“Greetings, dear strangers-“… wait, wrong kind of announcement. Ahem. Hey everyone, long time no see! It’s been 4 years, and last week, while pondering what to do with my general existence on the world wide web, I decided to resurrect Prismanga. For nostalgia’s sake, I decided to keep the old blog postings available, but I can not be held accountable if your eyes start burning while looking at the artwork. Don’t mind me being dramatic, I just tend to dislike most of my older art pieces. The older they are, the more I dislike them.
Anyway! As you may have noticed if you ever visited Prismanga before, I revamped the entire page. My last endeavors before closing it down had broken the layout, so I needed to figure out how to make it somewhat presentable again. I also deleted a bunch of old pages with pretty much no content – all stuff I eventually planned to expand on, but never finished. Like pretty much everything in my (solo) gamedev career, so why would the homepage be any different? Believe me when I say that no one will miss this stuff.
About Gamedev
Unfortunately, I also come bearing bad news. While this is indeed “the resurrection of Prismanga”, I’m talking about nothing more than the blog itself. Production of all my projects has stopped; perhaps forever. (Well, this could also be good news, depending on your viewpoint. Now you can finally bury your hopes of getting to play any of the games I recklessly announced and never finished. Yay! … ?)
Don’t get me wrong – I love my OCs the same I always loved them, and I still dream of several of my projects on a regular basis. Nothing changed about that whatsoever. But after trying for many, many years and never getting anywhere close to releasing anything, I can only come to two conclusions:
1) I’m just not cut out for long-term projects, because I lack both the skill to persevere, and the skill to not get distracted by shiny new endeavors all the time.
2) I’m always running on low batteries, which keeps me in a perpetual state of demotivation and exhaustion… so while I would love to work hard every day, I’m struggling to get things done in general. This also makes it very difficult to focus on big projects without getting burnt-out and might be a big reason for my failures.
If the first conclusion is the right one, then I’m never going to release any games of my own, unless I gather enough funds to hire a team first. At the end of the day, I absolutely love planning and drawing, but I just don’t have much passion for the rest. (Okay, writing can definitely be fun, but that’s another case of “I start to write a bunch of scripts and then never finish any of them”…)
If the second conclusion is the right one, I might have a shot if I finally manage to improve my garbage lifestyle. This is something I’ve hoped to do for a loooong time, but it never worked out either and I’m pretty sure I know the reasons. Bigger ones than just “you’re freaking lazy.”
At this point, I’m thinking that the only way for things to change would be to leave forever.
“What the heck are you doing here, then?” …Well. Just posting some art from time to time, accompanied by my usual rambling. Like I mentioned, I love my OCs dearly and I still draw them on a regular basis. Of course I could open up an account on Instagram, DeviantArt or something, but I think it would be more fun to use Prismanga. For old times’ sake, and because I’ve come to dislike social media a lot. I wish we could go back to the times when many people had a fun homepage of their own, about their projects or other passions, or simply their favorite characters or shows.
So yeah – don’t look for social media links; you won’t find any. I’m 100% done with personal accounts. There’s nothing I really want to tell the world anyway, aside from “I hope people on Twitter relearn to separate fiction and reality”, “cotton candy ice tea is delicious and you should try it” and “ever since August 2022, I become troubled when I have to make Tostadas in Cook, Serve, Delicious.” If I were to seriously restart my creative endeavors, I’d only make accounts for the purpose of project updates and/or posting art.
About Prismanga
Long story short, Prismanga is not a gamedev studio anymore, it’s just a personal blog with some history now. Therefore, we don’t need a mascot either. Sorry Zakuro, somehow you had even less to do than your predecessors. (But I get the feeling that he’d say “Oh, that’s a pity” in a somewhat distant tone and shrug.)
Instead, up there in the header, you can see… Niko. Remember him?
He was featured on Halloween art and White Day art, rising up the ranks from a side character in a VN I never even talked about, to being the main character in several other projects. He grew up quite a bit, didn’t he? Usually, I’d tease you with a “does he look kinda different because he got a redesign, or is something fishy about this?” line, but sadly there is no point if I’m not going to make games anymore.
For the time being, we’ll keep the Niko header around because he fits the usual Prismanga theme very well. He was always associated with colorful sky phenomena, after all. I actually have more new art of him I could show, but this posting is already getting a bit long, so let’s save this for another day.
As you can see, my style hasn’t become any less colorful and my sons are cuter than ever! That’s because I discovered a passion for otokonoko and crossdressing anime boys a few years back, and it really shows. My army of confusingly adorable male characters has grown considerably, and my desire to draw female characters has dropped like a rock. If I want femininity, I just draw a crossdresser instead of a girl nowadays, and I’m very unapologetic about it. Once I stopped caring about people’s opinions and started going all out with hairstyles, colors and outfits, I became very happy with my art. Following your passions does wonders~.
The Wrap-up
That’s more or less all I wanted to say for now. Comments are disabled because this is really a low-effort blog and I might not check it too often outside from posting updates, so I’d rather not have to moderate anything. If you wanted to comment, just let Niko know and hope that he delivers the message next time we meet in my dreams. (Don’t let yourself be stopped by the fact that I unfortunately never dreamt of him before.)
Wait, one more thing! I switched from using “Natsu” to “Shiki” last year, because it’s been bothering me forever that I accidentally named myself after the season I despise most. Feel free to call me either name, though. I can’t really go full Shiki anyway, because then we’d have to rename Gosatsu to Goshiki ww
Thanks for reading! Have a nice day~