finalbossblues

End of Year: 2022

Added 2022-12-31 16:00:07 +0000 UTC

It's the end of another year!

Man, I say it every year, but it's gone by so quickly... each year seems to go by faster than the one before... Maybe that's just what it's like to get old!

Like always at the end of the year, I want to look back on the releases and overall productivity throughout the past twelve months. Let's review our goals for the year, reflect on the progress made, and highlight some of the biggest releases.

As always-- we'll end the post with a massive .zip file that contains all of the regular patron content that I released throughout the year. If you don't want to read through the rest of the post and just want to skip right to the download, you can grab it up front here:

⦁ 2022 Year Patron Archive Bundle

NOTE: Some browsers have a hard time with .zip files. If the download isn't working, make sure to right-click and 'save as', or try a different browser.

Note that it doesn't include a few things that would be considered "special" and are distinct from the normal weekly releases-- these would be in a separate folder. Specifically I'm talking about the Lo-bit stuff and the Quirky NPCs.

The Quirky NPC pack can be accessed for patrons via the itch access link, if you want to grab them all at once. I'll likely release a similar pack for the Lo-bit assets, but I want to wait until I inevitably return to expand it some more. In the meantime, you can find the links in the threads below.

Speaking of which-- I want to recap some of the big events and releases from this year:

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Quirky NPC Month

This year's April Fools' non-Prank led to a special month where I released a new character every weekday, leading to twenty new quirky and weird little characters designed to use as NPCs.

This was a really fun little event where I pushed myself to create a lot of content in a short period. If you think that another event like this would be a good idea for 2023, let me know in the comments.

All of the links to the individual quirky sprites can be found in April's end-of-month thread.

One of the cool things about these sprites is that I revisited them later on, based on patron requests. Some of the most popular characters from this month made appearances later on this year, with expanded full-body walking sprites:

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The other special themed event that we had this year was the Lo-Bit Character Week this summer. That was a week where I shared a huge amount of little 16x16 lo-bit character sprites, in a new style.

It started off with the Lo-Bit Tiles, which were expanded into a full set shortly after the initial release proved to be popular. Then I came back with a full week of character sprite releases, leading to a big collection of 64 characters.

Most of them are only one-directional NPC sprites, but the set does include a group of fully animated heroes and soldiers. I wonder which characters are the most popular, if I revisit any and want to give them the four-direction treatment... hmmm...

There's enough content here to be collected into a standalone asset pack of its own; but I've held off because I think there's more ideas to explore in this style. We'll see where things go with these in the new year!

Lo-Bit Character Week was a pre-scheduled event that I put a bunch of work into ahead of time so that I could have a good series of releases during the week when I was on vacation-- last year, we did something similar with Orc Week...

Does anybody have good ideas what I should plan for my summer vacation in 2023?

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Next up, I want to talk about the progress made with regular patron releases this year.

One of the ideas that we've been building on is themed releases and expansions. In last year's recap thread, and after the popularity of the "Inside the Monster's Belly" series at the end of 2021, I talked about doing more of these this year.

Here are some perfect examples, significant releases that I think really defined some of the content this year made for patrons:

Shrines and Seals

I did this little series at the beginning of this year, starting with some inspiration from Chrono Trigger and leading to a set that could provide a theme that could carry over throughout an entire game's setting.

In my imagination, these are relics from some ancient magical civilization, and the player can find them in various locations all over the landscape and in multiple dungeons... I especially like them because they provide potential for gameplay mechanics that go beyond pure decoration.

I'm happy with how these came out, especially since these were some of the earlier releases that included two color variations: you might end up seeing some of these in the upcoming Elements tileset packs!

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Decking and Western Buildings Tileset

This collection started as a simple patron request that spiraled into something much bigger. The wild-west theme of these tiles is pretty distinct, but I really like them because they aren't only useful for a western setting. These are designed to fit in with other previous Time Fantasy building tiles, and ultimately it gives more opportunities for buildings and different styles for the towns in your game world.

There's enough here to be the basis of a complete expansion set... But we're done with Time Fantasy, so these will remain a special patreon release for the foreseeable future-- in their current form, that is.

Because they have a detailed wood texture that's in line with my more recent style, I could imagine repurposing some of this stuff into the Elements tiles in the future-- especially the decking tiles, which are pretty versatile, and could potentially be used to really enhance any kind of building.

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Updated Overworld

The other big themed series that I worked on was a complete overhaul of the world map tiles. These were all based on patron requests-- but it's also something that I wanted to do myself, to really push the style and plan for the future.

By the way, if you've read this far into this post, you're amazing. Reply with some sort of reference to spelunking and snorkeling as a little secret message that only us cool people will get.

