Paranoid Android

Hey, everyone!! It came out last month but I never did post about it here- I got so mad about the first season of the DMC show last year that I made a very long, very passionate DMC retrospective for the entire series!

I recently took a whack at reviving the Kirhos species mod for Starbound, and made a kick-butt Workshop thumbnail for it. I just had to do an Akira slide. Mandatory. I don't make the rules :3 In hindsight, I could've made the hoverbike shinier, but other than that I'm pretty darn happy with it.

The Kirhos species and the depicted character Sai belong to @yyako.

Here's Sai by herself:

HEY! One of the games I did pixel art for, Yolk Heroes, is up for a Godot Game Award!! It'd be so cool to say I worked on an award winning game. So you should go vote for us to win the Nostalgia award!

I got one response to my Tumblr post pointing me to the back of Claude's house, but actually those are just Kickstarter backers! I have completed the game's epilogue, and I can now 100% confirm that there is no place in the game where someone would reasonably expect to see the people who made the game.

And hey, I didn't work on the game, so I can't burn any bridges. However, my partner DID work on the game, and it was terrible to work on, almost entirely due to the director being extremely bad at every facet of his job.

My partner (@bugbearstew, who knows I'm making this) was an artist on the game. There's a pretty good chance you love something he did! He designed a bunch of non-romanceable NPCs, including Peter, Wesley, Slobert, and the Snaccoon. He designed all the seasonal bosses and their pet forms, as well (and the gameplay for each was based off those designs, so if the fights seem kind of meandering and aimless that's why).

He joined the project in late 2020 and left in late 2022. There's a lot of tea I could spill about this, but I'm hoping it suffices to say that I watched my partner's creative spark die over the stress of working on Sun Haven and it took him months to rebuild his drive and his confidence. And they don't even have the tact to tell you that he worked on the game.

By the end of year 1, there was no movement on credits being added to Sun Haven.

By the end of year 2, it was promised that credits would be added to the Pixel Sprout website. This never happened.

Now, at the end of year 3, it was promised that credits would be added to an upcoming patch. That was six weeks ago, and there's been no news on the patch since last month.

At this point, if they ever do add credits, it will have been too little, too late. Crediting the workers won't have undone the poor pay, the constant crunch, the preying upon struggling artists. It might have three years ago, but not now. Not anymore.

At this point there isn't anything that I can say that is productive. It's a tragedy with no real resolution, here. I want to move on from it but I can't until the credits are in, and it'll be the most Pyrrhic of victories. I could say a lot of mean things to various people but I won't. Instead I'll be sad and tired over here.