I hate that I’m always trying to find cool biology themed stuff to wear but all the “nature inspired” clothing companies just have like two crossed arrows or a minimalistic mountain on a sweatshirt. Fucking lame, that’s barely even nature-adjacent. Put the life cycle of a salamander on a jacket, put hyena skeleton patterns on leggings, put a damn field guide of birds of prey on a peacoat and THEN you can have my money. Do NOT give me a shirt with a leaf on it that says “stay wild” or some bullshit I would much prefer clothing that broadcasts to everyone around me how many teeth an adult Jaguar has or how some pitcher plants can catch and digest rats.
Solstice Handmade fungi, arthropods, and various other animals
The Vet Med Artist mostly stickers/prints but they have a hoodie. Ink art exploring veterinary medicine
Laura Wolf Lots of silly bird art (prints through RB)
The Lincoln Forest national park apparel
Fernecreative more prints than apparel but Ferne illustrates (mostly British) wildlife
Coywolf Collections neat zoology art with some furries mixed in
Kelly Ballantyne not sure how much she makes in terms of clothing because her shop is on vacation at the moment, but this artist makes lots of bird illustrations
Moodymoon.co birds, fungi, plants, and other outdoor inspired art!
Mustardbeetle BUGS N BIRDS
Sipseywilder nature apparel of all kinds, bugs, cryptids, birds, plants, etc
Alex Tomlinson cute bird art, lots of art to do with birds and the postal service
Freehand Goods Florian wildlife
Avairia Art cute sea critters
Glitter and Toadstools all sorts of critters
Mothsprout lots of different kinds of critters, some furry stuff mixed in
Pikaloe cute cartoon nature critters, public shop is through rb but if you are a patron you get access to a secret shop
Chentomology bug art
Acorvi art mostly sea critters, cartoony style
Saxony Charlot Hawaiian wildlife I don’t see any apparel yet (though there are some buttons) but I figured I’d share anyway because a portion of profits goes to conservation in Hawaii
Lochnessie the “Birbie” dove design creator, they make lots of cartoony bird art. There aren’t any clothes listed at the moment but they do produce shirts occasionally
One day I would like to make clothing that fits this genre, but I am a full time student and I have a job (among other commitments) so that’s probably not gonna happen soon aha. Also I’m not sure how much I really want to deal with being “marketable.” But I may or may not make my own nature apparel one day :)
Yeah I getcha. I was once like you. Pure and naive. Great news. I AM STILL PURE AND NAIVE, GAME DEV IS FUN! But where to start?
To start, here are a couple of entry level softwares you can use! source: I just made a game called In Stars and Time and people are asking me how to start making vidy gaems. Now, without further ado:
SOFTWARES AND ENGINES FOR PEOPLE WHO DON'T KNOW HOW TO CODE!!!
Ren'py (and also a link to it if you click here do it):
THE visual novel software. Comic artists, look no further
✨Pros: It's free! It's simple! It has great documentation! It has a bunch of plugins and UI stuff and assets for you to buy! It can be used even if you have LITERALLY no programming experience! (You'll just need to read the doc a bunch) You can also port your game to a BUNCH of consoles!
✨Cons: None really <3
Some games to look at: Doki Doki Literature Club, Bad End Theater, Butterfly Soup
Twine:
Great for text-based games! GREAT FOR WRITERS WHO DONT WANNA DRAW!!!!!!!!! (but you can draw if you want)
✨Pros: It's free! It's simple! It's versatile! It has great documentation! It can be used even if you have LITERALLY no programming experience! (You'll just need to read the doc a bunch)
✨Cons: You can add pictures, but it's a pain.
Some games to look at: The Uncle Who Works For Nintendo, Queers In love At The End of The World, Escape Velocity
Bitsy:
Little topdown games!
✨Pros: It's free! It's simple! It's (somewhat) intuitive! It has great documentation! It can be used even if you have LITERALLY no programming experience! You can make everything in it, from text to sprites to code! Those games sure are small!
✨Cons: Those games sure are small. This is to make THE simplest game. Barely any animation for your sprites, can barely fit a line of text in there. But honestly, the restrictions are refreshing!
Some games to look at: honestly I haven't played that many bitsy games because i am a fake gamer. The picture above is from Under A Star Called Sun though and that looks so pretty
RPGMaker:
To make RPGs! LIKE ME!!!!!
NOTE: I recommend getting the latest version if you can, but all have their pros and cons. You can get a better idea by looking at this post.
✨Pros: Literally everything you need to make an RPG. Has a tutorial inside the software itself that will teach you the basics. Pretty simple to understand, even if you have no coding experience! Also I made a post helping you out with RPGMaker right here!
