I hope you're having a great time so far! There's so much stuff to go through today, ahah. I think I'm gonna start marathoning the movies during dinner tonight, but I voted on most of the art on the front page (I'm not done!!). Though if I'm gonna be real, Pico Day ends up being Pico Week as I continue to poke around to see what I missed..

I had fully intended on posting up an image today, but I could not get myself to draw anything after working on that Uncle Chuck image a couple days ago. Every time I sat down to draw something recently I just wanted to nap instead. I'm always so tire--zzzzz

P-bot. P-bot, buddy, friend, compadre, tomodachi. We need to talk. I only have three songs up.

The shock and confusion I had when seeing this in my DMs could power a snowblower.

I saw mentions on the forums that someone in the art portal was scouting willy-nilly and I wouldn't be surprised if it's someone doing the same to the audio portal and I'll be unscouted eventually, but if not, thanks to the mysterious person who picked me, it feels like an honor I don't deserve. 😆

I don't think I ever "officially" plugged my portfolio website, and only quietly linked it here and there. But last fall, I found a host and bought a domain and here it is:

🌟🌟🌟 https://www.pepperly.art/ 🌟🌟🌟

Last week I finally finished the bones of a major coding overhaul, which most importantly hides the .html ending, and it also has an almost-automated page generation through templating with 11ty & nunjucks for significantly easier updates. With a ton of templating and crazy coding, updating for both desktop and mobile, adding new stuff to navigation, and even RSS'd the blog-based updates, are all so smooth now.

I use Boostrap to make the layouts, and SimpleLightbox handles image browsing. I've got thumbnails generated through thumbsup. It's so much cleaner and easier to update than my previous try, which was a huge mess and was so hard to manually update that I haven't done so in a year and a half (version 1 is my current neocities page which I'll be transforming into something more fun in the future). Templating is so easy to work with that I'm almost excited to do continuous updates. I'm also really happy with how the commission sheets look compared to my first iterations, and I got good feedback that even mobile works well (I hate browsing the internet on my phone, so I just tried to make it not frustrating).

So yeah! I just wanted to publicly announce it, finally.

Also, I did Jamuary! I don't think I'm "good enough" to post here, really (the skill of NG musicians is not to be reckoned with, and I'm a coward), but I collected everything from the past month into a playlist on itch.io. I used MeowSynth for almost all the songs, so I playfully called it Jameowary. They're mostly silly and fun, and this is only starting my third year of messing around with music in between other projects, so don't take them too seriously. Even if you don't have time to listen to some beginner's goofy album, I listed some of my favorites on the page. Or you can ignore it completely, heh. It'll be nice for me to look back on, eventually. Maybe.

I have last year's Jamuary also uploaded there, mostly for archival's sake, but maybe don't listen to that now. 😰 That one's less fun to look back on. (I still like a couple songs)

Is anyone going? I've got a table this year in the Artist Alley; the one I bought and paid for in 2020, lol. I'm gonna have buttons, big and small prints, stickers, and a few other random things.

I have a really nice and flexible setup for my mini-prints to display both them and the bigger versions freely, and my sticker and mini-print book has a slight rearrange. Here's a preview of some of my prints! I only have like 3-6 copies of anything print-wise so if there's something you're really gunning for, be sure to snag them right away.

Anyway, if you're going, drop on by to booth 408! I'll be wearing a goofy hat all weekend, probably my Pikachu one covered in pins, or a silly Sonic one.

Hope everyone is having a good time! I was at a little anime convention selling merch today, and between doing a little prep for that for conventions and doing commissions and busywork, I hadn't really even had the time to brainstorm anything, let alone participate. Gonna sit and check out the festivities now that I'm back home, both today and tomorrow.

Cool table shot, featuring a couple friends:

It is also free comics day. I picked up a stan lee thing and fishflies

Wow, that's me! Neato! Literally the day after I finally change my icon to something more personal, haha. Thanks for featuring me, G-bot (RNG-bot?)!!! 👋 And hello to anyone stopping by!

I guess some various updates/etc while I'm here!

I am literally one art away from 100 art in my gallery! As much as I want it to be cool and special it's likely going to be the commission I'll be finishing up in the next couple days. Can't win them all, I guess. I have a dumb goal to hit 1K fans by the end of the year. Somehow I got 800 in a year and a half, so this should be a viable goal, however I know I can't force people to follow or like my stuff, so if it doesn't happen it's not a big deal. (if you want to commission me, too 👉👈)

I am finally(?) part of the uncool club and caught Covid back right before Christmas, after two and a half years of being careful about it. It floored me for about two weeks but the rest of the house was fine. It felt like the flu but it absolutely destroyed my stamina for about a month. I, thankfully, don't feel like I got long Covid issues.

