hi twitter/ bluesky/ whatevertheheck!

hiiii!~ this'll be the first post in my devlog to be shared on social media, and i'm feeling stage anxiety!.. even though i've already been writing these for a while.

for courtesy, hi! i'm wdbros. i have a website at https://www.wdbros.com/ and a little introduction written up here! it's nice to meet you. there's a little backlog of five posts for you to read through! go ahead. take your time. i'll wait. :)

also, here's Jerry.

if you were wondering.

wow, that looks cool!

yes! it does! and there's more!

but first, a preamble. shush, settle down. ahem

so... people say that when making something, you can't rely on the sense of gratification you get or expect to get from it to carry you through. (gratification here can mean via internal means or something like social media engagement.) it's considered an unreliable source of motivation and liable to fail without support from a healthy source of discipline.

personally i'm iffy on that. i think there's more there, but i haven't done the self-interrogation to disagree too much with this consensus, and it sounds very reasonable.

but discipline alone does something else. i notice this in the people around me more than myself; it tends to cause a subtle disconnect between creator and creation.

when you conceive a new idea, you are in it in a sense: you can't help but live and breathe it. the less you engage with it in ways that make you motivated about it-- the more make-me-do-it responsibility you load onto discipline, the less inside you are of your own idea. you may remember what your idea was about and stay faithful to it, but you will make new decisions from a place detached, the window shrinking to a keyhole.

personally, i hold on to being inside of my ideas very, very tightly... and therefore generally have more problems with discipline. any projects that i've tried to do long-term have suffered greatly for it. jerrygame, my current project and the subject of these digests, is possibly the first time i'm nearing problems with having more discipline than motivation. enough that progress has slowed.

but no more!

no turning back

today's post is special in that i'm sharing it, right? i'm dancing in the middle of the panopticon now. and i will be checking post metrics with a lot of regularity... which will be both a source of anguish and motivation to work on jerrygame. i'm a "drawing" type artist, i've drawn lots of Monika (DDLC) in my life and posted those drawings online. (you probably know this if you're a twitter follower.) so i'm quite familiar with the way checking metrics can play with your psyche. it's not always great. but...

i did something for myself just recently that resulted in a lot of gratification: i colour-blocked the model! seeing it in a state that looks this much nearer to completion gave me a huge rush of positive feelings. i'm actually, like, doing something!

i've been trying to avoid using gratification for motivation, but it's a stronger tool than i remember. strong enough that maybe, just maybe, occasional boosts from social media engagement could be worth it..?

*record scratch*

or maybe there's different kinds of gratification, and maybe one is more reliable. maybe healthier? it's hard to kno-

scene!

Drumroll, please...

so, here's Jerry now.

to illustrate, while i'm working on the topology, i'm mostly seeing this.

working with the visual in Fig. 2 for a while felt... stale? despite adding hair (which turned out a LOT better than i expected), the pearls and dress. the colours did something huge, somehow. maybe it's because this model is a lot more resolved?

also, the topic of her dress is quite tricky. turns out drawing skill does help in terms of visually designing a model, but it doesn't give you good enough knowledge of topology to help make a dress that'll deform nicely at low poly counts. that's something that, realistically, i will have to figure out a sleazy workaround for, like changing her outfit. something a REAL 3d artist wouldn't have to do >:(

wow that was awesome

from here, i'm realising i will probably delay uv-ing and texturing it in favour of rigging and rough animation. future plans are... less solid now -- modelling has consumed a lot more of my conscious than i had planned to allot, so i will have to take a step back to figure out a direction.

all the while, i need to stay inside jerrygame as much as i can. one good tool is writing... not just about the process, but, you know... creative writing? storytelling?

maybe poems?

...

goodbye! and get out of my house.