Sparklite

Sparklite is a Link to the Past style 16-bit top-down rougelike. Your home base is on a floating island, and each descent plops you down onto a procedurally generated world where you gather resources for some purpose I don't fully understand. To upgrade your equipment, I think? Probably.

The game looks cute and seems charming, but it suffers from Bad Switch Port Disease. Specifically, you can't walk to the left. Instead you have to do a weird maneuver where you turn right two to four times depending on where you want to go. It's very difficult to control, and I don't think this was intentional.

I'm going to have to put Sparklite into the same category as Airoheart, meaning that there were no quality control checks on the Nintendo Switch version. I understand that porting games isn't simple, but "you can't walk to the left" seems like it would raise some sort of flag. Oh well.

The good news is that a frustrated post-Sparklite search on the Nintendo Switch store taught me that a sequel to Blossom Tales recently came out. (Hooray!) I already started playing, and it's a joy. A very simple joy that perhaps wears its A Link to the Past influences a bit too shamelessly, but a joy nonetheless.

Art Takes Time and Energy

Because I'm terrible at math, I'm just going to tell you how much I make per contracted projects, plus some relevant information in terms of Life Stuff.
https://trungles.tumblr.com/post/701032492328714240/hello-long-time-follower-just-on-other-platforms

I started making art in 2012-ish as well, but only semi-professionally, and barely on purpose. I was employed full-time in a non-art job between 2013 and 2018 at a local non-profit. Throughout this time, I was working 40 hours a week at my day job, commuting between 2-4 hours a day depending on the weather (my commute was an hour for each direction in good weather and up to three hours if it snowed), and then working on comics for 3-4 hours in the evening, every evening. This meant that I would frequently be working anywhere between 65-85 hours a week for five years, and I do not recommend this! I burned out pretty bad! I didn’t go to art school or learn about comics, either, so I felt like I had to spend time building my portfolio to make up for lost time.

This is a really good post. Trungles doesn't come out and say it, but he's talking about the infamous "seven-year line" to get into a creative industry. Basically, most people can't just roll up to the door and walk in. Instead, you have to spend years networking and building a portfolio before maybe -maybe!- you get a lucky break.

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