Usk Productions Blog

Oh yeah, I have a blog, don't I?

Cruise complete

So, I wrapped up Ultimate Pleasure Cruise at the end of August. I didn't get nearly as much done on it as I hoped I would, unfortunately. I kind of wish I had spent less time on drawing multiple character body types, and more time on writing, as right now you see the same scenes a lot.

Still, I learned a lot of new stuff in the process, so it was at least a partial success.

• Ultimate Pleasure Cruise title screen.
• Having a conversation with a passenger.
• 3D model of the cruise ship exterior.

Half a novel

I took a stab at NaNoWriMo this November. I managed to hit 25,000 words, which was halfway to my target and still the most I've ever written for a single project. It's an extremely rough first draft that ends abruptly and I probably won't publish it anywhere.

During the writing process I had big plans to print the book and hardcover bind it myself. Obviously that's not going to happen for half of a rough draft, but maybe someday. However, I did use it as an excuse to make a nice build process for compiling Markdown into various formats using Pandoc and a variety of other tools. I discovered that the entire LaTeX ecosystem is incredibly fragmented, and most of the tools I found people suggesting online are either deprecated, buggy, or don't work under Git Bash. So that was frustrating. I had to write a lot of scripts myself.

What really bothers me about LaTeX and its various document classes is that none of them actually look like the books on my shelf. LaTeX proponents constantly talk about how high quality the output is, but I've never seen a LaTeX-rendered book that looks anything like a real book I could buy at the store.

The future

What's next? What am I doing in 2024?

I really want to get back into drawing. I haven't really done anything since finishing Ultimate Pleasure Cruise, and I feel all my experience slipping away again. I was doing a figure drawing class before; I should pick that back up.

As for games, I'm kind of itching to expand a few of my projects, but it would basically mean starting over on them from scratch, and I don't know if I have it in me at the moment. I also have ideas for two or three new projects, but they're all very content-heavy and I'm afraid I'd get bored before getting anywhere with them. I may just wait until I find another NSFW game jam.