Category: News

Hello, friends!

January seemed to last all year, and then it was February 4th before I realized it! Funny how that works.

Two main agenda items to begin: Fuck ICE and fuck ice. If you need further elaboration on the first one, then I’m a bit confused how I haven’t scared you off before this, but a gang of masked men going around and snatching people out of their homes and schools and workplaces and churches without giving them due process, which is already bad enough without going into them shooting innocent people in the head… if that doesn’t rile up your deepest moral fibers to say that there is no language sufficient to express your contempt for that kind of behavior, but you’ll try your fucking hardest to find the words… then I just don’t know what to say.

For the second item, the main event I was looking forward to in January (other than the Steelers’ inevitable first-game exit from the playoffs) was a showing of the Lord of the Rings trilogy on the big screen, Friday through Sunday, one movie a day. I bought the tickets for the second weekend because the first one had worse seats, and just as the promised Friday came around, so did the ice storm that made the streets outside slicker than spit on a salamander. Fortunately, the power stayed on for us throughout (unlike what happened five years ago), but I wanted to go see movie! We watched it at home instead, which was good in its own way, but just not the same, y’know?

Artistically, I’ve made some decent game-making progress this month, but it’s still slow. The holiday season did a proper number on me and I remain in recovery mode in a lot of ways, and Job is still bad more often than not despite getting through the rush. I hope to find Different Job in the not-too-distant future! The economy doesn’t support that hope, but still, I hope it. Cross your fingers for me, pals!

Love,
Josh

Hello, friends!

Now, listen. I love Christmas. I do. I think it’s neat. And even if it wasn’t personally my thing, I could appreciate that it’s a time for people to be merry as the cold sets in (above the equator, at least), and that’s not a bad thing.

But.

Until you’ve worked the returns desk before, during, and after Christmas, you do not know its dark side. And its dark side is grim, y’all. It changes you as a person. Fundamentally.

(If I had a genie-wish to spare, one of them would be to make it so that people only get 80% of your money back on their returns. I think that’s the break-even point where most people would say “Yeah, there are costs involved with putting this back on the shelf/returning it to the manufacturer, even if it’s still in perfect working order,” while the people who use stores as rental facilities would maybe, maybe change their habits.)

(Actually, I’d just use the wish to make it so anyone who buys something with the intent to return it has one bad Food Oopsie within the next week for each item. Spaghetti sauce on their favorite shirt, ice cream scoop lands on the ground, etc. I think it’s a fair tradeoff.)

Anyway.

I had intentions to make a big wrap-up of what I did in 2025, but I don’t have enough to show off for that to be worth it. I drew a lot (okay, a fair amount), wrote… some, and did a lot of gamedev work, along with my Twitch streams, but most of my work this year has been building up skills that I hope to use in 2026 and beyond. Well, that and surviving the personal and worldwide hells of 2025, as well as working retail.

One of my main goals in 2026 is to not start any new projects. I have about ten things that I want to finish before I start anything else, and I think that about four of them are finishable in the next twelve months. The others are more ambitious and/or ongoing projects; things I’ve talked about, like The Devil That Knows You, The Hartvane Chronicles Book II, Star-Crossed Mercenaries, or ongoing streams like Backlog Busters Brigade. (I don’t think I’m going to manage to play every game ever made, but I’ll keep playin’ ’em anyway.) There’s also an unannounced one, so if/when I start talking about something that makes you say, “Whoa, that’s really ambitious to be doing on your own,” that’s the thing I’m talking about now! I already know it’s a lot! But I’m gonna do it anyway!

Making art is one of the few things that I can do without an ounce of guilt. I never feel like I should be doing something else instead. I thought that would change when I quit Patreon in 2024, but it still feels important, if a bit less urgent. I wish that there was more (or any) financial payout for me doing it, because it would be really great to not work where I’m working anymore, but for now, I’ll try to keep my chin up and keep making things. It’s hard. It’s painfully hard at times to not have what I make get the audience I think it deserves, because I want people to enjoy the things I make, by orders of magnitude more than I want financial recompense. But ultimately, I need to make these things for myself first and foremost. Anyone else enjoying them is gravy.

But it’s delicious, delicious gravy. And if I ever make something you enjoy, I would love for you to tell me so.

I think that’s all for now. See you in February, if not sooner, y’all. Take care of yourself and each other. Enjoy art made for humans, by humans.

Love,
Josh

Hello, friends!

Do you, uh. Do you ever feel like you’ve been living in an unprecedented moment in your country’s history for almost the last decade and you’re ready to live in precedented times again?

Just curious.

September went by both fast and slow, and now it’s time for Spooky Season! Nice to have the normal horrors available to us again. I’ve spent the last month working on a smaller game that’s almost entirely mechanics-focused, because that’s one of the big roadblocks I’ve been struggling with. It needs at least another month in the proverbial oven, but I’m excited about the progress I’m making! More news to come on that front.

I think that gamedev is where I’m keeping my focus for the rest of the year. I had ambitions for a while after starting a day* job that I’d be able to work there and balance multiple projects, but at this point, I’m happy if I make any progress at all in a given week. If there are any wealthy benefactors out there looking to be a patron of the arts, please let me know and I’ll happily be a benefactee!

Short update this month. Hope y’all are well, or at least surviving. Hang in there, friends.

Love,
Josh

*I wish my shifts were consistent enough to always be during the day…

Howdy and hello, friends!

