Friday Rambles and Game Dev Update 2025-07-11

It's the Friday Ramble.

Merch Stuff

The Penny plushie campaign has ended successfully! Thank you for your support!

Final tally has us with 548 sold, which was more than I was hoping for. And Makeship sent me my cut the day after the campaign ended, which is like, really fast. They've always been great to work with, honestly.

And so, the Penny plushie saga is finally over, and I can go back to staring at my screen trying to squeeze a story for Game 2 out of my brain.

Art Stuff

In between writing notes for the story for Game 2, I drew some Tiger-chan. Life imitates art, as they say?

People who have played the Overtime chapter might recognize that these are in the style of the posters Penny draws for her project.

Who knows, maybe they'll be repurposed to show up in Game 2.

In any case, it felt good to just draw without having it be for some marketing comic or sprites for a game. And in the spirit of Rambles long past, here are the sketches for the pics.

I also made them into stickers because might as well, and will be adding them to the sticker shop next week! They look very cute and they'll be a limited edition, unless they're really popular, in which case I'll keep restocking them.

Speaking of restocks, I restocked a lot of the sold-out stickers on my shop, including the ever-popular "Pixel Burger" and "Clearly You Don't Own An Air Fryer" stickers, as well as bringing back some oldies featuring Blythe, like "Smile!" and "Done With Work?". I added the Hana sticker back for good measure. That one hasn't been on the shop in like two years, so it's a good chance to get it if you missed it before. But maybe wait until the new Tiger-chan stickers are added. Unless you don't care about Tiger-chan. How dare you?

I'll probably also do a clearance sale during the beginning of August before I close the shop in September while I'm on my big family/work overseas trip for the year. Here's a secret code for you if you want to get the HOT DEALZ early, since you're a cool Patreon person, you. It's a Buy 3 Get 1 Free coupon. If you buy 6 you get 2. And so on. It's madness! You'd have to be crazy not to take this deal! -> 2025BUY3GET1

As I write this I already have multiple orders on my shop buying the restocked stickers. Wha...? Are people spamming refresh on my site or something? I hope they aren't Patreon people who missed out on using a coupon code. Well, let me know if one of them was you, and I'll add an extra goodie or two to your order.

Game Dev Stuff

I did more brainstorming and writing and I think it's starting to coalesce into a coherent and compelling narrative. I added more functionality to the VN framework. I drew some placeholder artwork. I wrote some dialogue. And I have a really good idea for this game's minigame and how to integrate it with the story.

The start feels familiar. After all... Why not? Why shouldn't I make the exact same game again with different words?

But other than that, not much else to show off, because most of the work is in an unorganized text scribbled everywhere state. Next week it'll be even more coalesced! Some of it might even be presentable!

And so, I'm still holding onto hope that I'll have an announcement by the time TGS rolls around. I want a store page set up already so people can start wishlisting it, so they'll always have a reminder that my game exists and will release at some point.

The End

That's about it for this week. Next week will be focused on dev work now that all the sales and marketing events are done, and I won't be distracted by constantly looking at numbers. Probably. Anyway, thanks for your support as always, and see you next week!