I used a set of paid UI plugins for VX Ace called the Luna Engine, which took a LOT of fiddling with numbers and settings in scripts. It has some compatibility errors with some scripts, if you're trying to insert it into an existing project, and honestly it's a little buggy even on its own. Despite still being sold as official DLC for the engine on Steam to this day, the devs of the scripts dropped support and stopped fixing bugs years ago. I tried contacting them about bugs probably in like late 2016, only two years after it was released and one year after I bought it in a Humble Bundle, and by then they'd already dropped all support for their VX Ace scripts and moved on to MV.

Ah, the joys of RPG Maker development. And people wonder why I want to stop working in this engine.

Anyway, in the end, I did get it to work, and the results are great. So the Luna Engine technically still works. But it takes a lot of elbow grease.

There's a decent chance that'll happen, yeah. I was never super interested in Higurashi because the anime has given it this reputation where people put it on lists like "Top 10 Most FUCKED UP and TWISTED Anime That Will Make You PUKE and SHIT YOUR PANTS!!" and focus on the moe anime girls going crazy and murdering each other or whatever, as opposed to anything else in the story. People act like it's pure shock value horror. Which really didn't sound like my thing! When, like, the original VNs of Higurashi and Umineko don't even show the gore lol. Reading Umineko is really driving home how much more these stories have going on beyond just shocking the reader.

It'll probably be quite some time before I can read Higurashi, though. I'm reading Umineko with Anthony (who's the one who pestered me to read it all year) by putting it on our TV through my Steam Deck dock, which means we're getting through like an hour or two of reading a day, tops. Though eventually I might start reading more of it on my own to get through it faster. We'll see.

I get where you're coming from, but I do want to continue TKP when I'm feeling less burnt out on everything. After all this time and effort it would feel hugely anticlimactic if I just called it quits there instead of fully covering all of Archie Sonic. It's just not my top priority compared to my game dev work, but that's nothing new.

There was definitely some conscious DnD influence on SLARPG and its brand of fantasy. It was intentionally designed to be that flavor of fantasy, but with a cartoonier aesthetic and a modern setting and a focus on anthro characters, before swerving into various other directions. Though I've never actually played DnD! Or really any tabletop RPGs, aside from a few sessions of Pathfinder. So really it's mostly from me listening to a ton of The Adventure Zone: Balance early in development (which I would cite as a major influence), and also indirect influence through other fantasy things descended from DnD, like Warcraft and early JRPGs and whatnot.

Nah, I'm just playing the Steam version unmodded. I'm sure it's good, but the original intended experience is for it to have no voice acting, so that's what I'm doing. I also just don't like having to wait for voice lines to finish as I'm reading. I'd rather just read it like a book that happens to have pictures and sound.

Aside from Undertale and Deltarune, which I assume 100% of my audience has already played, I haven't actually played many indie RPGs. In particular, I didn't want popular RPG Maker games to influence my own work too much. The RPG Maker scene is extremely vibrant and awesome, but there can also be this feedback loop where a lot of RPG Maker games seem to be primarily influenced by other RPG Maker games. (Omori is 100% this to me, sorry lol.) SLARPG certainly ticks several of those boxes—Mother influence, surrealism, meta elements, mental health themes, a scary part, etc.—but I was trying to make something more inspired by classic fantasy JRPGs, which is ironically not what most of the popular RPG Maker games are trying to do even though that's literally what the engine was made for. I didn't want that to get diluted too much with assumptions about what RPG Maker games are "supposed" to be like. I also just didn't want to risk subconsciously ripping off things I'd seen in other RPG Maker games. It's very easy to look at another game and go "oh shit, you can do that in RPG Maker?" and suddenly want to do the same thing. I wanted to explore the engine on my own terms.

Uhhhh but check out Hylics, I guess. It's nothing like SLARPG, but Hylics is cool. I need to play Hylics sometime, now that SLARPG is done and accidental plagiarism is less of a concern for me. I also need to get around to playing OneShot and Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass. And Small Saga, for something not made in RPG Maker. And CrossCode. And I haven't even gotten around to Disco Elysium yet. I have a very large backlog okay

No estimate for when regular updates about the Archie comics will return, sorry. I'm still burnt out. I should have a Shadow Gens review up before the end of the month, though.

Not what I'm working on right now, but the Novas will return, someday, in some form

Cyber Owls is quite literally built for that, but I think it would be funnier if it was one of the games with more adult subject matter. I'm thinking a Quibble Race cartoon that tries to soften the shady mob gambling element of it and adds a kid-friendly moral to every episode. But then also they have one Very Special Episode about the dangers of performance-enhancing drugs.

