Slay the Spire comics were a daily exercise of commitment for PixelPenguin

Timothy 'PixelPenguin' Eden is publishing hundreds of his comics as coffee table books

For the past two years, Timothy Eden has lived by a commitment. Every day, he would draw and publish a comic about Slay the Spire, and keep it up until the sequel came out. As of March 5, Slay the Spire 2 is now out in early access.

The artistic endeavor began as so many things do: with a breakup. Eden, who streams on YouTube and Twitch as the content creator PixelPenguin, was going through it — with his health, with his career, with his relationship.

“It was all kind of in crisis mode, and I thought, I need something to anchor myself,” Eden told Polygon over a video call this month. “One of my home base feelings for me is video games, and I hadn't started a new video game in a long time. And I thought, OK, well, I'll just, I don't know, buy myself a video game. Slay the Spire looks good.”

Released in 2019, Slay the Spire has since become totemic in the indie game world. Developer Mega Crit deftly fused deck-building turn-based combat with roguelike mechanics and fantasy flair for a game that has appealed to players of pretty much all tastes. Some friends had recommended it to Eden, even the typically non-gamer ones, and it had an “overwhelmingly positive” rating on Steam based on tens of thousands of reviews. (One of his rules: “Anything that says overwhelmingly positive on Steam, I'm going to like it.”) So he gave it a shot.

Ironically, Eden was not a fan of the game’s art style ("[it] has that idle mobile RPG feel when you look at it for the first time"), but became enamored by the atmosphere and the characters, and started drawing them every day. He was inspired by content creator Ursa Ryan, who primarily makes content for the Civilization series. In anticipation of Civilization 7’s February 2025 release, Ryan pulled a similar stunt, drawing one comic every day until the game was finally out.

Eden posted his first comic to Reddit on June 24, 2024, under the title “Day #1 of drawing badly until StS2 comes out.” (Your mileage may vary on the “badly” part. I, for one, think they’re quite charming.) At first, he thought the stunt would be a small internet curio, enjoyed by “10, 20 people.” Then it blew up. His posts on Reddit regularly garnered thousands of upvotes. He was even featured on the front page of Reddit.

“It became a bigger part of my life than I thought it would,” he said.

Eden admitted there were moments where he thought about throwing in the towel. Around the 100-day mark, he hit the first wall when he realized it wasn’t possible to get hundreds of comic ideas out of a single Slay the Spire run. But the toughest moment, he said, came when Mega Crit announced that Slay the Spire 2, initially planned for a 2025 release, would be delayed into 2026. The way games are developed these days, that could’ve meant hundreds more drawings. (Eden was clear to note, though, that he supports developers taking all the time they need to polish games, rather than rush them out unfinished.)

“It was a commitment,” he said. “It was an important commitment for me. One of these things that was going on in my life was my relationship collapsing with my partner. And it was about a mismatch between our understandings of what commitment meant. And so this whole thing was also a way […] to show myself that I could expect people who commit to something to hold themselves to a commitment because I could do it.” He thought: if he was going to commit to something meaningful, he should be able to do it to the end. “Even on the days that it feels tiring or exhausting or you have no ideas or no inspiration, it shouldn't feel like work. It should feel like checking in with your commitment.”

Mega Crit released Slay the Spire 2 in early access via Steam on March 5 — and instantly became one of the most-played and best-received games of the year. Players praised how the sequel took all of the aspects that made the first game such a standout and improved upon them, though some, including Eden, noted that it felt more like an expansion than a proper sequel.

Eden isn’t going to continue drawing or start drawing comics for another game because how do you just follow up a project like that? But “the journey had meant too much to me for it to just stay in the forgotten archives of the internet,” he said. He had to make something.

“The community event of the daily drawings was only kept material because of the fact that they were being visited and engaged with every day. That the substance of their existence was that,” Eden said. “And once it was over, I personally, even if no one bought it, I needed to turn it into something that had substance and that could stay with me.”

That’s why, even if the servers of Reddit get shut off or transformed into AI or whatever, you’ll always be able to see Eden’s art. Drawing Badly Until StS2 Comes Out (Vol 1.: 1-300) is a printed collection of his comics, and will be followed by a second volume covering the remaining comics. Ryan, his inspiration for the endeavor, wrote the foreword.

“Maybe five years from now, someone's going to be bored at home and see the thing on their coffee table and flip through it and go, ‘I remember these times in my life where it was the silly penguin posting memes,’" Eden said. “And sometimes it was emotional, and sometimes it was funny, and it was something that tied a lot of people together in a meaningful routine.”