2025 started fresh off the heels of when I began the development of Version 3. It kept most of the foundation of Versions 1 and 2, but overhauled a part of the foundation that led to a cascade of changes and new worldbuilding. I spent nearly the entire year focused on this project as I had a lot of mistakes to fix in the previous version and wanted to not only fix those mistakes, but go well beyond how far Version 2 got.
However, the start of the year was rough. I could still write, but struggled to draw. In the first few months of the year, I wrote extensive notes about worldbuilding ideas. I'd link them here, but I plan to only mirror the most relevant of them, and some of those might be edited for length. When writing them, I was throwing quite a bit at the wall to see what stuck. Some of that information from early in the year is outdated, but I thought it was interesting to see how far some ideas went, the ideas that stuck and what didn't.
Moving to a wiki for most of the project development was a game changer! After I re-introduced characters, teams, sectors and stories on the wiki, I found the path that updates would follow:
I introduced a character in mid-January, but I began her drawing before the end of 2024 and it took longer than I hoped it would. I didn't get to finishing a page for her since I was rethinking a lot of the worldbuilding which would affect every character and what I established for them. Her drawing was the last that I finished in the style of how I introduced characters during Version 2. The original had a background but the transparent version saves on space. I liked drawing these full-body images with their own backgrounds but I felt unable to keep drawing them after this one.
Much of the writing I did in December 2024 and January 2025 was about the worldbuilding; writing overviews for each of the sectors and teams that have been listed as I thought over how to reference certain details. I published my notes about these changes as the first update to the project this year. My notes for them were so extensive that when I posted them on the blog, I published them over 3 long posts.
The most drastic change from these is that sectors didn't go defunct just because the teams associated with them did since I realized it didn't make much sense for that to happen in this setting. In a more serious one, it could.
My next major update was reworking character pages in an updated format that was simplified so they could be expanded on as characters had more story appearances. A format to fight against my completionist tendencies to be more accepting of uncertainty, and it works well for wiki articles.
This is what I was fighting against:
"The format I used for these pages which I wrote during the development of Version 2 got very long and unwieldy to write yet I felt like I had to complete sections for everything like all of the relationships I could think of between characters that knew each other, definite details about their backstories up to the 2020's if possible, the exact circumstances behind why some of them changed teams and when. If I didn't... that didn’t feel like it was an option."
Reworking them was frustrating and difficult as I struggled over how much information to start with on their pages and how to rewrite them to focus more towards the present; how much would be enough to introduce them without the pitfalls of how I wrote the pages previously. I wasn't even fully satisfied with the rewrites, but what kept these efforts from being wasted is that they influenced how I wrote articles on the wiki.
System Time Reset... was published, and with it a retcon to change the "present" back to 2010, which led to a storyline idea of Marcia keeping her pre-reset memories past that time, but being frustrated that she's back in the limelight while she wants to rebuild the research that she lost. I published character pages this month and in March for the characters that were introduced in this story. This was the most satisfying update of the month after a lot of frustration.
That shift was to justify focusing on stories that took place during or before then, but still kept the door open for later stories as future scenarios.
I drew portraits for most of those characters, but they were kind of rough and I struggled to draw them. They were meant to be just part of full-body images, but I struggled with the poses. Several chapters of I Was a Software Developer... had several changes in them to reflect the new worldbuilding and lore changes. This part was frustrating since I wasn't moving forward with new story chapters, but it was necessary.
STR chapter 1 didn't have any illustrations and chapter 2 had one in a simpler style.
Chapter 9 of IWASD was published as the first new story chapter of the year and included an illustration. The most major update for the project during this year happened in March with the launch of the wiki! (https://operatingsuperstars.wordpress.com/2025/03/25/update-27-wiki-launch/)
The simplified format for character pages worked well enough on the Wordpress site, but the lore and worldbuilding pages got so unwieldy that I continued with a wiki and keep the Wordpress blog to announce updates.
Chapters published: IWASD Chapter 9
April was a month of extensive writing for the wiki. In its earliest stages, I adapted pages from the Wordpress blog and refined them further. I felt like I was able to start drawing more again this month, though still not at the full capacity as how I could previously.
Chapters published: IWASD Chapter 10
I started mirroring the story chapters that have been published to Neocities. The project home page I planned was still under construction, so I only published the links to the chapters and the chapter list page. The home page for the project wasn't linked, but I had something on it just for anyone who still wanted to check; that was To the Visitors that Wandered into The Construction Zone. The first articles for characters were published this month. I started with Damien, Marcia and Juna for the former two being protagonists of ongoing stories and the latter the deuteragonist of one of them:
This shaped how I introduce characters in Version 3; I still felt unable to draw full-body illustrations for each new character to introduce them how I did during Version 2. Introducing their designs through chibi "overworld sprites" with a slight top-down view was a stylistic choice to reflect the MMO-inspired aspects of Techlandia, but it is also a pragmatic way to ensure each character to be introduced will have a drawing that shows most of their outfit for their article.
