Benjamin Rivers

Some random guy assaulted me on the street today. Nothing serious — in fact it was quite bizarre. I suddenly heard, “If you like this bag of f%$&ing chips so much, you can have it!” and then he punched me in the chest… while holding a bag of chips.

I wasn’t really hurt, just in shock. I just kept walking, because by the time my brain figured out what was happening, it had already happened. It did leave me unsettled though; what if I’d been stabbed instead?

In any case, I think they were Lay’s Dill Pickle chips, based on the blurry green and yellow image in my head.

The irony of keeping this personal blog is that I feel weird about promoting my work on here! But to be brief: we finally reached the milestone of announcing the new game we’ve been working on these past couple of years:

Neo Harbor Rescue Squad lets you live the life of a rookie paramedic through frantic minigame action and a wild, funny story. Juggle waves of patients with a battle-like triage system; master dozens of treatment minigames; and win the city’s recognition from the rival fire department in this paramedic action drama!

As we finish the game (for PS5, PS4, and Steam), we’re also spending a lot of timing banging the drum to try to build awareness for it — which, as you can imagine, is no small feat in the social media landscape of 2024.

Will Neo Harbor Rescue Squad find the audience we think is out there for it? We won’t know until we launch: until then, we’ve got our work cut out for us.

You can wishlist the game on Steam and see the official site here.

Another piece from an art stream on my Twitch channel. All I started with was a random figure pose that seemed a bit boring and stiff, and then it turned into this — a goth weather girl?

I wanted to draw an elaborate gothic outfit, because I love the subculture, and they’re fun to design. And recently I’d been playing around with some brushes in Procreate to create some dry, streaky effects — what better way to convey some pouring rain?

The best part of just drawing like this is that I don’t have to think about it too much or justify any decisions; I get to see where inspiration takes me. My favourite part of this piece? The stocking pattern! I used one of Procreate’s build-in brushes to do something unexpected.