Blog  Farewell 2022. Hello 2023.



Farewell 2022. Hello 2023.

By komicer, 20 Dec 2022

Farewell 2022. Hello 2023.

Before you know it, we are staring at Christmas 2022 coming right at us. Ever since the ‘end’ of the pandemic, time has been passing by really really fast. Soon, it will be 2023. At this junction of time, it is worth for us to look back at what we’ve managed to do this year.

Let’s do this one month at a time. Like 2022’s round-up, some are more of a stretch than others. But I felt that we’ve done a lot more for the year compared to 2022. If anything, there are months when there’s so many things to highlight! If we can’t squeeze them into the nice format, we’ll squeeze them in this blog post as Honorable Mentions.

What a year it was

Jan 2022

Start of the year tend to be quieter. Jan 2022 actually saw the release of Rise of Third Power. It was a game that we did key visuals and character designs for in the past. However, just recently, we did something even cooler for Stegosoft. So… let’s save the eventual R3P entry for 2023’s round up.

It’s the Lunar New Year! So to welcome the new year, we had Usanekorin draw us something gorgeous!

I hope this had brought us more huat for the year

Jan 2022 also saw the announcement of Extravaganza 2022! We were represented by Poopiepuff and CDS is proud to be a supporter of an art competition that doesn’t involve NFTs.

Feb 2022

It has been our pleasure to work with Otafest to redesign their mascots! These are the 2022 versions but we have done the ones for 2023 (and 2024) as well!

They’ve already announced the 2023 looks! This was particularly special because it featured touches from WaHa, Poopiepuff AND Usanekorin!

And of course, Happy Valentine’s! Imouri remains one of our best clients!

Mar 2023

March is another relatively quiet month. But we did do some kind of animation. This time, it was a relatively straight-forward, non-commercial animation for a wedding.

You can view all the other artworks we did for the couple here!

Apr 2022

Another quiet month. The artworks that we did for New Gen Ninja Corps were unveiled!

May 2022

Dr. Kobushi’s Labyrinthine Laboratory is formally announced with all-new key visuals by WaHa and the demo released online. Dr. Kobushi is an amazingly challenging game that is released on PC and Nintendo Switch.

Many thanks to Nadim for working with us for the various designs and the key visuals for the game. We even got to visit Tokyo Game Show later in September to help promote the game!

Jun 2022

It has been so long since GreenTeaNeko did the art assets for My Little Dictator. The artworks were mostly completed by 2014 but eight years on, after we have practically given up on it, the game was finally unleashed onto Steam!

Hope pays off! This gives us hopium that some of the other vaulted projects that we’ve worked on in the past might one day see daylight.

Jul 2022

Slava Ukraini

Enough said. That flag turned out really good.

Aug 2022

August is kinda the anniversary for the studio. In conjunction with the anniversary, we ran a CSP giveaway, sponsored by Graphixly. Three lucky commentors got free stuff!

August was also when we returned to the studio after years of WFH. It’s a flexi-working arrangement so we aren’t in ALL the time. Just twice a week. Enough to catch up on how everyone is doing. We also invested in hardware upgrades!

Sep 2022

An actual animation! This one was for vtuber, Faye. Over the year, we’ve also done a bunch of backgrounds for her but this animated opening is one of the nicest work we got to showcase for the year!

Oct 2022

This one was a fun one. We got to do a new key visual for Nissin again! Instead of an anime character, we did a more yuru-chara character to promote the Truffle-cheese UFO flavor. They did an amazing job with the PR activation package! We wished we could have gotten our hands on one of those too.

Do you know that the original concept was to go 3D? The 3D models were already completed before the decision was made to go with 2D art instead.

Another highlight of Oct 2022 that we didn’t manage to include was our participation within Artblovk’s Halloween pop-up, Party of Five. We managed to form a group of five between ourselves and other CDS affiliated artists.

An additional note to add that Usanekorin has corrected us that his character is actually a sentient water droplet rather than a slime. Oops.

Nice

Nov 2022

Not so much a WORK showcase but after years of pandemic-induced hibernation, AFA is back! The doujin artists among us finally came back to boothing! The doujin circle was even one of the featured creators within the AFA Creators’ Hub.

It was nice to be back hustling at the booth.

Dec 2022

Finally, December. It’s the time when everyone is in a holiday mood. If not overseas, at least to Sentosa?

Under CDS, we coordinated a large group of artists to work on the backgrounds of this animation. After a wait of a couple of months, the animation finally turned up on our Facebook feed!

Beyond backgrounds for a Sentosa animation, we have also started taking up more live anime portrait drawing gigs. There was the session for Club21’s Run Hany product launch back in October.

And in December, we did a session at the National Museum as part of their Family Fun programme.

Maybe we’ll do even more of such for 2023!

2022 wrap-up

As a whole, 2022 was quite a decent year for us. Things were slowly returning to normal around the world and for us as well. There’s the usual work but also… the usual play. Let’s hope that from here onwards, we can go back to the ‘upward growth trajectory’!

Much of this post (and the older ones as well) are full of embedded tweets. If Twitter falls, much of these posts are going to be so so dated. Can’t say I’m a fan of the douchebag but we sure hope he don’t burn Twitter down. Stay resilient, all your remaining survivors still in the Twitter offices!

And of course, last but not least, Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

Xmas House Mouse by our intern, Youqi

We think that after all these years of pandemic, we all could really use the holidays!