❀ Big changes

　　4/21/2024

　　HAHAHA IT’S BEEN SO LONG. I AM SO SORRY. I MEANT FOR AGES TO ACTUALLY MAKE AN ENTRY AND KEPT FORGETTING… I promise this website is not dead! I did not in fact Perish from my wisdom tooth extraction. Life just kept happening and I kept putting this off. But no longer! I have lots of things to say. I hope that my return shall be a welcome one.

　　Firstly! I made a Ko-Fi! \o/ 🎉 If you’d like to support me, you can get access to the official OHAU server with a one-time donation! I’m a lot better about updating certain things there (I’m not Great. But. Certainly better than I’ve been with this website lol) and I share my conceptual work there c-: + you can get lots of other silly (some exclusive!) benefits if you become a Ko-Fi member, like seeing the WIPs for my videos and (as of recent) hearing me babble incessantly about whatever it is I plan to do next. I have just recently shared A Bunch of artwork for a video I was working on and eventually lost the inspiration to finish. SO. If you’d like to support me / hear more about the story / ask questions / whatever, now you have the option to do so ! :-D Overall it’s also a more reliable source of hearing from me and learning about things as they develop, esp if you become a member (*^ω^*)

　　AS FOR THE STATE OF OHAU CURRENTLY. The other part of why I stalled so long on this entry is that not much has been happening truthfully. Kess is finishing college and I am not very good at making progress by myself, so most of my work has been with passive thoughts and character design/touchups. I made a very neat pinboard in the meantime though! I do have things to talk about, it just hasn’t been actively happening enough for me to feel pressured to make entries keeping things here up to date. Pretty much everything new puts the story into a really watery state in a way that makes it difficult to explain in context to everything else. Because the way it affects everything else means that… everything else is Really Watery. The way I’ve thought about it up to this point puts the story in a position, in my mind, where almost none of the previously settled points and elements are viable anymore (ㆀ˘･з･˘)

　　Besides the vagueness of story direction there’s no real interconnected plot I could go over in concern with the main story. We’ve thrown out a lot of the elements from UcLo already, but I’m fixing to throw out Even More. Really tear that old thing apart. It stinks to feel like the story is still in such an uncertain place after all this time, but I think the past year was spent more with getting our footing in terms of where we wanted to take the story and the sort of tone we wanted it to have; I really wanted to make OHAU into something new and of its own after breaking off with my previous story partner, but apparently that’s not super easy to do all at once after doing The Same Thing for upwards of 3 years. I feel like it’s a ship of theseus type thing. But, like, the point is to slowly replace every part until you have an entirely new ship, y’know? We couldn’t just start from scratch, I guess. We had to work our way up till we legitimately would be able to have a blank slate to work with. It’s gonna feel weird to be moving on without those staple plot points and elements and things, but I think ultimately it’ll be for the better. Good for the story’s health. And also good for my health. It’s nice to properly move on from the storytelling experience of my 16-year-old self. I like not feeling completely embarrassed of my passion project, LOL.

　　Okay. I wrote this previous bit a while ago. Discussion has been going in the background on and off and we have decided to start things over almost entirely. So. No more ship of theseus. But y’know, that’s not a bad thing. We’ve already made a LOT of progress just by doing that and going in a different direction. It feels weird, but not in a bad way. I’m excited for all this stuff to be the new norm :-)

　　There’s no more resort, which is, like… a humongous thing, because we’ve had the idea of the resort since day one. That’s such a huge change to make for the tone of the story and the overall setting. No resort means no a lot of things. We’ve also done a lot of worldbuilding work that changes the context to the story as a general rule. I’m not really sure how to get into it just for the sheer magnitude of what has changed since the last time I updated this site, so… I probably won’t. But I will say that things have changed a lot! And they will likely continue to do so. What I can ask of you now is to disregard what you’ve known about the story up to this point. Maybe not completely, because there’s a lot of work we’ve done that we are keeping (like character direction and concepts we developed that were already removed from the story as we started it with,) but… most things, definitely. This also means that all of the videos up on my channel are completely out of date. Even Ghost of Chicago. Unfortunately :-(. Sabine (previously Enola) and Puppy and a host of other characters have been shelved from the project entirely, and some new characters have been introduced, and lots of names have been changed. It’s a lot of work, and it feels strange to have everything so quickly become so different after four years of it all being based a certain way, but I’m excited about it. It’s going to be much better and much more fun in the long run :-)

　　I will give you one thing though! Instead of an ostentatious domestic family resort being the focal establishment of interest, we are doing an in-town diner! It is called Danique’s. I’m going to have to update some of the iconography on this site (and in other places) once I’ve fleshed out the diner’s logo to where I’m happy with it. The theming will fit a lot more overall to how I’ve designed the site I think, since it’s meant to be space/star themed. We’ve also decided to rename the town of Lindens entirely; Amity, meaning friendship and harmony. I’m also going to have to update the main cast on the front page… and the story blurb. And I have so many redesigns to do. Ooh. I have a lot of work to do. The majority of these big changes and developments were only instated yesterday (as of writing this) so I’ve got a lot on my plate. I hope y’all are excited! Thank you for so much your support and sticking with me throughout all this (=´∀｀)人(´∀｀=)

　　Hopefully I’ll be able to return to making videos soon. But for now, I’ll be on Animation Hiatus, as the story has yet to be fleshed out enough for me to really properly illustrate what we’re working with. If you want to keep up with me and what I’m working on, consider donating to my Ko-fi and joining the server! I’m pretty active there as of late and likely will be sharing a lot of conceptual work in the near future, if I don’t end up being super busy.

　　I think I'd also like to overhaul this website at some point too. The stuff people are able to do with their neocities websites is really inspiring to me... I'd like to do something as cool as that. Maybe in the future when I have more time on my hands to blow on website creation!

- Kyu