I'm working on my website again, this time with a python-based local server instead of having several hundred updates on the main site or fighting javascript not working via file -> open. Technology is amazing. My WIP looks exactly the same but I've got dynamically loading headers, footers, and a sitemap. I've finally got an easier to use gallery code, as the previous one was perfect visibly but difficult to update without bugs, so I'm working on porting all my galleries to more manageable codes and pages, and it's SLOW.

I also actually completed all of Jamuary and I'll be posting that page up to my website, too! I managed to post only two here, as I felt most of my songs were either not Newgrounds-worthy, or had too many samples for me to comfortably post here. (or both...) I'm terribly bad with drums so I used a lot of amen breaks and other peoples' remixes of the breaks, and other drum loops, and while it feels like that seems to be okay here, I'd rather be safe than sorry.

Semi-related, I started a tiny personal FNF mod for an OC out of boredom and the itch to create something, back in the fall, and I feel like I learned just enough new stuff about music during the month that I need to revisit the stuff I've already done. I'm not terribly thrilled about my spriting either, for various reasons, so I think I might scrap everything and remake it from scratch, lmao. We'll see if I ever release it! Committing to a project when you have high expectations for yourself is hard.

Thanks for reading if you got this far! I hope you find some money on the ground or in a forgotten jacket's pocket!!

Haha, I was so busy recently that I haven't been able to finish my thing for the day, so here's a little peek. I'll try to finish it up in the coming week or so, though. Kind of a fun summer scene to pair with the Christmas one I did for the Advent Calendar. I wasn't home at all today so I'm gonna go peek around and see what everyone else has been doing, rather than force myself to rush this out.

I have so much to do lmao it's probably like not even 15% along, though I might go back and resketch and reink everyone, since it's not up to my current par right now.

I just realized I hit 600+ fans! Thanks everyone!

Little afterward about the mod, I guess! (Mod here / Gameplay here )

I literally spent all my free time working on it for the past ... 13-ish months? I think it took me a month to push out what initially ended up being the demo, then in between working on IvnyRose I worked on the levels, programming, and animation. I think animation officially started in November, but I had some early cutscene thoughts at least vaguely storyboarded since August. I also watched way more music theory and production videos (so much trap, ugh) on Youtube than I could really honestly estimate, picking up some rudimentary music theory over the course of about 10 months? Maybe 8-ish. I don't think anything *really* clicked until this past February but I was so knee-deep in getting the animations and some chunks of IvnyRose done that I really couldn't do much with the songs I made myself. They're not great but I think they're at least passable, which is basically the feedback I've seen here and there online. There's so many amazing people in the scene, I can't expect to compete, but at least I did ... something.

Speaking of Music, Anjer got me music like right after asking, as I had initially wanted to release a simple mod on Europ33nor Day, so I've been sitting on his amazing works for months!!! Teravex gave me the music closer to release, and my neverending patience combined with the delay to Piconjo day was what inspired me to do silly animated cutscenes in between songs instead of simpler things in the beginning. I just knew I could do it, so I took the challenge I gave myself. I didn't manage to do everything perfect, but I'm pleased with what I did. I never found anyone to compose for JoM's songs so he just ended up getting something by me, but I wanted to do vaguely Final Fantasy and purposefully terrible songs for Legendary Frog from the beginning.

There's a couple scrapped things; Tutorial has normal music but it takes place on a Newgrounds video page, but badly drawn. BF and GF who I stylized in such a way that the staged looked like flipaclip videos on a joke version of the site. I was gonna have another stupid song there and hide a little bit of story in it, but I just left it as-is because I just wanted to focus on the reset of the things. The "secret" song was just a scrapped song I had put together but left in for the heck of it. Is it an anti-reward? Yes. I had asked in .hax if anyone wanted to compose a song and that's so much more fun than what anything I could've done. The song t0mmy and Piconjo conjured up actually told enough of a story for me mentally that I completely based the entire stage on it, not the other way around. I still get a kick out of the absolute anti-payoff it does once you get past the spammy part. There's a stick variant of JoM, and the old blue cape Piconjo was unscrapped for the initial versions of the songs Anjer did. I think I left IvnyRose boyfriend in, and the Thank You hidden title screen that can't be triggered anymore. Ah well, there's always stuff left on the cutting room floor.

