(Thanks for the coolest photo of marfGH ever, dcb.)
I have been locked into a state of frenzy with Volume 1 for almost two weeks now. Polish, bugfixes, art, and sending things out to beta testers is kinda all I've done with my life for a while. Some days, I wake up, exhausted over the little circles. Some days, like today, I have a renewed sense of dedication to the little circles. We are still set to ship for Christmas.
As I stand, the setlist is playable end-to-end, my tweaks are all implemented, the two hidden songs will be up to snuff before today is over, and all features are either as polished and crash-free as I can tell or inaccessible and deferred to later. I've been hearing feedback from beta people (and watching dcb play, he's gotten pretty good!) and I'll be taking them up on the ones I agree with. I'd still like to do one more round of scrubbing through the scripts and menu files and lightening things, but it's already pretty lean compared to even DX Lite, let alone DX 2.0. The bonus behind-the-scenes video is all filmed, I just need to assemble it.
On the art front, the Somnolians have been super helpful. Caby took on a bunch of screen retextures, Savannah's interested in doing one, I've been trying to recruit some other art folks outside the group, and on Saturday, lads all piled into a Drawpile to doodle stupid marfs for the setlist! Seriously, they came out so good. Very funny, very cute. Given the setlist is probably the most prominent non-game screen outside of the main menu, I'm thrilled that there wasn't just enough good doodles for one screen, but actually for four. (I've coded it so it picks one every time you turn the game on. You see something new every time!)
For as much work as it is, I really have to credit marfGH with breaking me out of a serious apprehension about my art. The last time I was seriously focused on anything resembling pieces was Art Fight 2024, and about half of that gap was due to being exhausted after the event and the other half was me being scared to retexture all these screens. It seemed like such a big ask, and I didn't feel as practiced with marfs as I wanted to be for something people outside the group would see, and it just felt like a weird mix, cute and Guitar Hero? With such a big project and then deadline looming, I think I just wanted to avoid art, mostly.
Then one night—maybe the night I last updated the journal—I was peeking at Jay Ryan's site, The Bird Machine. He's a poster artist who makes drawing cute geometric squirrels and raccoons instead of gigantically detailed skulls and hot babes his thing, and he's actually worked with a lot of bands I like, namely The Breeders, Shellac, and Matt Talbot of Hum (and possibly Hum proper). (He actually did one of the screens for the original Guitar Hero II also—check the tutorials menu!) His work was always what I aimed for with my menu retextures, but I was still avoiding the thought. I didn't want to just badly imitate the style of a much better, skilled artist because I didn't know what the hell else to do.
But again, come late November, I was looking at his site in bed. That's when it hit me. "Fuck it. I can make this work." Why not? If Shellac of North America can have cute animals on a poster, why can I not have them in my Guitar Hero disc?
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Here we are. Thankfully, art is fake. (Obviously, the Fanter marf and modifiers menu is Caby's work, not mine.) But yeah, genuinely just been playing with brushes and style things and making it up as I go along, and it's been very freeing! I think I should aim for that when I get back to my normal animal people stuff too. Blend modes are my third favorite thing in life, behind PHP and my Caby.
Anyway, just wanted to check in, lads. Other than that, it's mostly been playing Gran Turismo and getting Christmas stuff sorted. Occasionally some blog stuff on Letters and The Mighty Boosh with Caby and Trys on Thursdays. (Also been binging the entire run of Lesser Than Three today, because silly slice of life animal people comics are my weakness and have been since middle school.) Busy time of year!
Gonna go eat something now! I'm streaming tonight, an art stream actually. With the charts done, I'm gonna try to do nothing but draw until the deadline. I do enjoy it a lot, I just get in over my head and doubt my abilities sometimes. Also sometimes, a deadline is actually good to kick your ass into gear.
