Just organizing things into a neat lil pinned post so I won't have to worry about it later!
🌼
Welcome to my blog! I post/reblog cozy game content from games I enjoy. Currently this is mainly a Stardew Valley and Fields of Mistria blog, as those are my two great loves. I also love yapping about stardew mods, and have created many modded saves/modpacks for my own personal use.
🌼
I'm very much an adult in my 30s, but this blog will only contain sfw content, nothing spicy. This is also an AI free blog, no AI for me please
I am so bad at keeping track of time that I never realized that the project is officially 1 year old, counting from the date I first shared Cheri's portrait to the unofficial FoM server. She's come so far (and so did my art!).
With the v.3.0 portraits finished, revamping of the gift tastes, and writing the new intro, the biggest part of Cheri's latest revamp is finished! So glad I had that off my shoulders, because it's quite the art debt to have. Now I can be a bit more relaxed in making new stuff for the project. Maybe I'll finally get to proofreading my writing to put on the wiki, too.
All in all, thank you to everyone who's supported me throughout developing this project! The design and character brainstorming, lore discourse, silly headcanoning that became serious, and of course, just plain enthusiasm and joy about Cheri. These kept me not only creating art, but also sharing them, as Petals Upon the River is the first fanwork I've shared publicly on the internet since nearly ten years ago. It means a lot to me 🤍
In celebration of all this, here's some development FAQ and fun facts under the cut!
FAQ
Q: What software do you use?
A: Aseprite. Generally, I recommend doing pixel art in software made specifically for pixel art. They're more lightweight than regular digital art softwares like CSP, there's pixel perfect settings for cleaner lines, and it helps with exporting faster (through use of frames) and lossless resizing. Good alternatives are Libresprite and Pixquare (iOS).
.✦ ݁˖
Q: How did you do all the stuff for the project wiki?
A: Carrd Pro Plus subscription (unfortunately), getting back into CSS/HTML, learning a little bit of JS, and a ton of patience as I try to NOT rip my hair out due to Carrd's limitations even with Pro Plus.
The most intensive custom codework I've done so far are for the conversation topics in the Dialogue tab (i.e. the dialogue lines where you are offered choices and the topic resumes in later times you talk to the character again, like Balor's 'strawberry milk' conversation), and for the character bio tabs.
.✦ ݁˖
Q: How did you make the fake screenshots?
A: Taking in-game screenshots at 1x display resolution for the backgrounds, manual editing the rest. At 1x, the true resolution is still at 200%, so I had to do the dialogue box/portrait/sprite work in a separate file, export those 200%, then smack them into another .aseprite file where I keep the screenshots.
.✦ ݁˖
Q: Is the custom journal background for Cheri's bio a template?
A: No! I did edit that based off of the vanilla journal UI, but I edited colors, added the wear and tear on the pages, bookmark and tabs, and the receipt (based off of a part of the shop UI) to better match the look of Cheri's in-universe accounting ledger. Most of the additions are hand-pixeled, as opposed to frankenspriting.
Q: Is Cheri's house interior real in-game footage?
A: No. It's a drawing. I'm too scared to open the game's map files after seeing how the assets are organized.
.✦ ݁˖ 🌸 .✦ ݁˖
Fun Facts
Cheri was first announced as a concept in the unofficial FoM server on June 24th 2025, and their first portrait concept shared on July 4th 2025. It's been a year of development by now!
It took me a while to name the project, but I settled on "Petals Upon the River" because it's a reference to a rare but very much real hamon (temper line) design called Yoshinogawa ("Yoshino River") depicting cherry blossom petals and water ripples - example here. This pattern is also what Cheri has on her new sword's hamon.
(Art by Araimin on VGen!)
Speaking of petals, early on during development, sometimes I have thoughts that it would be too on-the-nose and maybe tropey in a lame way to have a Japanese OC with cherry blossom motifs — especially considering I'm not even Japanese. I think the direction that Cheri has gone towards is pretty cool by now, but that thought is certainly part of why I decided to give Cheri and their home province a more specifically Buddhist background/worldbuilding rather than Shinto. I also thought that the system of spiritually uplifted people and deifying them instead of a pantheon of unknowable, all-powerful gods is more in line towards the canon faiths we have in FoM (i.e. the dragon worship).
As of currently, the project has three focal characters across several arcs of Cheri's life (Cheri themself, their Master for the "past" arc, and Chihiro for the "future" arc), and 5 full-fledged members of the supporting cast (Snow White, Nagamitsu and Shizuruhime from the "past" cast, and Balor and Cheri's two travelling partners, whom I have not revealed officially yet). There's also quite a bit of background characters, like the old Master's parents, who are decently developed.
I've always been someone who makes worldbuilding in service of the characters and story, so I tended to work backwards to make them. My first devised worldbuilding material is the marital blade tradition, which genuinely started as a joke and rapidly became serious.
Today I pumped out a bunch of designs for the obelisks (some are still w.i.p)!
Right now I have:
Vanilla - Earth, Water, Desert, Island
Modded - Dam, DeepWoods, Ridgeside, Downtown zuzu, East Scrap
*Working on adding one for Mt Vapius~
I have no idea how to add these to the game, all the obelisk mods I've checked out have complex seeming configs, (I think because the sizes of the designs differ from the vanilla obelisks, so it's a bit different workflow than just editing the image via content patcher?) but I'll figure it out eventuallyyyy~
