creatures. Constructing creatures directly means getting the weapons you want with some downsides. But you can take your creatures and breed those downsides out to make weapons that better fit your needs, and unlocks the potential for new aspects of creatures you can't get from creature parts out in the wild. Basically, it takes the looter-shooter focus on high paced combat, and mixes things up with the loot system so you will have more control over your loadout. But...because your enemies are creatures too, expect any that survive to reproduce, evolve, and adapt to their environmental pressures. i.e., You.

The story and mechanics are ambitious enough that I'm going to have to build out significant tooling in Godot (as in, like, building my own testing framework and node editor plugin for the engine). There are a few reasons for this:

1. Godot lacks solid options for some of the most common needs for serious developers. Existing plugins for needs like testing coverage, end to end testing, managing save state of a story-heavy games, and a translation system are all kind of anemic. G.U.T.'s your only option for testing, but it has issues, and as the name suggests, is only for unit testing. There are plugins for managing save state, but not purpose built for a game that might have a story that's dozens of hours long with branching possibilities. Something like that would require a graph editor and graph traversal algorithm to keep track of story flags, but Godot's graph nodes are considered experimental, and follow some patterns I found problematic when using similar tooling in Unity. I don't want to base something as critical as save state integrity on parts of the engine that are subject to change dramatically, so I don't have much choice but to build a system from the ground up and test it with my own testing framework to ensure the quality I expect from myself.
2. I firmly believe Godot will become the blender of game development, so I want to contribute to Godot's open source ecosystem in some way and be a good citizen. 10 years from now, I seriously think Godot could be an industry standard, and GDScript as a purpose built language has many of the advantages of javascript and python, but specific to games development. It wouldn't surprise me if GDScript and Godot in general became widely used by smaller studios in the next 5 to 10 years, and I want to be a part of that story.
3. Building my own tools is a path forward for self-funding the game. If I can build solid tools that turn out to be useful to advanced developers, I can use that as a means to start up a patreon, or perhaps even earn some contracts as a support dev.

Y'all might have noticed that my discord and youtube channel for the project died...yeah...that happened. Initially I wanted to go the route of building up an audience for my game through content creation. But very quickly I found myself spending more time on those things than the actual game. Since my time is split between a growing family, helping start up Latecomer and the D&D module, Project Recordkeeper, and a full time job as a software engineer, I realized pretty quickly that YouTube probably wouldn't be a great fit, though I might still post updates and demos here and there. Right now the project is in the pre-production phase, and I don't want to be one of those game-dev tubers who spends more time making tutorials to get by than working on the thing I actually want to make for you all.

The New Year

I've got a few New Year's Resolutions!

1. Sleep more (Challenge Level: Impossible)
2. Spend more time with family
3. Be my wife's favorite person

What are your resolutions?

Man there's a lot going on in the industry right now:

Right now I'm moving my game over to Godot, and I have the choice between Godot's native language, GDscript, and using their C# binding. I've got a ton of C# code from Unity that I'd love to salvage, but it'd also be nice to have the chance to reimplement using a domain specific language. For reference, this is meant to be a larger scale indie project, so whatever I pick I'll have to stick with for a number of years.

What do you all think? And what do you guys think about Godot?

Hey all, big announcement time:

I'm updating my username for the first time ever to reflect some branding changes. Now, instead of JerrodStorm, my new username is TravelSizedLions to reflect my studio's name, Travel-sized Lions Story Co.

With everything going on with Unity and with me stepping back and looking at where my project is and where I want it to go, I've also made the tough decision to change engines.

If you want to see what I'm up to, come hang out with me over of my game's official discord server! You can also get an idea of what my game is by checking out my youtube channel, which will also be getting the name change. I'll also be posting updates and images here occasionally as well! Stay tuned!

Hey All!

It's been a hot minute.

I've been up literally all night finishing up my submission for Robot Day, so it might be another hot minute before I wake up from this half stupor (groans).

But basically, go check out my submission!

And, if you're interested, I also recorded a speed draw of it! :D

My submission is the main splash screen for the game I'm developing called Journey of the Return! If you want to support me come check out the game's discord and derp around with me and my buds, or you could follow me here, or even subscribe to my youtube channel for updates! I'm all over (except X, Facebook, Instagram, Tik-Tok, Reddit, Tumblr, Twitch...hmm...maybe I'm not as all over as I thought.)