Like the sets that I talked about above, these will certainly find their way into future Elements releases. The difference is that these tiles were planned that way from the beginning-- I knew that I wanted to make something really impressive for the Elements world map set (let's face it, the classic TF overworld stuff was severely limited, especially because of the RPG Maker format that I restricted myself to).

The OpenRTP world tiles got me thinking about where to go with the overworld style, and then I decided to really go deep into the patron requests for new overworld stuff. After that, I just kept going and going and going... you can be sure to see more of this in the future, too.

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I think that we did a good job delivering on these theme ideas, incorporating patron requests into some larger collections that might be more useful than one-off releases.

And we balanced these themed releases alongside the regular smaller stuff, leading to a more robust library overall.

We can look forward to more like this in the future.

So in the upcoming request threads, if you can think of a cool themed set that would be useful, please share those ideas too!

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Lastly, let's wind things down with a recap of my full releases from 2022:

Farmfall

Farmfall was a one-week game jam entry that I made alongside a friend. We put a ton of work into this little thing and I'm really happy with how it turned out. I think this game has a strong little action-roguelike-style gameplay loop.

In the end, we didn't place in the contest (even though our game was better than the other entries, we lost the popularity vote because I'm bad at media campaigns I think LOL-- not the first time that has happened! Yes I'm still salty LOL)

But after this was over, I did release a bunch of the assets here on patreon. Hopefully you got some use out of them.

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Snow-mega Modern

Snow-mega is the most recent release on this list... in fact, it's the most recent thing I did at all, having enjoyed the last week off as a holiday vacation.

This has been a patron request for a while, and it was a little too big of an update to be a regular patron release (it's a series of snowy tileset variations that match directly with the originals)-- so I thought that it would be a really fun idea to be my big Christmas present this year.

Just gotta give some love to Omega Modern. :)

Honestly, there isn't too much to say here. It's not quite a full release, really-- but I thought it was a significant enough update to be worth mentioning.

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Final Tower Tileset

I put a lot of love into this one-- I hope that you can tell from the detail in it, and I'm really proud with how it came out. I think it pushes that grittier later-SNES style really nicely-- the kind of tone that we'll see more of as we progress into the Elements tilesets in the near future.

The theme of this release also feels really perfect for its place in the series-- there's no better way to put a cap on the original Time Fantasy series than with an expansion pack for a final dungeon!

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Open RTP Tilesets

This collection is a total remake of the original RPGMaker 2000 RTP. I created and released into the public domain this year. It was my contribution to EasyRPG's ongoing project of preserving old RM games, and another way for me to give back to the community as a whole.

I want to paste this little note that I wrote for the itch page:

I'm really proud of this little project. I spent all my middle school and teenage years playing with RM2K/3, and there's something really fulfilling about recreating the entire RTP tiles. Sure, I've made *more* than this already with Time Fantasy... but this seems like I've accomplished something that I wanted to do my whole life.

I'm happy to release these sets as a way to give back to the hobby that has given me so much.

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And, of course...

Elements Character Core

And here we go. This is the big one! Honestly-- there's nothing more to say that hasn't been said. So I'll keep it simple:

This set has been an on-and-off project for the past few years (the process has been well documented here on patreon)-- and now the core set is finally released! It's exciting to be ready to dive head-first into making expansions and expanding this from being "my new style" into being THE set of 2023.

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So...

There's less here for full releases than the previous few years-- specifically in terms of smaller expansions to Time Fantasy. But I think that's because my focus was on creating similar expansions for patreon content instead. For example, the Quirky NPC set that I talked about already: it was created primarily as a fun event for patrons, but in the end I compiled them into an expansion set anyway.

I could potentially do the same with the updated overworld tiles or the western stuff, as I already mentioned; but I've already talked about future plans for those-- so we kept up on the amount of asset packs in terms of content, even if the actual release numbers don't reflect it.

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One last thing:

I want to give another special thanks to all of my patrons, because this year we went through a really rough time with my dog Human and his surgery. I've posted about that before so I won't go into any details here, but it was challenging and defining time for about two months of this year.

It's because of the income from this page that I was able to tell the vet that I didn't care about the cost-- "do whatever you need to do to help him"-- and it worked out. I can't be grateful enough. A lot of people aren't in the position to be able to do that. So give some love to a dog in your life :)

I'm very happy to report that our boy is healthy again and back to his old self (even though now when he goes outside, he pees like a girl 😫).

Here he is with some of his Christmas presents: a snowman hotdog toy that I got for him and curled up in a blanket from my mom. Hmm, he really needs a haircut! 😅