✨Cons: Some stuff can be hard to figure out. Also, the latest version is expensive. Get it on sale!
Some games to look at: Ib, Hylics, In Stars and Time (hehe. I made it)
engine.lol:
collage worlds! it is relatively new so I don't know much about it, but it seems fascinating. picture is from Garden!
NOTE: There's a bunch of smaller engines to find out there. Just yesterday I found out there's an Idle Game Maker made by the Cookie Clicker creator. Isn't life wonderful?
✨more advice under the cut. this is Long ok✨
ENGINES I KNOW NOTHING ABOUT AND THEY SEEM HARD BUT ALSO GIVE IT A TRY I GUESS!!!! :
Unity and Unreal: I don't know anything about those! That looks hard to learn! But indie devs use them! It seems expensive! Follow your dreams though! Don't ask me how!
GameMaker: Wuh I just don't know anything about it either! I just know it's now free if your game is non-commercial (aka, you're not selling it), and Undertale was made on it! It seems good! You probably need some coding experience though!!!
Godot: Man I know even less about this one. Heard good things though!
BUNCHA RANDOM ADVICE!!!!
-Make something small first! Try making simple: a character is in a room, and exits the room. The character can look around, decide to take an item with them, can leave, and maybe the door is locked and you have to find the key. Figuring out how to code something like that, whether it is as a fully text-based game or as an RPGMaker map, should be a good start to figure out how your software of choice works!
-After that, if you have an idea, try first to make the simplest version of that idea. For my timeloop RPG, my simplest version was two rooms: first room you can walk in, second room with the King, where a cutscene automatically plays and the battle starts, you immediately die, and loop back to the first room, with the text from this point on reflecting this change. I think I also added a loop counter. This helped me figure out the most important thing: Can This Game Be Made? After that, the rest is just fun stuff.
So if you want to make a dating sim, try and figure out how to add choices, and how to have affection points go up and down depending on your choices! If you want to make a platformer, figure out how to make your character move and jump and how to create a simple level! If you just want to make a kinetic visual novel with no choices, figure out how to add text, and how to add portraits! You'll be surprised at how powerful you'll feel after having figured even those simple things out.
-If you have a programming problem or just get confused, never underestimate the power of asking Google! You most likely won't be the only person asking this question, and you will learn some useful tips! If you are powerful enough, you can even… Ask people??? On forums??? Not me though.
-Yeah I know you probably want to make Your Big Idea RIGHT NOW but please. Make a smaller prototype first. You need to get that experience. Trust me.
-If you are not a womanthing of many skills like me, you might realize you need help. Maybe you need an artist, or a programmer. So! Game jams on itch.io are a great way to get to work and meet other game devs that have different strengths! Or ask around! Maybe your artist friend secretly always wanted to draw for a game. Ask! Collaborate! Have fun!!!
I hope that was useful! If it was. Maybe. You'd like to buy me a coffee. Or maybe you could check out my comics and games. Or just my new critically acclaimed game In Stars and Time. If you want. Ok bye
Seriously cannot recommend GBStudio enough for beginners, it makes making a gb/gbc game pretty simple, it's also FOSS (free, open source software) and the devs in my experience are very responsive as is the community
A quick and easy to use drag and drop retro game creator for your favourite handheld video game system.
Worth noting that ren'py and gb studio will happily let you add whatever ridiculous code you want on top of their frameworks. GB Studio will straight up dump the entire engine as a CMake project if you want to work in assembler or C, so if you don't like the way something works you can change it.
A while ago, I made a doc filled with pretty much evwry cheap and free resource I could find for game dev, and Im still working on it. Highly reccommend checking it out.
I appreciate this video a lot--people don't realize how important it is to start slow if you're trying to come back from a completely sedentary lifestyle, and they get really hurt as a result. Straining your muscles too much, too suddenly can land you in the E.R. and the wrong joint injury can permanently affect your mobility, so please start with absolute basics and easy stretches!
I almost asked myself how the hell it took me so long to finish TOTK before remembering the time I got sidetracked for well over an hour putting dead fish where they shouldn’t be and photographing them, which is one of the many unhinged things this game just lets you do
Looking back at my history with Sonic... it's so fucking surreal that I got to witness the births of 90% of this fandom's pairings.
I remember when Sonails used to be the absolute norm along side Sonally because most people were on the fence about whether Tails was a boy or not so they just defaulted to making him a girl. I still remember reading fanfics that referred to our little yellow menace as "she". This quickly got shut down though when Sega confirmed Tails as a "he". Sonails fell into obscurity because "GAY BAD" and it hasn't quite recovered from it... I dont think the people of today really want it to... but you can't really blame them. Nowadays it's hard to even imagine that Tails could've been mistaken for anything other than a dude. History is so fun lol.
