Weekly Update! 1-17-2021 (Boss 3 work, voice acting, personal update) (Patreon)

Hey everybody! This week went quite a bit better than the past few. I'm still working on getting back to full force, but my mental state has been gradually improving, so I'm gonna call it a win! This next week, to give me that extra little kick I need, I intend to start up our usual Mon/Wed/Fri streams schedule again, starting at roughly 3 pm EST. Keep an eye out for those, Red might be joining and doing work on the reworked Sentry CG as well!

First off is some more work on Boss 3, implementing Orex's finished animations and adding more special effects to her attacks. You can see in the gif up above that her projectile toss attack has brand new art, instead of bursting into knives like it used to.

She also has a new special effect (and a slight recoil animation) added to her sniper shot; I want to add even more effects to this move, maybe some kind of "charge up" before the shot happens? It still feels like it's missing something, and the ingame art implementation is incomplete (which is why her arm doesn't move after shooting), but it's already more interesting than it used to be, that's for sure.

Aside from that, here's one small thing I started working on this week - the main menu gallery! For the time being, I'm going to focus on ONLY implementing the Cutscene Viewer in this main menu gallery, since the rest of the gallery functions are already available after loading your save. Naturally, I'll be focused mostly on getting the Verreda+Lucas scene viewable from this gallery, so you don't have to do a full playthrough to watch it again. Eventually, I want to make all of the game's cutscenes viewable there, but I'm not sure if other, non-H cutscenes will be available in v0.43; it's not a very high priority at the moment. 

I've also started implementing some conversations this week, after receiving voice acting from some of our cast; it's important to note, however, that one of our cast members is currently ill, and naturally they will not be recording until they've recovered. It's possible that some parts of the new conversations in v0.43 won't be voiced because of that. Please send them good vibes for a swift recovery!

Lastly, before the weekly update is done, personal stuff: feel free to skip over this if you don't care, and thank you for reading the update! The rest will just be a continuation of last week's personal update. I plan on including at least a small blurb about this every week, as a way to continue holding myself accountable for sticking to these lifestyle changes.

My attempts with exercise have been sort of right in the middle ground, this week. On the plus side, we've been drinking veggie-packed smoothies basically every single day, and sticking to our fasting schedule pretty well (fasting being something I've had good results with in the past); on the negative side, I haven't really been able to push myself much farther than when I started yet, and I've taken a few days off when my muscles are too sore, since I don't want to overdo it and end up injuring myself. Despite that, though, I HAVE been keeping up with it every day my body isn't too sore! All in all, I'm not incredibly happy with how the week went for exercise, but I'm also fully aware that it's a marathon, not a sprint; as long as I can keep it up, even if I'm not making as much progress as I want, then I will gradually improve. And until then, making any progress at all is still really something to be proud of, especially when you're as out of shape as I am.

I hope all of you are having luck with any life changes you're trying to make! Let's keep each other accountable for sticking to it, and really make 2021 a better year for ourselves. See you next update!