2024 has been an interesting year for me, but good overall.

Like last year I've made an art recap post:

It's got doodles and various unfinished/unseen pieces from the whole year

I've also seen people going over their art month by month in blog post form, so here's mine too:

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January

Started off the year feeling very confident in my art abilities. Two days into the year I cranked out a whole site skin (not an official one)

However I took a break from drawing to enter a game jam a friend made me aware of. This was the Boss Rush Jam 2024 on Itch, and the first ever game jam I'd taken part in. On top of being a boss rush game, the theme for the jam was "Exchange". I came up with a few concepts, but I settled on a system where it's 2 players who exchange their attack resource meters with each other. I started working on Wizard & Warrior, a local coop shmup with a simple pixel art aesthetic. By chance Pixel Day was coming up, so I grinded out on the game to get it ready for then.

The game released on Pixel Day and was submitted to the game jam several days early. I think the game received pretty well on both Itch and Newgrounds.

This was how Wizard & Warrior ranked out of 390 entries. Boss design being so high surprised me since one of them is literally just a big crab lol.

February

Thanks to the game dev break I had fallen off my arting skills high horse and was back to feeling pretty doubtful about my abilities again. I drew practically nothing this month. I did a bit of pixel art for some of my friends' game jam entry. I designed the main character and the floor sprite.

March

March was a busy month for me, I got a full time job and moved out of my parents house for the first time. Getting used to the new routine of this job left me without much time to draw anything, and it would be a while before I picked up the pen consistently again.

That being said I did get something done before I started work:

I think this might be my most favourite thing I've drawn ever.

April

Genuinely did nothing noteworthy this month. Was spending most of my free time gaming rather than doing art lol

May

By the time May rolled around I was much more familiar with my work routine and was very slowly starting to draw again. Beginning of this month a new Minecraft snapshot rolled out that lets you add new paintings into the game via resource/data packs. I took this oppurtunity to make my own, so reusing an unfinished piece from January I made a pixel art vaporeon painting.

Also Pico Day is in May and I wanted to draw something for it again. In previous years I have simply done an illustration of a different character in a tank, but I wanted to do something different. I made this piece with Skullkid, I was pretty proud of it, nothing too specia- HOLY SHIT it got frontpaged. My first ever frontpage, thank you to everyone who gave that piece some love.

Since getting frontpaged I have felt a lot more confident in my abilities again :)

I also "released" my site skin changing extension this month to tie alongside Pico Day. I'm still updating it, so check it out if that sounds interesting to you.

June

Not much art from me again in June. I did however come up with a game concept. What if the mario Wanted minigame was set around the Psychonauts characters. I started work on a little prototype, but this probably won't go anywhere...

Made these sprites for it though, thought they looked good

July

Once again there is nothing of note from me for this month. Drew a couple things here and there but nothing posted to the public.

August

It was around this time my job security was becoming more and more flaky. The company I was working for was extremely small and had already laid off half the developers (of which there were 4, me included). Whilst me and the other guy were spared from the lay-offs, we did lose the office. Working from home = more free time :D

I joined the Music Gijinka collab, first art collab in quite some time. I paid homage to my favourite artist Carpenter Brut.

September

I lost my job, did I mention job security was flaky? Fortunately this job loss was at no fault of my own, but it still meant I would have to move back home. I had signed a bunch of 1 year contracts on things for my house, so cancelling them and moving out wasn't instant. I had effectively been given 2/3 weeks to just chill in my own place doing nothing other than job searching and preparing to move again.

With all this free time meant I had loads of time to draw again. But instead I opted to play Fortnite.

October

October saw my birthday and also the move back into my parents house. Beginning of October saw me making an entry for a Minecraft youtube art "contest". I put "contest" in quotation marks because you don't really win anything other than the old reliable exposure bucks.

I didn't win btw. In fact I didn't even make it into the section of the youtubers video where he goes over "all the entries". And where I was featured on his website, he used the wrong username. I truly was Tonight's Big Loser.

I also took part in another collab this month, the Pokemon variance collab. I was bummed I missed out on the Pokemon mystery meat collab from earlier this year, and I wanted to draw more Pokemon again. I made 2 entries for this of my most favourite Pokemon: Vaporeon and Shinx.

By this point in October I've been with my parents for a couple weeks now and I'm picking up old projects again. I rediscovered my Psychonauts Wanted minigame and started work on that once more. But this time around I had another idea, what if instead of Psychonauts... it was a collab game?

November

Throughout November I am doing the occasional little bit for my Wanted! game all whilst still deliberating on the theme. I was so torn on collab/Psychonauts I made a blog post about it, hoping to get some more opinions on it. This eventually swayed me towards collab.

Before I would officially announce it though I wanted to have the game in a pretty much finished state, so I slowly chipped away at it posting development updates on Bluesky.

Around the end of Novemeber this very game I was working on recreating became a bit of a meme Twitter, with an account called FindLuigi posting rounds of the game every few hours or so. I posted about it in the replies of a tweet once and it got a fair amount of attention from other users. This whole deal was the kick I needed to get this game out ASAP and ride the popularity wave it was currently having.

So on November 30th I made the collab public and open to submissions.

Decemember

December was the month another collab I had worked on was set to release, Pico Cross Collab. Some may already know but this game never released, and as such everyones art for it was left in limbo for a while before being given the go ahead to release our work later.

I quite like how it turned out, but something about it still feels a bit empty to me, bit late to worry about that now though haha

Now that the Pico Cross collab hadn't released I felt a little left out. If it weren't for Pico Cross I would've actually applied to be a part of Tankmas 2024. So I reached out to MrShmoods asking if I could do a little work, and sure enough he actually let me in. My contributions have been small, only consisiting of a few costumes, but I'm so so so grateful to the Tankmas team for the oppurtunity.

Whilst all that was happening I have been busy with managing the Wanted! collab. During this time over 170 submissions have been made which is fucking mental!! Hosting this collab is genuinely the most fun I've ever had on Newgrounds, adding in community suggestions and sprite submissions have made every day something to look forward to. The game is shaping up to be a really good one and I can't wait for it to release on Pixel Day.

I also posted some Vaporeon day art and joined the Petri Pals collab too :)

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And that is how my year ends, despite everything that has happened I am still sat in the same spot writing up a recap post on my computer. Only difference is I now have an iPad and my hairline has receded further.

Thank you to everyone here who I have interacted with on Newgrounds this year, you've made it a good one.

Another reminder to check my art recap post, where I've got various other low effort stuff or unfinished stuff from throughout the year

See you next year for more art and the Wanted! collab release :D