I remember when Sonadow was invented. With the rising popularity in anime (specifically shounen anime), Shounen-Ai was creeping its way up there. Gay relationships were so goddamn taboo compared to nowadays but goddamnit if the taboo didn't capture your heart in some weird demented way- then I guess people got tired of the soft and fluffy "Shounen-Ai" and just wanted the gay porn, the "YAOI" and by god if Sonadow wasn't the most popular yaoi ship in existence... It still very much is but it's toned down in it's depraved raunchiness over the years. I still remember when it used to have like 5 names because people were so into trying to categorize it in the "Seme/Uke" fashion. Shadic/Shadonic/ShaSoni for Seme!Shadow and Uke!Sonic- which was and still very much is the most popular iteration of the ship, then you had SoniSha/Sonadow for the Seme!Sonic and Uke!Shadow version. Somewhere down the line, Westerners got too lazy to categorize and decided that "Sonadow" sounded the best because it rolls off the tongue nice and has a good mouth feel so it shall be the umbrella term for every iteration of Sonic x Shadow x Sonic. Sonadow has literally withstood the test of time for a whole 20 goddamn years and counting, if ANYTHING, yall HAVE to give this ship mad props for that. Not even Sonally can compare to that and Sonamy is a close second. I say Sonamy is a close second because it was never really enjoyed as Sonic and Amy being cute together (yes, like every ship, there are people who actually genuinely enjoyed it but the climate was the complete opposite). Sonamy was "enjoyed" because it was either better than Sonally or because it wasn't "gross gay yaoi shit" like Sonadow and other upcoming ships.
NEXT IS SONKNUX. It's always been an understated ship but it definitely became a little more popular when Sonadow got big because "MORE YAOI". I remember not having very strong feelings for the ship. I didn't hate it but I didn't care for it either, it was more like "yeah ok that makes sense if you're going to make it gay". It was never "OMG SO POPULAR" but it did have a following you had to acknowledge, like even the most delusional people couldn't deny this ship lol. There was also Knuxadow but at the time it was barely even a thing, it was an obscure rarepair but not so much anymore.
Now the go to for Knuckles ships was and still definitely is Knuxouge. God I remember all of the misogynistic flavored fan art and fan fics for this pairing- like, I get it. Rouge got nice curves, big ass, and fat tiddies while Knuckles got that big dick (which I'm going to say he doesn't because there's literally nothing there... there's nothing there except for smooth red fur... nothing-) and hypermasculinity. I get it. I loved this ship tho, there was more porn of it than genuine fan art and fan fics, but I mean yall get the picture. Im pretty sure yall can grasp the climate that surrounded this ship back in the day.
Knuxpio is also a ship but it was super obscure, like only deep divers got into it. I guess that still kinda rings true today because although there are definitely more people to appreciate it, it's still not on the public stage like alot of other ships. Same goes for Knuxighty and most other Knuckles ships.
CRAILS... TAILREAM... TAILS X CREAM. I am almost positive we still don't have a definitive ship name for these two but boy do I remember when these two little demons blew up. I used to like this ship because I thought it was super super adorable- like, here you have Sonic with all of these love interests but what about Tails? Tails should have a little someone of his own. In walks Cream in all of her adorable little bunny glory..... and Charmy too- BUT EVERYTHING WENT SO BAD SO FUCKING FAST. IT WAS NO LONGER CUTE. Welcome to the big popularity boom of shotacon and lolicon outside of Japan.
This post is already miles long so look out for a second one... probably... it's just so fun recalling the fruition of all of these ships and comparing some of them to how they're received today. Much nostalgia very punch to the gut~
Yeah, sure, seeing new things is helpful as a fantasy writer. But. Don’t make the mistake of assuming that exposure to new things is the same as traveling. You know what else exposes you to new things? The internet. Documentaries. Books. Freaking Youtube. So when you’re bored of cats and cooking tutorials, go on an adventure!
You wanna write create some fantasy creatures but don’t know where to start? Go check out some videos The Weird Creatures Earth has Had.
Want some inspiration for your Super Evil Villain’s Villanous Deeds?
Or maybe you want some weird locations to kick start your Fantasy World Terraforming?
Or maybe you need knowledge of bunches of historical places and cities and cultures?
But maybe you’re basing fantasy on the modern world?
Okay but lets say you want to start from the same inspiration as GRRM? (and part two!)
That’s just the stuff I could quickly grab. Things I’m subscribed to, that I know offhand. There is So. Much. Stuff. Online.
The best thing about the internet is that it means its not just the fortunate sons that get to learn, and explore and imagine and write. We get to see stories from all over the place, from all sorts of people, who bring All Kinds of New Ideas.
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