Archipelagos excite me

Plus cosy cats, writing prompts and hand drawn fonts

Game update

If you’re not aware already (I’ve welcomed a lot of new people from Substack this week, hello!) I’m making a game — some concept art attached below if this is your first time hearing about it. I mentioned previously that it’s a bit Animal Crossing inspired, and as part of that we’ve been building out an island world. This week we’ve been thinking about (and working on) the idea of an archipelago, which I’m really excited about. As always I’ll leave a bit of mystery until we have something more visual to share!

Concept art

Lofi chillhop videos

I’ve always been a fan of the lofi beats part of YouTube and the relaxing, looping artwork has influenced my own work. I’ve wanted to grow my own channel featuring my own animations for a while, and seeing how much AI content has overtaken this part of YouTube has inspired me to pick this idea back up. There’s a snippet of my first video below — the full video is here.

Watch the full video on YouTube

I did try this same kind of thing out a few years ago and it got the attention of chillhop.com, leading to the commission below — let me know if you recognise this little guy:

I’ve added some further thoughts on AI lofi music channels at the end of the newsletter.

Need inspiration for your writing?

I’ve had a great week on Substack introducing a lot of new faces to my work. I could write a separate newsletter all about how that’s felt — the level of engagement and outpouring of appreciation for my work in a short space of time has honestly been overwhelming (in a good way). Thank you to everyone who has shared or commented on my various notes!

One thing I’ve been having fun doing is sharing some of my work as writing prompts. Here’s an example image:

And here’s a brief excerpt from Abby Paradis’ contribution:

”He stood beneath the canopy, just at the edge where the dirt path meets the grassy field. His boots looked like powdered donuts, dusted by a thousand roads. The hat on his head cast a shadow that didn’t fit his face anymore. He held a briefcase that had once carried secrets. Seeing the house all lit up had triggered doubt that he’d been intentionally keeping at bay. Someone was still waiting, or at least forgetting to stop hoping.”

Read Abby’s full piece here and please consider subscribing to her newsletter!

Based on how people have been engaging with these prompts (“My first attempt at fiction in months”, “Wow. This really gave me inspiration… to the writing table we go!”) I’m going to keep posting them monthly, and have enabled payments on my Substack account for anyone who wants them weekly for more regular inspiration and as a way of supporting my work. I’m really happy to have welcomed my first paying subscriber this week — consider joining them and we can get a little writing community going, I’d love to help provide some inspiration for your work or help you get unstuck.

How I made a cosy cat

Another quick process sneak peek from me this week, also featuring some music I made to go with it. Have a look below!

Referral scheme

If you refer just one other person to my newsletter you can get my 60+ image phone wallpaper pack for free. Thank you to my first referrer, who has claimed their free wallpapers!

Learn how to refer my newsletter here

Other stuff

I added my hand drawn fonts pack to Gumroad this week. I use them in all my own marketing materials, video captions etc. Get 10% off with the code HXLVVFW at checkout.

I reduced my lowest Patreon tier to £1.50 (~$2) to make it easier to support me. If you’re someone who loves my work and you think it’s enough of a reward that you’re helping me to keep spending time making art, please consider a small monthly contribution. You can see a list of my current patrons here — thank you all!

That’s all my updates for now, thanks for reading and have a great weekend!

Further thoughts on AI videos

It’s getting harder to tell what’s AI with these long, relaxing YouTube music videos — my wife and I used to play a game of spotting the weird broken bits in the artwork that a human just wouldn’t ever draw intentionally, but now it’s trivial to create very tasteful and convincing work, especially the Ghibli-esque scenes or game-inspired pixel art that a lot of these videos use. I’m simultaneously impressed and horrified at how good OpenAI’s 4o model is in particular at illustrative, detailed, stylised and pleasing images and I’ve frequently been caught out on YouTube by what initially seems like human-made artwork and music.

AI lofi videos are a “passive income niche”, meaning a small number of people are making money out of them, and a larger number of people are making videos about those people to get views, causing an influx of an even larger group of people now trying to make money from it too (except close to 100% of them won’t).

If you’re trying to spot AI channels, look out for these signs:

– They post new videos every 1-3 days all in a very consistent style with unique artwork and music, at a faster pace than a person can realistically be making

– In video descriptions, they usually only credit the channel itself for music and artwork. Though I have very occasionally seen entire fictional bands, musicians and artists credited in an attempt to look more authentic, but since this is more effort, you won’t see it much — automated, low effort slop is the whole point of this scheme

– Occasionally they label themselves as ‘synthetic content’ which YouTube buries in the description anyway — but more often they don’t, I suspect because they know people care or perhaps to evade different treatment by YouTube’s algorithm

– Bonus points if you can also tell from the music, which has a certain a crunchy, fuzzy sound, even for lofi. It sounds a bit like a very compressed mp3 (remember those?). I expect this tell will be outdated before too long