If you’re wondering why you haven’t heard from me for a while, it’s because you’ve been hearing from me everywhere else on the site— every static page (save for the cool character info button system Elise rigged), every cheerful blurb, every tweet— has come from me and, despite being someone who enjoys public writing, it’s been difficult.

You see, when you start a website like this, there’s some sense of magic to it. You go to WordPress, you pick a theme, and voila! a site appears before your eyes. If you did it right, it seems real and professional right off the bat. But as you want to tell your readers more and help them learn what you’ve learned, you have to create pages— pages upon pages dedicated to informing them on this or that…and unfortunately, those pages of interesting information don’t fill themselves.

And even more unfortunately, I can’t easily download all my thoughts and experiences with this project so far onto the site. It takes time and effort recounting the steps my team and I took to get where we are, the basic elements of the project, explaining our sources and how we arrived at them and, often most dastardly, trying to compose succinct, catchy Tweets that convince some sliver of the Twitter-verse that our project is one worth checking out.

Now, two or so weeks since the creation of the site, we’re at a manageable spot. The pages are filled, the site looks professional, and a casual viewer would be able to get a good sense of what we’re about by clicking through the tabs. For the time being, I’m happy— edits, of course, still happen here and there and pages are updated as new information rolls in…but as is life, this kind of contentedness means disruption lurks around the corner.

And as of this last week, boy, did it disrupt.

Just as the website was reaching a good place, I turned my focus toward my responsibilities as Art Director. Whereas I had been doing little pieces here and there, I finally was in a spot where I could focus on character design. I expected this portion of the project to be part-beast, part-respite; I knew it would take a lot of work, but the promise of hours of drawing with a good audiobook (or a bad one, depending on what was assigned in my coursework) was alluring.

So there I was, sketching out the first portrait of Sir Thomas Gates (as Henry James’ “The Beast in the Jungle” droned in the background) when a sinking feeling hit my stomach. The style, I feared, wasn’t going to work. Whereas my semi-realistic, rarely-colored style of drawing looked exceptional in notebook margins, it seemed glaringly underwhelming on the Unity-rendered backgrounds of our game.

Distraught, I turned to my lifeline— one that, many times throughout development, I’ve remarked on how fortunate I was to have around— my cohort-mate, Meaghan Green. Not only did she double major in Studio Art as an undergrad, Meaghan had helped her elder brothers with their own independent video game company. And, within one panic-stricken conversation, she had managed to whirl my measly, flat-looking portrait into a more befitting, ink-sketched design.  

Now, as she probably feared and expected, she’s been roped into the group. Before this, she had helped consult on things like the pitch presentation, user interface, and my designs, but now she’s taking a more pronounced role with character design— teaching me how to emulate the style she’s using as well as how to use PhotoShop (since I previously have only used ProCreate) to clean up the line work.

So it seems for the time being, we’re back to cruising altitude, but I know better than to recline and take it easy— turbulence, it seems, is usually just around the bend.