I've got some cool stuff coming along for Robot Day. Sit tight!

In the meantime, enjoy my latest dev log!

...Especially if you're feeling down on yourself as a creator, just remember, J.R.R. Tolkien didn't publish The Lord of the Rings until he was 62 years old. That's old enough that many folks would be retired! Can you imagine the seminal work of your life hitting store shelves when you're a grandfather? I can't.

The internet goes fast, and you may feel like you have to succeed as a creator while you're young, but in reality, you've got a whole life to spend making the things you want to make. So long as you keep on going, your best work is in front of you, not behind you. So don't get discouraged! Just keep choosing to do what makes you happy. Don't worry about what others are doing so much. And if you don't believe me, listen to this random old dude. He knows what's up.

My favorite part is when he decided to work through a programming course using a blackboard. I laughed at that, but after thinking about it more, I realized that some of my best code started out on pencil and paper or a whiteboard.

---

In other news, I'm slowly but surely planning out the plot and sidequests of my game, The Journey of the Return. I've been writing a second draft of it over at my WorldAnvil page (spoilers) and workshopping it with my wife and some of her writer friends. Progress is slow, but steady. I can't say when the drafting and revision stage will be finished, but to give an idea, the game is divided up into 7 chapters including the prologue, and I'm currently a good ways into the meatiest section, part 4.

It was encouraging to see my boss battle design from the prologue get front-paged! I really didn't expect that, lol. That gives me some hope that the game will get some traction when it's finally ready.

I'm currently also revisiting the art style of JotR. Originally, it was planned to be 100% pixel art. But I've recently re-discovered my love for Flash, so I'm exploring mixing the two mediums together. I'm hoping that I can get some meaningful visual symbolism going from that decision. I've included a quick clip with a basic test using mostly just the flash stuff (let me know what you think!), but you'll have to wait and see what I've really got in mind later. :)

For now, enjoy some spritework redone in flash:

Love you Newgrounds. <3

-J

Looks like only one other person submitted prompts for Sunday Scribbles today, so I asked some family to fill in a few more :)

These are the prompts, in case anyone else decides to join in to draw! Reply in the comments with your drawing (or a link to it) containing all these prompts:

• GEAR
• LATE
• PANCAKES
• COMPASS
• RAINSTORM
• FROG
• ALIEN

Hey All!

I've started a new tradition called Sunday Scribbles! I'm hoping to make it a chance to get in some fun, low-pressure drawing practice while interacting with the Newgrounds community! The rules are:

• Every Saturday, I'll make a blog post calling for prompts
• Post your ONE WORD prompt in the comments of the blogpost (family friendly, please). One prompt per person!
• Whatever prompts have been added by Sunday morning, you have to make a drawing that tries to incorporate all of the prompts people submitted.
• The drawing doesn't have to be in any particular medium, and doesn't have to be fully rendered (I plan on just doing these on printer paper with a #2 mechanical pencil)
• I'll make another blogpost Sunday morning with the official prompts where people can post their scribbles!
• You don't have to draw anything to submit a prompt!

For example, here's my Sunday Scribble from last week!

To start things off, my prompt is "GEAR." I'm excited to hear what you all come up with!

In the summer towards the end of my first year in highschool, I remember walking up on a conversation in the computer lab where some friends of mine were joking around. One kid was quoting something he'd recently watched.

"YEEEAH, I'M A BRAIN!"

Everybody laughed. They continued chuckling over space cats and the like, so I asked what they were quoting. One of them pulled up MovieMakers. As I watched Tom run around in circles carrying a camera that he'd spent all of his, Matt's, and Edd's savings on, I knew I'd already found my new favorite "thing." That was my first experience with Eddsworld, and I believe my first real experience with the idea of flash animation.

I kept reading Edd's comics and watching his backlog of movies. Over the summer, my parents put me in an art program, and one of the classes was about making comics. By then I'd seen most of Edd's stuff, and I knew I wanted to take that class, because I wanted to make people laugh, like Eddsworld. I ended up being the star pupil, and the teacher recommended that my parents pick up Adobe Creative suite, which they did along with a small wacom tablet.

I remember dinking around with Photoshop and not knowing what to do with it. I also remember being actively confused by Illustrator. But when I opened up Flash, I fell in love. A week or so later, I had made my first comic--the first of several to come.