When I was getting back into Archie Sonic via TKP I had a feeling Bunnie would be my new favorite because I like cyborg characters and I've always liked her design, and this quickly ended up being true. Bunnie's just the most fun member of the Freedom Fighters. She has this tragic backstory where she got half-roboticized, and part of her wishes she could go back to normal and worries about the possibility that she could endanger her friends, but she's also determined to use her newfound abilities to kick all kinds of ass and protect her friends. She has every reason to be a mess and instead she tries her hardest to be a ray of sunshine for the rest of the team. She's great. Also her having body dysmorphia is basically handing me a trans reading on a silver platter lmao

Rouge is also one of the most fun characters in the game cast, and I always want that potential to be realized more outside of the comics. She's this crafty femme fatale spy working for the government, but also she's a total kleptomaniac who just cannot stop stealing jewels whenever she sees them. She can't help herself. But everyone just has to turn a blind eye to this because she's so good at her job, being a master infiltrator and intel gatherer and also a highly skilled hand-to-hand fighter to boot. And also she, of all characters, has to serve as the angel on Shadow's shoulder, because compared to him and Omega somehow the grounded one is the serial jewel thief who keeps trying to steal the Master Emerald just because she thinks it's neat. She's so funny when she's allowed to be funny. Her dynamic with basically everyone is a lot of fun because she's such a tease and she's a little more morally unscrupulous and selfish compared to all the unambiguously heroic characters that make up much of the roster, but really she's a softy deep down, when you get to know her. (Now if only they'd give her a new voice actress...)

Now to not overanalyze the fact that my faves are the Hot Furry Girl With Big Boobs characters and what effect that may or may not have had on my psyche. That's just a bonus. I do genuinely like both of them as characters lol

Mega Man. I was too hyped for him to finally be added after years of wishing to not main him. I also play a frankly surprising amount of Wario just because he's such a funny character. I love eating my own motorcycle and knocking people out with a fart. I also have to play Ness and Lucas and Richter as a fan of their games, even if I don't think I'm super great with any of them. And I haven't played much Smash since the DLC started coming out, but I liked Terry when I dabbled with him.

I use an XP-Pen Deco 01 V2, a basic $60 USB drawing tablet with no screen that I find really reliable. I like the paper texture cover it comes with, and the pen doesn't need a battery, which are both pluses. After SLARPG released and I had the money to do so I bought an iPad to try and get into drawing directly on a screen, but honestly I'm so used to drawing on cheap non-screen tablets at this point that anything else feels unnatural to me. So now I just use the iPad to read comics lol

Nah that's pretty normal. You can just think the art is neat.

It's still very surreal, in a good way.

I mean, the game was basically 100% formulated to be a thing I wish I could send back in time to myself in my late teens, both in terms of evoking fiction I was obsessed with back then and also discussing some gender stuff that I needed to hear. It's the game that would have cracked my egg and been my favorite thing in the world. So I guess it's not THAT surprising to hear it did that for other people.

But also I spent almost eight years worrying that it would come out and no one would give a shit, or that the people who had been waiting for it would be disappointed with the end product, or that people would call it problematic and toxic because Melody and Allison have one (1) fight and there's a villain redemption arc in it. (Bearing witness to the SU critical discourse did a number on me in my early 20s lmao.) And also, like, there are so few scenes where Melody and Claire being trans is actually directly addressed, so it's easy for me to feel like it's actually a relatively minor element of the story compared to everything else, something that could get lost in the shuffle if you aren't actively doing a trans reading of the narrative.

So it's a little wild to look around and see people naming themselves after my characters and saying it helped them crack their eggs or convinced them to go on HRT. It's strange to know that my little furry RPG Maker game I made on my laptop had that effect on people. But it's nice. I don't like to overstate my importance as some kind of transfem icon or whatever, but I'm glad my game found its audience and that it means something to those who played it.

who doesn't

I became obsessed with Archie Sonic at a formative age. Pretty self-explanatory I think lol. And then my middle school Sonic-sona I used on Smack Jeeves (who was an edit of Tails' sprites from Sonic Advance) evolved into my first fursona as I became more acquainted with the idea of furries. Then I was in the closet throughout high school after figuring out I was bi at age 14, and I found it very reassuring how many openly, flamboyantly queer people there were in the furry scene. I kind of kept the fact that I was a furry to myself, though. Then after becoming known for MLP fanart for a while and gaining an actual audience for my art I just pivoted to being a full-blown furry artist, like many other people did.