Weather was very pleasant in May (knock on the wood, this is not the case in a lot of different parts of the world), my family and I kept busy with kids’ activities, birthday parties, mulberry picking and finally got to use the newly acquired bike rack on my self-installed tow hitch for a pleasant bike ride by the San Francisco Bay. The month feels like a much needed, balanced break, right as kids wrapped up their school year into the summer.
Here are the things that kept me busy this past month, aside from the day-to-day ‘job’ related stuff…
Creating and hacking stuffs
Game Dev
As mentioned from last time, I took a break and learned about another game engine, Godot. Followed a Udemy course for a few sections and made a text based game. While the Godot engine looks nice and powerful (and free!) I found myself missing building ‘Qin’ (up next) so I am switching gears again.
Back to building Qin, the action game based on the story of China’s first emperor that I’ve been building for the past 2 years. I have fixed an issue/feature request and am now working on fixing more things before its ‘Milestone 3’ release.
Drawing
Weekly project drawing - I continue to draw comics in 3-blocks stripe style. While it is succinct and fits well in comical style, it doesn’t allow much storytelling or world building. I wonder if I should try 6-blocks or some multi-block spread… that would take too much time for me (at least at the beginning) though… We shall see.
Study drawings - this month I tried to not only practice by blindly following the photos but also try to add in my own style/flavor to the drawing. The result, at least to me, is a sense of refreshing joy. Hope you enjoy them too.
#FanArt - This continues to be a highlight of all the drawing activities…
Writing
My book#2 project, “100 Drawings of Tang Dynasty Poems” (唐詩一百畫) has been fully drafted, and now I am starting to edit it into a publishing format… This will continue to be published/shared with my Patreon members every week!
‘Impressions’ book - This short story book is a long term project that will last a while (probably 2 years) - I am slowly grinding through it here and there.
The Web
My Patreon members continue to get all the full resolution arts and pre-released book writing every week! I am also looking forward to providing soft copies of my books and games to my patrons later this year.
Website and Merch Store - no updates, but check them out!
Hacking - This month I’ve taken a detour - took a quick course on Udemy and learned more about how to quickly build a DevOps infrastructure, running a service (website or API) - with tech such as Raspberry Pi, docker containers, nginx load balancing / reverse proxying, CircleCI for CI/CD with GitHub repo and more. Fun time!
Consuming Stuffs
Reading - Continue to read “The Dead Are Arising - The Life of Malcolm X”
Gaming - Shadow of Tomb Raider got to the 2nd half of the story; dropped Crusader: No Regret as the game got a bit unfairly hard, especially with the small keyboard control change introduced in this second game…; Played a bit of ‘Lovecraft Untold Stories’ (fun and pretty, but it quickly get a bit repetitive); also played A TON of this mobile game Mighty Doom and got to level 6! :) Finally, I’ve started a Chinese classic RPG: 軒轅劍 楓之舞
TV/Movies - Exodus: Gods and Kings (decent!); Wrestler (I’ve heard that it’s good, but I absolutely love it!); Burning (very well done, love the stories that can be interpreted different ways, make you think) ; Smartless: On the Road (these guys are hilarious, charming, and lovely at the same time. I couldn’t stop and just binged it)
Learning - continuing with the Udemy course on Rust + Webassembly - oh, this is proven to be too much over my head… lol.
That’s it for this issue of my newsletter! If you really finished reading the above, I thank you, and wish that my sharing would either entertain you, or inspire you (if you’ve been thinking about your own creative projects).