I wanted to be just like Edd. I even remember convincing my church youth leaders to let me use Wednesday night activity nights to plan, record, and make a cartoon with the rest of the guys my age. Like Eddsworld, it was about four dumb friends montaging their way through some nonsense to achieve a simple goal.

I kept making comics and animations, though not all of them are hosted here (and some of them I can't re-publish due to copyright). I kept going until my senior year of highshool. March rolled around, and right after my 18th birthday, the news dropped about Edd's death. I was heartbroken for weeks. My childhood hero had died of cancer.

As I learned more about the real Edd, it sank in just how dedicated he was to what he did, working on animations even while his health declined. I learned that he wasn't that much older than I was at the time. That made me want to be like him even more. I wanted to go on and be an animator--to do it for a living.

But the hopes of the bright-eyed kid whose childhood hero had died? Well, they died themselves not long after, unfortunately. I didn't get to become an online content creator like Edd. And I got to see some of the ugly side of the entertainment industry from the way it was emulated by my classmates in college. The creative crowd I'd surrounded myself with turned out to not really like me, and I started to feel like who succeeded and who failed was more about who you knew and whether your beliefs jelled with the creative culture than what you actually made. When I left college for two years to serve a mission, I then saw that my parents weren't as supportive of me being creative long term as I'd thought. My father asked me to hand over my sketchbook on the flight out, thinking it a waste of time while on a mission, and insinuating that art wasn't really a valid career path for someone who wanted to have a family anyway. That crushed me.

Sometime after I got back, I began to wonder if art was a waste of time. I ended up switching majors and became a software developer. And I'd nearly given up drawing forever if it hadn't been for a divine intervention that kept me from burning my sketchbook. I got married, got my first job out of college, and life happened.

I hated it. So much, in fact, that the only thing that kept me going until I got to a better situation was a game I started working on in my spare time. I buried myself in that project for nearly 2 years.

And then, I got sick. Very sick. I felt like I had no choice but to stop creating. It's been over a year since my first hospital visit, and I'm still getting over whatever the heck happened to me that morning back in March of 2022, coincidentally almost 10 years to the day after Edd's death.

Since then, I've started thinking more deeply about my past and what I want out of life. I wanted to rediscover that confident kid in highschool who I seem to remember smiling and joking with friends every day. As I dug, I remembered that not only did that kid like to draw, he liked to share his drawings. I remembered he liked comics, and that he liked Newgrounds. Then, in the past few weeks, I remembered that he liked Eddsworld.

As I re-watched MovieMakers for the first time in forever--this time with my wife of 7 years and our newborn daughter--I remembered exactly why I loved Eddsworld so much as a kid.

You want to know what it was? What inspired me most? Funny enough, it was that Edd was unapologetically *bad* at drawing. Brush strokes that overlapped too much, clear nubs on his linework where he had erased strokes, inconsistent proportions from shot to shot, poorly drawn hands, and animations where he intentionally framed the shot so he didn't have to draw legs.

He was no Disney animator. In fact, his success stands in pretty stark defiance of the attitude of the industry snobs I've learned to roll my eyes at. Despite Edd's simplistic artstyle, his humor was witty and his characters were relatable. He didn't feel like some arteest shilling highminded trash. He felt like some guy I could have sat with in class doodling alongside. As a kid, it was that combination of approachability and humor that made me think "Yeah, I can make something like that." It's that kind of down-to-earth simplicity that kept me going as a young artist until eventually I got my own work front-paged senior year of highschool.

And now, it's inspired me to start creating for others again, even if I don't feel well most of the time nowadays, and even if my work isn't as flashy, as funny, as well made, or as well received as others'. Because if Edd could do it, you and I can do it too.

My wife and I just started up a tradition of doing short bursts of drawings taking in random suggestions from friends and family every Sunday. The rules are that each person can only submit a one-word prompt, and I have to make a drawing that incorporates all of them. So this week, her and her siblings' prompts were:

• avocado
• sheep
• love
• temple

Aaaaaaaand viola! Here's what I came up with!

I thought'd be fun if I loop in you guys, too! So, next Sunday I'll make a post here in the morning (sometime AM mountain time) asking for prompts (please keep them family friendly), and then later that day, I'll make another post with the results! Follow me if you want to know when posts go live. :3

And I'd love to see what scribbles you guys come up with, too! Let me know if you decide to participate, and I'll follow you and maybe feature your sunday scribbles in my posts. :)