This is a crosspost from my Substack newsletter.

Also in video form!

WHEREISCOPE IS PERISCOPE?

I’m gonna cut to the chase. The Periscope one-shot I talked about last month obviously hasn’t released yet. I started working on it way too late and didn’t realize how long it would actually take to complete it. The contest I was making it for had a 15 page limit but the script I wrote probably would’ve fit a 20 - 25 page comic better. Things are a bit cramped, but I have all the page layouts done. I just need to finish drawing everything, which is gonna take some time. I did finish the lineart for the first page, which you can see below:

It’s funny. At first I wanted to make Froz Challenger as this large comic project but then I decided to downscale and make Hazardous Materials to get a better handle on comic-ing. Naturally, HazMat turned out to be a rather large undertaking in and of itself. I jumped (heh) at the opportunity to make something smaller for the Newgrounds Jump contest but even that’s turned out to be way more work than I anticipated.

It’s a similar situation with some other things I want to make. There’s a ton that needs to go into those projects and I really lack the experience to make them. I have a bad habit of starting a project (without realizing it’s gonna be a crazy amount of work), getting some decent progress on it, burning out, and then shoving it into the writhing mound of unfinished projects on the back-burner before moving on to a shiny new toy that will inevitably meet the same fate.

I’m gonna take a step back from all the things I want to work on and try shifting gears to some smaller-scale stuff. I still want to finish Periscope since it’s more than halfway to the finish line but I also need to complete some more reasonably-sized projects so I can:

A. Build up my skills.

B. Actually finish stuff.

C. Learn how long it takes to complete things.

There’s some animation stuff I wanna do with Blender but I’m gonna try making some one-off models first to get some practice in and to build up an asset library. I’d like to do something similar for the tabletop stuff I’m working on. Instead of trying to make a full-on oneshot module I want to focus on just making single enemies, encounters, or rooms. Things I can reasonably complete in a day or a week.

Overall I really gotta get my shit together when it comes to how I’m spending my free time. On top of all this stuff I wanna make I also have a huge backlog of books I want to read (comics, novels, and nonfiction), vidya I want to play, and some housekeeping I should probably take care of. I’m not sure how you’re actually supposed to function as an adult and I’m starting to see why some people drink …but I have enough chemical dependencies (food, air, water, plastic) as-is.

Anyways.

We’ll see how well I’m able to stick to this. I’ve been itching to get back to the robot scorpion scratchbuild and the comic reader, among other things. There’s a lotta stuff I want to do and I gotta get better about breaking that up into more manageable chunks so I can actually get shit done. If the next Hydromonthly has more stuff going on that means it worked.

Pizza Time

Oh, and one more thing. I also made a bunch of pizzas (and a couple pizza-adjacent things) this past month (See Substack for full-res images.). Instead of posting recipes on my website I’m gonna use that section as a showcase of various stuff I’ve cooked (website updates coming soon™) since I’m either following existing recipes or just freehanding stuff that I don’t really ever measure.

I’ll see you again next time with another Hydromonthly.

Have a good one,

-Hydro