I can hardly believe I’m saying it already, but the end of 2022 is upon us!

Now, as some of you will know, we relaunched our website and returned to Twitter after a lengthy hiatus back in October. Obviously, we were never really gone, but we definitely weren’t being as sociable as we could’ve been. Looking back, 2022 has been a really busy year for us, both in our personal lives and for Kinoko and friends.

Chelsey finished her college course in digital art and design back in the summer, after completing a massive animation project. I took on several big freelancing jobs in addition to my full-time work as a website developer. Together, we relocated to a whole new city. Kinoko finally got a name that we’re not embarrassed to type out publicly. We relaunched our website, and we even managed to drastically increase our Twitter following – up from a humble 90 at the beginning of October, to the 370 we have today!

Chelsey’s been developing a habit of creating more short comics and animations, and we’ve been posting those as they’re finished. Our comics section (which desperately needs a proper layout) has been slowly but surely growing, and you might have seen a few short animations of Kinoko popping up on Twitter here and there. Our ‘explore the series’ section has also been expanding with new character profiles and species, and we’ve got loads more where those came from. We might even have to break it up into sections soon!

We aren’t forgetting about our older stuff, of course. Even Kinoko – who was created all the way back in 2011 – has had a subtle design refresh to go along with his shiny new name. He even got a vehicle to cruise about space in. Perhaps most importantly of all, Blackhole – the universe’s ultimate and unstoppable big bad – finally got a deliciously evil design and some character development, after being initially created in 2013.

So, anyway, that’s our recap of 2022. Although we do wish that we’d been more consistently active on Twitter, in hindsight, we’re proud of everything we’ve done this year, particularly since October. Now let’s move on from all of that and talk about 2023!

Whilst these aren’t exactly ‘resolutions’ in the same sense as ‘start going to the gym’ or ‘eat less chocolate and drink less wine’, we have thought about some goals for the year ahead. We figured what better time to share these goals than now, in the spirit of the New Year celebrations? So, without further ado, here are our goals for the next twelve months…

Goal 1: Prototype our game

Last month, we used our blog to talk a little bit about the video game project we’re working on. Whilst we’re always going to have an interest in producing smaller works, like comics, stories and animations, this game is going to be at the heart of everything we do for the foreseeable future. We were very honest in that blog post – we said that it’s early days, and that the game as we currently envisage it may not even happen. Having both been involved in games development in the past, we also know what an epically massive undertaking developing video games is.

Nevertheless, we’re only going to get somewhere with this world we’re creating if we try. Whether we succeed or fail, our primary goal for 2023 is to get this game prototyped. We’re being realistic about this, of course. We know we aren’t going to finish it, and we certainly know we aren’t going to be releasing a playable demo of it. What we are going to do is prototype it to the best of our ability – create a game that feels good to play, with interesting mechanics and a nice art style – and share our progress along the way.

Broadly speaking, and as is the case with most things we do, I’m going to be doing the development and writing, and Chelsey’s going to be doing the art and animation. We’ll be designing the gameplay and the levels together, and we’ll likely both contribute to the user interface, too. We haven’t settled on any particular art style yet – that’s going to be one of the things we aim to do in 2023.

We’ll post updates on how the prototype’s coming along as often as we’re able to. Primarily, we’ll use our Twitter account to do this, but we’ll also aim to post regular, lengthy updates right here on our blog. It’s our hope that we’ll be able to write a really successful recap this time next year. For that reason, we’ll be taking care to document everything we do, and when. Not only will this mean that we can write about it, when the time comes, but it will also help us to make ourselves accountable for how we spend our time going forward.

Goal 2: Explore our world’s cosmology

If we had to put a label on how we chose to spend 2022, we’d probably call it the ‘Year of the Kuparkuke’.

The Enoki tribe of kuparkukes grew significantly this year, with many of its members being given significant character development. We really want the Enoki tribe to feel like a family – with all the ups and downs that come with that – and we think we achieved that. We’re still working on character profiles for everyone, but with the comics we’ve created (many of which are still unreleased, so look out for those in the near future) we think the Enoki village has come a long way and is starting to feel like a proper community now.

For 2023, we’re thinking of making it the ‘Year of Galaxy and Blackhole’.

These two characters were created very early on in the series’ development, with Galaxy being the creator of the universe, and Blackhole being that universe’s doom and reckoning. In 2023, we want to work on developing what this really means for the series, for Kinoko, for Fungaia, and for everything else. We want to explore how exactly it was that Galaxy created the universe, and where she came from. We want to explore what drove Blackhole to destroy her, and what still drives him now to destroy everything that Galaxy created and held dear.

For some time now – as a side project – we’ve been working on a comic that tells the story of these characters’ origins. We’ve scripted it as a three-page thing, and so far we’re one page down (spare for the words, which still need writing and dropping in). This comic is something we’ll definitely be sharing in 2023, so look out for that if you’re curious about how our universe – and these legendary characters – came to be.

Aside from the comic, we really just want to expand and develop our fictional version of the Milky Way Galaxy, too. We love creating planets – you can see quite a few of them in our ‘explore the series’ section already – but, with the real-life Milky Way Galaxy likely containing more than 100 billion planets – we can’t help but feel like ours is… pretty empty! In 2023, we’ll definitely be looking to expand Kinoko’s potential for adventure with plenty of new worlds for him to explore!

Goal 3: Share more stuff

Finally, we come to our website and our social media accounts.

Ever since we began to work on this project as a duo, back in 2016, we’ve always had a website of some kind. I’m a website developer. I’ve been developing websites as a hobby since I was eleven, when I taught myself to write HTML and CSS in Microsoft FrontPage. To my mind, the idea of not having a website is simply unthinkable, and so we’ve never not had one. The problem has been in knowing what to do with it!

We redeveloped our website in 2022 with one clear goal in mind: at its heart we have our ‘explore the series’ section, and that’s the part we’re most eager to work on. We went through our characters last night (because, at this point, we do lose track) and counted 140! We’ve talked publicly about some of them, but most of them exist only in the depths of our Google Drive, or otherwise only in the deepest recesses of our minds. On top of that, we’ve got species, we’ve got planets, we’ve got businesses, governments, cults, and all other sorts of organisations. We decided in 2022 that it’s time to get this stuff out of our heads and onto our website, and we’re going to be continuing with this throughout 2023.

This blog is something we’ve never had before. I’ve never been comfortable with the commitment of keeping a blog, having to come up with something worth writing about each month. Does anyone even care what I write here? Has anyone made it this far down the post? Probably not! But I realised, when deciding whether or not to start one in October, that it really doesn’t matter all that much whether it’s ‘worth writing about’ or not. If nothing else, keeping a blog like this makes us accountable. If writing two blog posts a month takes a couple of hours of my time, but those couple of hours help us ensure that we spend the other 700+ hours of the month doing stuff worth blogging about, then that’s time well-spent in my book.

As for our social media, these last three months have been the first time that ‘keeping our Twitter up-to-date’ hasn’t felt like a chore. We’ve genuinely enjoyed sharing more stuff there, engaging with our fellow artists and writers, finding new creators who inspire us, and building a bit of a following of our own. It’s been fun, and we definitely want to continue posting to Twitter in 2023. If you aren’t already following us there, make sure you do!

Anyway, I think I’ve talked enough for one year. I’m going to go back to enjoying ‘one final day of freedom’, before we get back to working on the game tomorrow, and I want to spend it continuing my playthrough of ‘Assassin’s Creed Odyssey’.

If you’ve made it this far, I thank you sincerely – have an amazing New Year and we’ll see you in 2023!