A short update this month. I haven’t gotten much internet-facing work done for a number of reasons, the most pleasant of which being my new-found obsession with Blue Prince. Highly recommended if you enjoy a puzzle game and don’t mind being confounded for hours on end, along with a bit of a tussle with some random number generation.

Having published a novel and finished two webcomics, along with dozens of theatrical performances and countless other artistic tidbits, it fascinates me how quickly various forms can reach “Not Too Bad” status. Not quite the “Good Enough” status, where you can share it with the public and feel proud of it, but where you can look at it for yourself and say, “Hey, this is not too bad.” Even within a given medium, there can be a lot of variety; a story might reach that point after its first draft or its twentieth. But of all of the forms I’ve tried, video games take the longest to reach that point. I’ve made a game that’s functional and can be played, but I’m still not at the “Not Too Bad” stage. There’s a certain volume of story and art and sound design, along with general je ne sais quoi (almost spelled it right on my first try!) that it still needs before I can look at it and feel good about it.

This isn’t to say that I’m not proud of the work I’ve done on it so far! I’ve grown a lot throughout this process, and I’ve developed a lot of skills I wouldn’t have any portion of otherwise. I’ve also grown a lot more forgiving of some things I see in games, and less forgiving of some others. Specific examples aren’t coming to mind, but perhaps some will arrive as I think on it over the course of this month.

All of this to say: I haven’t worked much on the game-making in the past month, but I have plans to get back onto that particular horse in the one ahead. And if you ask me if I’ll have a game that I consider Not Too Bad at the end of this month, I’d have to say that I…

May.

Get it? Get it???

Love,
Josh

Hello, friends! Long time no write. I’ll try and do better about that.

In a way that is surely unique to me, 2024 was a weird year for me. I had planned to get three major projects done: A novel, The Hartvane Chronicles Book II; A New Comic (which turns out to be The Devil That Knows You); and progress on Star-Crossed Mercenaries, the game I’m making. If I had to give myself a letter grade for these projects, I’d give an F, B+, and C+, respectively. Let me explain why!

The Hartvane Chronicles Book II is essentially no further along now than it was this time last year. Part of that is getting stuck on plot points that I still haven’t figured out how to line up, and part of that is just not working on it (which is the best way to get those plot points unstuck). I did the least writing this past year compared with the past… decade, I think? I’ve been more focused on other things, and honestly, the… limited response to Book I certainly hasn’t lit a fire under me to write the second one. I still want to write it, mind you, and fully intend to, but it’s harder to generate the enthusiasm when I’m the only one working on doing so.

The Devil That Knows You was originally supposed to release on a twelve-pages-every-three-months schedule, but after getting the first twelve out the door, I realized just how big of an ask that is for a single person to do. I’ve finished the next fourteen pages, and once I have the cover and other non-story pages done, that will be available on the internet! Probably late January/early February, I’ll have a specific release date soon. I’m very happy with the 26 pages I’ve made so far, and I’m looking forward to sharing the rest of the story once I have them drawn up to share with y’all!

Star-Crossed Mercenaries is still in pre-pre-development as I work on its prototype game to work out whether the mechanics I want to put into the game will work or not. The technical side is going very well, all things considered, but there are some gameplay elements where I still need to figure out how I want to treat them, and that’s holding up development a bit. The prototype will be my main priority once I get the current batch of The Devil That Knows You pages out the door, so hopefully I’ll have exciting news in the coming months!

I’ve also started two projects over on my Twitch channel! The Backlog Busters Brigade is (almost) every Tuesday evening, and it’s a chance to play those games that I still haven’t finished with my pals. It’s a fun time! The second project is Final Fantasy d12, where I play through the first twelve mainline Final Fantasy games (except 11 is X-2 because XI wouldn’t work for the format) and switch between them after every battle I can. It’s very silly and I’m currently making a program that will make it easier for me to keep track of where I’m at in the games. That’s also been on a bit of a hiatus, but it should be coming back in the next few weeks!

If you’re a careful reader, you might notice that a lot of things have been on the back burner. There are two big reasons for that: Burnout and getting a day job! I rolled into 2024 with a plan, and when it went off the rails around March, it got me into a bit of a funk. I was still working on things, but with much less enthusiasm. Then Patreon decided to do its silly nonsense for the year, which was finally enough to push me off their platform, and it turn was enough to convince me to start the job hunt in earnest. I’m not going to say where I’m employed, and I certainly know better than to besmirch my employer on the internet, but I will say that if I could make a living wage making things for y’all instead of working for somebody else, that would be an easy decision for me. (After I gave my employer appropriate notice, of course.) I have longer thoughts about the problem we’re running into with the pay gap between tiers of creative people and the issues that arise from that, but those thoughts aren’t firmly set yet, and I’d certainly like to at least take a stab at a solution, which I haven’t formulated yet, so I’ll leave it at that little hint for now.

I think that’s it for now? I’ll try to be better about posting here more often! If you’d like to support me financially and are able to do so, the best places for that are PayPal and Ko-fi. If you’d like to support me in an even more meaningful way, please, please, please recommend the things I make that you like to your friends. I’m hoping that 2025 is the year I figure out the whole “Market What I Make to People” thing, but while I’m trying, any help you can give to invite people in is greatly appreciated.

Thank you, Internet Pals! See y’all ’round the web.

Love,
Josh