I focused a lot on writing character articles for each of the characters that appeared in STR that were refinements over their earlier pages. The last articles for them were published in the middle of the month and I started publishing articles for more of the characters that appeared in IWASD. This solidified the approach I've been taking to introducing characters through their story appearances or other wiki appearances. However this means that characters I introduced in Version 2 that still haven't appeared in Version 3 don't have articles yet, and the first character I introduced this year hasn't appeared on the wiki.
Chapters published: IWASD chapter 11
Another of the largest updates was this month: Publishing the project home page on Neocities! With this update, To the Visitors... became public; an article was written for it and several character articles were published on the wiki.
By launching a homepage for the project on Neocities, I'm happy that I fulfilled how I intended to launch OS during the development of Version 1! Updates are posted on the site alongside the blog. I list the site as the homepage for the project, but continue to mirror updates on the blog since it's more readable to some readers and is optimized for mobile. Unfortunately I couldn't figure out how to make the layout of the site work well on mobile.
I planned the layout of the site to have multiple areas to show illustrations and show off characters; the sidebar for WIP images, a section for ongoing stories and an illustration from their latest chapters, and in the update log.
The current story chapters when the site launched:
During this month I also continued Same Place, Different Universe and published chapter 3. It's the first chapter in this story with full-color illustrations. A lot of that time was spent on modeling the background on one of them though and troubleshooting during the render process. 🥲
Chapters published: SPDU chapter 3
This month wrapped up the publishing of articles for characters that appeared in To the Visitors.... Steady updates still continued through the month.
Chapters published: IWASD chapter 12, SPDU chapter 4
There was still a lot of steady work on the project this month.
Chapters published: IWASD chapter 13
The 1 year anniversary of SPDU was this month, and I wrote about what I planned for it vs. what it became. I did a lot of story writing and drawing this month and published 3 story chapters!
This quote from my anniversary post of SPDU sums up my approach to writing character articles:
"This is because my approach to introducing characters changed between when I wrote chapters 2 and 3. My approach to introducing characters is consistently through their appearances in stories. In a way it's trickier; there are characters I still want to introduce but I feel that I must wait until I can feature them in a story, but it's also worked more smoothly for me when ironing out details about their characterizations that I might not have otherwise thought of."
Chapter 14 of IWASD had only one illustration, but it was an ambitious one in a different format than I usually use.
Chapters published: SPDU chapters 5 and 6, IWASD chapter 14
IWASD ended up on the backburner after chapter 14 was published since my focus shifted towards reaching a major plot point and worldbuilding details in SPDU; these details included several for the Fragments Reloaded continuity. I updated the Fragments Reloaded article with overviews for each of the listed organizations, and focused on catching up on articles for characters that appeared in earlier story chapters but didn’t have articles yet.
I accumulated a fairly large to-do list for the project that I focused on clearing out.
Chapters published: SPDU chapters 7 and 8
I didn't publish any chapters this month, but I'm working on the most ambitious one I drafted for the project! Chapter 9 of SPDU will have 4 illustrations introducing 6 characters, not dressed in their normal outfits but in elaborate punk-style outfits for their upcoming performance. All of this is while I make overworld images for their normal outfits and hairstyles, draft articles for them and the article for their team. All of that is while I draft the usual updates to the wiki after publishing each story chapter.
While I've been writing this chapter, I made several design and backstory decisions for some characters I struggled with so this chapter is also another breakthrough. During the month I shared a few WIPs. When this is all finished, this'll be the first major update for the project in the new year!
On the 27th, I had the impromptu idea to write this review. It probably kept me from finishing chapter 9 by the end of the year, and from clearing another item from my to-do list, but I don't regret that I wrote this review to look back on how far this project came since the start of the year; from a rough start to refining the ideas that stuck. Sometimes they did in ways that I didn't expect! I could move forward with characters I struggled with earlier in the year and draw more character illustrations with a lot more ease.
I wrote my early notes though when I was still focused on writing the histories of each team and sector that has been listed; I moved away from this approach after I continued development on the wiki. Since then, some details in the rollout posts have changed. One of them is that the Xerox-based team was renamed Visionaries on Paper since that better fit the ideas I had. Their previous name at best, only fit in a "management was trying way too hard to be cool with pop culture references" way 🙃
Since SPDU became a lot longer and more ambitious than I planned, I'm thinking about retconning "the present" time to its timeframe which is late 2017. I'd need to update some articles to reflect that, but the late 2010's became the latest timeframe I have a lot of ideas for in both continuities.
One of my goals this year was to finish IWASD, but SPDU became my main focus because of some plot points I wanted to get to and had more room to introduce more characters.
