Hello, it’s been a hot second since I’ve posted anything on here, but fear not, I am still alive.

Since the last thing I posted [checks notes] over two years ago, a lot of things have happened! A few game jams, a lot of writing, and of course the Big project :)

I have to make another post after this so I’ll just hop to it…

Global Game Jam 2023: Sproot

Once again, I’ve pitched in to Global Game Jam. This year, the theme was Roots, which we used to make a game where you help a plant grow by guiding its roots to water and nutrients while avoiding things like rocks and parasites.

Sproot title screen

We decided that the “story”, inasmuch as a game like this has a story, is that you are a little farmer rabbit who is trying to grow plants to impress your rabbit girlfriend and also maybe teach people about plants?

End screen art, featuring the bunny farmer’s bunny girlfriend

Character dialogue box portraits

I’m not actually sure if we ended up getting to the point where we actually used the dialogue box portraits?

Because this game was turn and grid-based, there’s honestly not very much art for me to show off in the way of animations–there were pretty much no animations at all, actually. My main contribution was tilesets, ui, background art as well as a lot of plants for the levels. The idea was that as you collected more nutrients your plant would grow bigger until it was fully grown, at which point you would win.

 

Stages of plant growth for different levels. From top to bottom: dandelion, bamboo, cactus, oak, willow, Venus flytrap, and corpse flower.

Background art for the tutorial level. The game field would be set in the planter (and significantly zoomed in).

We did end up doing a follow-up to this GGJ and working a bit more on Sproot for another game jam (which we did not win, but there was a physical booth and stuff which was nice).

Oh, come to think of it, I did do one animation for this game:

Loading animation of a bunny running.

It’s a bunny running! I had to look up a video of a rabbit running in slow motion to animate this! It was meant to be a loading screen animation, but I don’t think we ended up actually using this animation? Oh, well.

Anyways, the game is playable and (maybe?) fun, so that’s all you can really ask for. Here’s the link, which has both the GGJ version and the later one: https://teammmorgb.itch.io/sproot

Schwarz’s Child

We decided to do another game jam which was not a Global Game Jam–Game Off 2023 on itch.io. This one had a longer development time, a month instead of one weekend. The theme this year was ‘Scale’, which we decided to use a black hole gravity well game mechanic for (though under the table, this was a game mechanic we were thinking about before we even found about the actual theme).

Schwarz’s Child (a very obvious play on the Schwarzschild radius which determines the event horizon of a black hole) is a game where you are a little guy who can shoot black holes to manipulate items like crates to activate buttons to get to the end of whatever facility you happen to be in.

Schwarz’s Child splash art

Overall, it’s a puzzle platformer in which the main gameplay mechanic is creating and shooting black holes, which will act as gravity wells to attract items and your bullets, with the strength (scale) of the gravity well being based on the size of your black hole.

I did character animation sprites on this one:

 

 

Character sprites. Jump, Walk, Idle, Duck, Roll, Walk (Aiming). Getting WordPress to center multiple images on one line is a nightmare so this is what you get.

I don’t have a ton to say about this game. This pretty much is the limit of what I did on it–a lot of the other graphics were procedurally generated or (in the case of other assets) created by another member of the team. The game itself is short, but very much playable–again, the best thing you can have in a game jam game. Out of 612 entries, we rated pretty well, #28 overall. You can play it here: https://teammmorgb.itch.io/schwarzs-child

Writing, Generally

I did a lot of writing in 2023. Most of it is fanfiction, so I won’t really discuss it here–if you’re following me over on Tumblr, you’re already aware of it. But besides the 400k or so that I’ve written since the last time I posted here, I did get back to working on my novel some more.

“Your novel?” Yeah, The Crow’s Last Call, that supernatural hardboiled detective novel written in contemporary 1930s style which most people probably don’t remember anymore. I got a bunch more of it done, got the story to the fourth of five days in the book, so probably one more major push will get me to the finish line–it’s just a question of when I can do that final push. I estimate 30k or so until the end of the book, which isn’t honestly that many words in most cases, but The Crow’s Last Call is a much more dense story than most of the things I write so writing 30k isn’t quite so easy to pull out.

It’s really been a long time writing it, but for sure I want to finish it. It’s a story that I like a lot–I like the writing, I like the plot, I like the characters, and you could say “of course you do, you’re the one who wrote it”, but I’ll be real, not every single story I write gives me joy the way that The Crow’s Last Call does. I really want to get it finished in the next year or so, and maybe down the line make a full cast audiobook of it.

Roy Kaplan: Out of Sight

Okay, this is the big one–so big that I’ll be giving it its own post very shortly. But long story short, I made a resolution at the beginning of 2024 that I was going to get Out of Sight finished and launched by the end of this year, and doing that effectively required me to take over the entire project including production and editing. I’ve been working almost exclusively on Roy Kaplan since May to get everything edited together as well as putting together auditions for all the remaining roles, and now (as in, pretty much literally this week) I’m finally ready to post a trailer and give a real launch date: December 28.

“Wow, Jesse, you’re really cutting it close on the ‘this year’ thing.” Yeah, but I thought it would be nice to have Roy Kaplan: Out of Sight run starting out the new year. After hundreds of hours of work, I finally have all the voice lines in hand and have the first drafts for all twelve episodes finished. It’s been a very long learning process, but I think it’ll be worth it–or at the very least it’ll be a great relief to have it done. Stay tuned for my official Roy Kaplan promo post, which I’ll probably post tomorrow.

Life and Other Things

2023 and 2024 have been pretty good years for me, in all honesty. I’ve had the time to think about my life and figure out the things I do (and don’t) want to do with it. I took a cross-country train ride in a roomette. I’ve been doing more exercise, going out to events like pop-up trade shows and visiting the museum and generally enjoying things. I’ve had more time to appreciate Chicago and go to more places around the city. I’ve been able to visit the library again. I recently saw my first professional musical theatre production (Some Like It Hot which does happen to be one of my favorite movies), and it was very impressive. I’ve been learning a lot of different things, including Morse code, which I started picking up this week mostly for fun.

I can’t say that things are completely stable in my life right now, but I think I’m doing good. All these projects and everything outside of it, too. We’ll see what the world brings us in the coming year (probably a lot of troubles, given the recent election results, but the only way is through). I expect some pretty major developments in 2025, so I’m hoping they’ll be good ones.