Recap video of what I’ve been doing with, Blackmask, my game I’ve been working on for the past few years. If you want to know more check out my blog posts on the game’s website.
Category Archives: Video Games
2024:A Year In Review
It’s February of 2025 and it’s high time I talk about my accomplishments and disappointments of 2024! Because I certainly didn’t dally writing this post over last December and January to cut out the negativity weighing down this post. No siree!
As usual, I drew plenty of art, tackled new projects and went to lots of art shows. Yet, I know I can do more of this coming year!
Continue readingAnime Nostalgia Show and Waukecon This Week
This week will be a full week with art events all over the Northern Illinois Area where I’ll be displaying my art!
Continue readingFebruary Devruary
Updates have certainly slowed, but honestly, not much news I can report besides livestreaming, my birthday and continuing to work hard on Blackmask.
2/8/2021 Blackmask Recent Development Stuff
With the fruits of Adam’s labor reveals a new progress video for Blackmask!
This progress video done between the last video and now, includes new additions of Slopes, Dashing, NPCs, and Enemies. There’s some jank of course, but development still persists!
Continue readingHoliday Lyfe
Things are good. I’ve been doing holiday stuff, Etsy sales, video editing and new progress on my indie game!
My thanksgiving was well and my holidays are going alright. I cooked a nice dinner for my family and stuck together, caught up on some manga that I’d been missing out on like Dr. Stone and My Hero Academia and even purchased new games like Hollow Knight and The Wonderful 101 to get myself back into playing and thinking about video games.
I’m continuing my holiday sale on my Etsy store! Remember that it ends on December 18th, a week before Christmas! It’s the final week for my holiday sale! Stickers and Comics are great stocking stuffers!
Doing What I Can
Staying busy with my art stuff for the last few weeks. I’m doing what I can to pack my days with activity and take my mind of things. I feel good when I’m focused on a project that I care about.
I did some “Brand Synergy” and renamed my web domain from “ryanfrancisart.com” to “mastafran.com.” Since my username on Twitter, Instagram, Twitch, Artstation, and Newgrounds gets me more search results of my art than my actual birth name, I’ll just use it for my general “brand.” It’s still the same site and if I set up my redirects right, the old site name should redirect to the new names. If there are any problems, feel free to message me.
I edited together a progress video of our game tentatively called “Cole Blackmask and the Scrolls of Soleon” or just “Blackmask” It’s a Game Boy styled action-platformer about a raccoon merchant adventuring an outlandish animal world for ancient magic scrolls of cataclysmic power.
This is actually older footage melded together but I wanted to have a bigger elevator pitch video to show off to people. There’s still so much to do before we have enough for a playable demo. The music isn’t even ours because it’s from Final Fantasy Legend 2, so the music stuff isn’t squared away yet.
Continue readingWhat I’ve Been Up To: Sketching and Video Editing
I’m keeping my head above water with my commissions and other art, but I feel slightly more accomplished in the past few weeks as I’ve been learning to make edit videos like my chat with Bryant Bell. We talk about art, conventions, and life stuff so if you have an hour or time, please give it a listen.
What I’ve Been Up To: Project Blackmask
If you’ve been following my art and this blog before 2020, you know that I draw a lot of anthropomorphic animal characters. These animals were ideas for characters and world for a webcomic idea that I was thinking about for the past nine years.
It would’ve been the ongoing adventures of a plucky adventure merchant named Cole Blackmask as travels to strange lands, questing for loot to sell, battling powerful warriors and mystical forces who reside all over this funny animal world.
Pardon the Mess
It’s been a while since I’ve updated anything online. Over the past few months, I’ve made an extremely sloppy transfer to Bluehost in a rough effort to improve my website. My big goal is to set up my website as my core hub for all of my web presence including where I’ll post and sell my comics and post my news. I’ll still have my typical social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram but I want to one day sunset them as I think they don’t do much to help me out in my art journey.
Adam Mortell, Ryan Cambruzzi, Vincent Rusca and I worked on a game for Global Game Jam this year. I’m bummed that I didn’t do more for the game but, I learned how to make pixel art for the first time.
Besides that, I’ve been tackling some new freelance artwork and commission stuff including working on a new book in the Flawless Extra-Ordinary Superheroes Series. With this, I’m still trying to fund printing for Incident at The Game Store in color but some car problems have come up so money’s lacking.