As of today, Cloudflash has existed for 12 years. It's been a long, quiet ride. To celebrate, I made 5 new comics. Now, you might be thinking to yourself, "But Danno! 5 comics is barely enough to even get you caught up to your past month of slacking! You've merely been holding out on us!" While I see your point, I was specifically motivated by Cloudflash's anniversary and I made all of these within the past week. In other words, I would not have bothered to make them otherwise, so be grateful (even if the comics aren't that funny)!

I keep thinking about how I want to redesign the site, but I don't see it happening anytime too soon. My creative effort seems to be booked solid - if not with the occasional comic, then my hands are tied making graphics for [insert MMO project]. Although this is certainly not in the spirit of the site's anniversary, I was thinking about how I wanted to remove a lot of the old content (Flash movies and games), though maybe I'd keep it archived somewhere, anyway.

Speaking of [insert MMO project], I'm pretty psyched up for it. Things seem like they're coming along decently. I've wanted to make an MMO for as long as Cloudflash has existed - I got my first taste of isometric MMOs in 2004 with Tactics Arena Online. Shortly after playing that, I started designing my own plans and graphics. Of course, it never panned out and I've scrapped all those old plans, but I've never given up on the idea of one day making my own isometric MMO. I was certainly ambitious back then - my sprite sheet had about 20 frames for a single walking animation! These days, I feel like a 4 frame walking animation is enough work as it is.

Here's an old picture of my first MMO project compared to the current one. The difference is like night and day.

Anyway, if nothing else, one can observe that the right sort of effort and determination will eventually make a huge difference. Maybe I should've directed my effort into something more useful in life, but I've got no regrets about what I've done. Many of my projects would reduce my sleep to 4-6 hours a night, many of them took hard work, and many times I kept going at it even though it felt tedious to me. Still, I continued because I wanted to see it finished. Despite all that, these things were fun and memorable in their own way. So, I hope people will continue to occasionally visit my pointless website to take in the sights and share a bit of this fun, or at least whatever part of it is salvageable for people other than myself. Well, until next year.

This week's comic is a bit late, sorry about that. It's been taking a lot of time for me to make a single comic, which is fairly disappointing to me. Also it drains me and makes my drawing fingers hurt. I've always tried to kinda alternate the workload on my comics to avoid burning myself out. That is, I'd do 2-panel and 3-panel comics for a few weeks in a row, possibly throwing in a 4-panel comic, then I might do a big comic (5+ panels) and go back to my ideas that take less effort. Naturally, I tried to do the same thing since I started up again, but somehow I ended up doing a lot of big comics. I guess I'm running low on simpler ideas.

It's a sorta troublesome predicament. These comics have been taking me, like, 6 hours or more to create even though they're not very complex or detailed. Part of me wants to be lazy and take a break. Possibly practice drawing a bit to work on my speed. The other part of me loves creating and publishing things for everyone to see, though. I like how my comics are easy to access and show how I've improved over the years. I also like having a large quantity of comics and feel like I've got a lot of catching up to do.

Anyway, so you might see inconsistency in the comic updates. Or you might not. I'm not very reliable when it comes to my personal projects. I wish I could find the time/motivation to redesign the site already.