South Scrimshaw Part One is out both here and on Steam. This is the first four chapters. Many thanks to the people who have been following the project over the years. 

The story itself in not yet complete, but I'm going to post a few thoughts to mark the occasion.

I wrote a very primitive version of this story many years ago. It was a screenplay, since I was in LA at the time working much more frequently as an animator, and the plan was to do it as stop motion. I don't really know how close any of the pitches I made came to happening, but I suspect not very. 

Around the time that aspiration began hitting a wall I fell in love with VNs. I had known the Phoenix Wright adventure game style (which are fantastic too) but I'm talking about the NVL/sound/kinetic variety. There is a striking amount of power that gets through even some of the most minimal presentation. I think the potential of combining written word with multimedia presentation is obvious, and I cannot understand why the medium is relatively neglected compared to other varieties of animation and videogames. I'm also an illustrator more than I'm an animator and imagining my work as a VN felt perfect.

So, not actually knowing anything about what I was attempting, I decided to make the sort of thing I wanted to read.

Part of my ambition with this project was to learn how to paint with greater realism. This is a work to express my love of the natural world and I wanted illustrations with a real sense of light and texture and filth. At the time I felt extremely dissatisfied and limited by my reliance on pen and ink line and flat color, and that style was failing to express the nuance I wanted. Where I ended up is a mixed media fusion of watercolor and digital and line work that I'm really happy with, and I think has even more room to develop.

At the outset I didn't fully appreciate how much work I was taking on. This final release is over 400 unique illustrations. This was the main delay. Every painting felt like I had to fail two or three times to succeed, and I had to juggle all this in between paying work. Progress was interminably slow.

Perfectionism has always poisoned my creative process and South Scrimshaw has been a reckoning. But I refuse to completely reform myself, so on the other hand we all need personal standards to hold ourselves accountable to. After ruining my life for years, this stubbornness eventually paid off. Eventually I learned how to paint by repeatedly banging my head against my desk for days on end. Brain trauma aside I think this is the main way this project has succeeded. I'm still not the painter I want to be, but I can now paint something like how I want. Last fall I did a couple pieces of concept art for a director's film pitch and it was a moment where I thought, an illustration like this would have been completely impossible before.

However I've also found that learning everything for the first time, with my attention spread thin across so many different tasks, does not allow me to make my best work. Focusing so hard on the technical aspects of painting itself, the painting composition suffers. Worrying about writing and boarding left aspects of design lacking. I can see a lot I could have done better, and plan to improve on.

I do think that creating four chapters in almost as many years is in itself a massive failure. It was too slow. If I'm going to really blast my own work, I think it's overall too reliant on the vocabulary of cinema and I haven't done enough yet with the novel side of the visual novel.

I'm sure any artist on this site experiences a kind of self-loathing on a long project. My very small readership is one of the few bright points that could keep me focused and on task. I am not going to get gratuitously sentimental but life isn't easy in general and I cannot overstate my appreciation that there are people on the same wavelength as this passion project of mine.

A Steam release was the suggestion of a fellow VN dev here, Story Anon (also my very first reader and still somehow a fan after so long.) It was something I hadn't considered, but it got me thinking, and I've chosen to split this project into two parts.

South Scrimshaw is 8 chapters, and I'm separating them into two releases. The story is naturally split in two parts and allows for this without too much awkwardness. After so many years, and so much learned from experience, there's a natural and visible drift in art style that has set in. When Scrimshaw returns, I want to really push chapter 5 with everything I know now and not worry if it looks too different from chapter 1.

Also I need to regroup and plan my next work. It's a bit of a crossroads where I have to choose what to invest my time in. It won't hurt to take some time to reflect about things and see how Part One is received, or if it continues to go mostly unnoticed.

Anyway that is the post-mortem. Thanks for reading. Again, if you want to pick Scrimshaw up on Steam, it's free. I'm working on getting my Mac notarization, so hopefully Steam will also have that build in the future. You can follow me on twitter, I frequently post sketches. Thanks for reading.