The intermittent months and months of radio silence at a given time regarding progress on 東方虚舟 ~ Sapphic Starseas Abyss reflects one of my longest-held design theses.
Any work in most mediums takes a thousand talents smaller teams have to all brandish and large teams have to all coordinate; project and team management, audio / visual interface / effect coordination, dialoguework, motifwork, creature / costume / set design, narrative / exposition / scene / difficulty pacing and overhead, worldbuilding, copy-editing, budgeting, promotion, ad infinitum, forevermore. (Of course, mediums that don't express as many put higher burden on what remains.) Smaller groups take unconscious shortcuts and larger groups make vanilla compromises on weaker areas and budget-restrained aspects to get anything out at all under such weight, which contributes just as much as ambient pop culture does in producing generic slush. Straight-faced clichés of western fantasy settings, lacking options in character representation, cough, how many other deckbuilders on Steam use unaltered monochromatic Rexard and Poneti icons, cough cough, all the roguelikes with two or less songs while thousands of options have CC-BY licenses on Bandcamp, etcetera. The consequences of not using such have their own immense burdens; I've spent three years learning GIMP and G'MIC-Qt simply because I wanted my roguelike to not be 16-bit or otherwise be full of fuzzy abstract programmer art. My lack of restraint here thus meant working up and down the creative commons for thousands of needed assets, for UI bits and enemies and obstacles and status effects and other effects and card art and manifold collectible boosts. So it goes. The part where everything hasn't come together yet playability-wise further obscures this endless toil. It's hard for posting about games to spread without character melodrama or hot bodies or reflection and anecdotes, so all of these random contextless aesthetic + system samplings rarely stick.
...Having said all that, have some contextless vfx gifs from the hundreds I've worked away on. Gotta work with this aforementioned state of mostly being Aesthetic. Most of such are derived from the offerings of CuteStockFootage, KotatsuAkira, and pimen, if severely distorted in the fuzzy darkness that readily binds disparate sources together. (More works should really learn to do that.)
