OK, it's been a bit since I've given you an update, huh? Let's roll!

NEGATIVE REVERIE

Ok, real talk, development has been a lil slow on this... I HAVE made some updates to character sprites and some additional tilemap graphics, but most of my focus has been on other projects and responsibilities that have popped up.... SUCH AS:

THE MOUNTAIN CHIEFS ARE BACK

My Bass/Bass/Drummer Baroque Metal band The Mountain Chiefs have booked some shows this summer!! First up is 5/24 at Philamoca in Philadelphia!! (Flyer by Ami Moregore @amimoregore.bsky.social on Bsky)

If you'd like to give us a listen, you can here!
https://mountainchiefs.bandcamp.com/album/the-mountain-chiefs

THE ZAKU ALBUM

My MAIN band, Zaku, is almost done recording our first full length album!!! I've been going hard on getting the recordings just right and we have some very exciting announcements regarding it coming up soon! Things like.... musical easter eggs, an album release show, mixing and mastering staff, art, tracklist... etc etc etc!
I'm really excited about it! If you haven't heard us before, we're like.... uh... Instrumental Jazz Fusion Heavy Metal, I guess hahaha. It's fun! You can listen to our EP here, if you wanna get a taste of what we got going on:
https://zaku.bandcamp.com/album/zaku

PIXEL ART

Ok, as you can plainly see... I caught the pixel art bug again. Less than a week ago I figured I'd draw a quick anime babe for golden week... and 6 days later, I've made EIGHT pieces. WHEW! What a week! Anyway, I'd LIKE to continue drawing.... not only because I can feel myself improving or because it's just good for personal artistic nourishment... but tbh... it gets a lot of social media engagement too, hahaha.

It DOES take a lot of time though... time I could also be spending on working on Negative Reverie or...

JAPANESE STUDY

This week, I started digging more heavily into my Wanikani Japanese Vocabulary backlog... I have SO MANY unstudied vocabulary... I'm DROWNIN in it! But, there's only one way to get back on top... and that's to ACTUALLY do the reviews... (Btw, if you haven't heard of Wanikani, it's an app for anki-style kanji and vocabulary study. I recommend it!)

Also, I've started putting together a plan to improve my grammar. My knowledge of kanji and vocabulary is PRETTY GOOD for a hobbyist, but I can't put together a sentence to save my life. Gonna start working harder on this...

WEBSITE? THUMBY DATING GAME?

I've also had some OTHER ideas too...

I watched this delightful video by Shar about how she made her own personal website, and it's got me wanting to make one too...
(The video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tWh4cYCTv0 )
Maybe something that looks like a little NES point and click adventure game or something... idk yet!

Also, you may not know that for a long while, I was teaching myself programming by creating a dating game on the micro-handheld The Thumby. I never completed it, even though I did get pretty far into it...

I was thinking... Should I just upload what I DID get finished to itch.io and just let people mess around with the prototype? I don't know when I'll get around to finishing it... but it does seem like a tease to work on it for so long and then have nothing to show for it...

I dunno, let me know what you think about that!

AND SO,

This upcoming week is gonna be packed with more practicing for my shows coming up, both for Zaku and The Mountain Chiefs, AND I have 2 commissions I have to work on, but those should go by super quickly. I know most of you are here for Negative Reverie updates specifically, so I really want to recenter my efforts on that soon.

Let me know if you have any thoughts! Maybe there are some things u care about more than others you'd like to see me work on! I'm definitely someone who pretty much just does what I want, when I want... but I always welcome a suggestion!

As always, thank you so much for supporting me on Patreon!! Have a good week and I'll be back to writing more detailed posts like this sooner than later!! See you next week!