Winter 2022, looking ahead to 2023

Happy New Year, all! First off, I’d like to share my last few personal works of 2022.

I finally completed the main sprite for Erika, AKA the Phantom, for my Phantom of the Opera visual novel adaptation. I had a lot of fun researching late-Victorian mourning gowns for her costume. At one point, I was really into the idea of having a veil attached to her hat, but I nixed it for practical reasons. It would have obscured her facial expressions too much and been difficult to deal with in Live2D animation.

This piece I knocked out relatively quickly during the time I had off for the holidays. It’s inspired by a lot of the reading I’ve been doing lately about medieval women mystics and “female homoeroticism” (for lack of a better term) in the Middle Ages.

I have several goals/activities planned for 2023. Starting in late January, I’ll be taking a short course on graphic novels. I love sequential art, and I’m really interested in creating some – so this is me taking the plunge. I also, of course, am going to keep working on my visual novel project, now titled Beneath the Opera House. There are only two more basic character sprites to go before I have art for the complete cast. I’m looking into commissioning a couple of short original tracks for the soundtrack as well. A Phantom of the Opera story has to have good music!

Shop launch!

My print shop is now open! Head over to BigCartel to grab one of my hand-printed linocuts!

IMPORTANT: Unfortunately, I can only ship within the US for now, since international shipping is exorbitantly expensive… If you’re outside the US and are interested in a print, please email me (meagantrott@gmail), and we can discuss.

“Witch Heart”

Spring 2022 Update

The new full-time job on top of an ongoing freelance contract has been keeping me very busy, but I’ve still been making time for my own work! Since last update, I finished a new sprite for my VN project, made headway on another one, and tried out linocut printing for the first time since high school art class.

I’m planning to open an online shop soon for selling my lino prints. I will update here when it’s time to launch!

A very sweet guy.
The early stages of the next sprite on the list!
The first few pulls from my block titled “Witch Heart”.

Bartender Game Prototype

So I spent this past March and early April putting together a prototype/art test of sorts for a bartender game set in Weimar-era Berlin.  I absolutely love games like VA-11 Hall-A and Coffee Talk, so I wanted to try my hand at coding up my own drink mixing system.

You can download the prototype and try it out on Itch.io here: https://meagantrott.itch.io/weimar-bartender-prototype

Since releasing the basic prototype, I’ve also been experimenting with adding sprite animation.  This YouTube video is the results of my messing around with Ren’Py’s video sprites feature.