I might post up the cutscenes to the portal for those who aren't interested in the game to see what I had cooked up, but I don't have them compiled as a whole yet. I spent months animating them and I kind of want to archive them, but I'm just a bit hesitant.

Ah well.

Piconjo and IvnyRose took over well over a year of my life. With both of these chapters closed... I'm not sure what I'm going to do with myself on my free time. Haha, what do people do for fun anymore? How do you waste time without some big project looming over your head to work on? Aaaaaa.

Additionally, I didn't end up finishing my Pico Day drawing and I'm not sure I can finish it on time, so I'm not sure I'll have anything cool for the day. (´。＿。｀)

I have been here a year and it's been amazing!! Newgrounds is awesome! This is still the only place I have a sub for, haha, glad to throw in my 2 cents every once in a while for such a fun and active community. Y'all are amazing and I've done a lot of really cool stuff outside of my comfort zone because of Newgrounds and FNF and I feel like I might not be as stale and stagnant as I've been over the past few years. I don't know how you guys did it, but thanks for being such a big inspiration!

Some cool stuff I wouldn't have done if I didn't join:

I am also currently at 69 pieces of art in my gallery. Nice:tm:

Stuff on the horizon:

I need to finish my website! It's mostly done but one particular gallery page is still empty of images and there's some general ironing out I want to do with the layout, but my commissions page and most of my other galleries are complete! If you've got a neocities page and want to do mutual links with the little 88x32 button things let me know! I want to collect other sites on my button page, haha.

FNF vs Ivnyrose is out next week! I did a bunch of stuff for the week featuring Justice, please look forward to it. It's got some amazing bangers and cool art not by me. Also no stupid mechanics! Just jam along and enjoy the ride. Also give Keeby a follow, ok? It wouldn't have happened without her behind the helm.

FNF vs Piconjo will be releasing on Piconjo day! Week 2 & 3 are charted and in (I got some bangers in by Anjer which are absolutely amazing and I feel so bad that I've been sitting on them for so long, unshared, and Teravex is working on stuff right now, rearranging stuff from the Piconjo teh 6ayme OST to be FNF friendly!), though I want to do some small events with leftover time. Week 2's animated cutscenes are complete (I just gotta add noise), and I'm working on Week 3's. I have a little done for Week 1 (basically storyboard-level) but I hate it and I'm gonna restart. I had planned on being done with the animation by the end of the month, but it might be an extra week because I have somehow moved from tween animation to handdrawn stuff and it's taking forever. Aaah. Either way, a full release will drop on Piconjo Day as I plan to be completely weeks beforehand. I have done more animation for this than the rest of my entire life. I have learned so much while working on it and I'm going to have some bad burnout once I'm done, oh no. Anyway, please look forward to it!!

Speaking of burning, I've got a Dankman piece almost done and ready for tomorrow, heh. Just gotta finish a little coloring. I'm probably going to post the trophies I did for the Trophy Collab tomorrow too. Have you got mine yet?

I still haven't decided if I'm doing artfight this year and how much I'm going to go in if I do, but if you're into that my account is here and i always do followbacks and revenges.

Who knows what else is in the future, though! I'm hoping to join some more collabs!

Thanks for readin' and bein' cool, Newgrounds!!

If anyone's needing an extra set of paws for their Pico Day game, I can offer art! My main focuses right now are my occasional commissions (which as of this post is an empty plate), coding up a website for myself, and finishing the cutscenes for the Piconjo mod. I've recently finished my work needed for the Ivny Rose mod, so I'm looking to fill that gap.

I can do all sorts of stuff! I'm familiar with animating characters in Animate, pixel art of varying degrees, backgrounds (I'd love to try my hand at a parallax bg of some sort), can easily do character portraits and the like too. I'm pretty flexible stylistically as well. I can mostly offer 2D art, but I'm also vaguely familiar with Blender and could probably do a low-poly sprite or two. I've touched a bit in Ren'py, Pico-8, Godot, and Unity as far as engines go, though most of my knowledge is FNF-centric haxe lol.

As a note I'd like to work with an adult or a team of mostly adults. I am an old fart and I don't feel comfortable working with minors when they have the potential to be half my age or less.

Hit me up in DMs for a chat, if we think we can work together on something I can pass along my discord.

I'll likely remove this if I found a team to work with!