Weekly Update - 10-30-2021 (Level editor making good progress, new animation techniques) (Patreon)

Hey everyone, just a text update today. This was a slightly weird week for me; I had a few days where I felt off and was struggling to get work done, and I think I had my first experience with a "concerta crash" - right around the time my medication started wearing off for the day I just lost all of my energy, and spent the rest of the evening feeling bummed for no discernible reason. I did some googling the day after, and it sounds like it's a fairly normal side effect of the ADHD medication. Since it's a stimulant, when it wears off it can end up making you feel pretty terrible. It's only happened the one time so far, so hopefully it won't be a regular occurence, but there are ways to counter it and I plan on talking to my doctor about it when I see her again mid-November.

With all that being said, even though the week was kinda off, it's far from all bad news! I didn't get as much done as I hoped, but I got some good work done on the level editor; programming menus is kind of a hassle, but I managed to get a foundation for the menus that I can use for most of them, allowing me to populate a list of unlimited size with objects for placement in the level editor, scroll through that menu, select what object to place, and put it in the level.

I also finished early work on the exporting process, so now when I'm done with a level I can easily save it and drop it straight into Crisis Point, and it will come out the exact same as it does in the editor. I also managed to finish implementing both room size and grid options, and fixing any of the minor bugs that have popped up. Basically, this week was more foundational stuff, and I should be able to pretty easily add in new assets to the level editor from here on. Tilesets will require a unique menu, since they're functionally different from objects, but the work I've done will be applicable to all objects in the game; collisions, enemies, triggers, and so on. It's still got a ways to go, especially to implement some of the features I want like auto-tiling, but the core feature set is looking great.

Aside from my work, Orex has finished updating all of the Warped Soldier's gameplay animations, and he's been doing some more experimentation with 3D models and rendering. He found some pixel rendering techniques online, and was able to get some surprisingly good looking assets out of it! With the golem animations from before, he simply traced over renders with pixels, which takes quite a bit of time - but the new rendering techniques he found allow him to export 3d animations directly to the ingame pixelated resolution, with basic shading and everything. They're a bit rough around the edges, naturally, but they work extremely well as a base to build animations off of, and save him a lot of time - especially with animations that have complex 3D motions. I'll try to post some examples of animations using that technique next week, but I can assure you that you can't even tell it was made using 3D models for help, once the full detail is applied.

Hopefully this next week will be less strange for me (fingers crossed, since it's also my birthday week), so I can get more stuff done. I'm really enjoying working on this editor, at least when my brain's behaving. I'm trying to make some changes in my house and work schedule to accomodate my ADHD, as well; one of the negatives of having so many people living in one house is that things can get pretty loud/active here sometimes, and since my "office" is in the main room of the house, it can unfortunately be really distracting, especially with my ADHD. I spent some money this week on setting up a nice upstairs office in our bedroom, so I have a quiet place to work when I need it. We still need a few things before it's usable, but they're in the mail and should arrive this week. Fingers crossed it'll help me out!

And that's about it for this week. Coming to terms with my mental health is a difficult process, but I'm realizing I need to start making changes in life aside from just taking medication to accommodate my mind and work with it, instead of against it. In addition to the office upstairs, I started doing intermittent fasting again (which has previously worked great for me, both in terms of weight loss and generally feeling way better), and our household has started going on almost-daily walks, to try and work on our physical health and hopefully get my heart rate under control. I've said it a million times already, but seriously, thank you all so much for giving me the time and opportunity to work on all of this! I'm so grateful to all of you for sticking with us.

As one last thing before I go: I can't promise anything yet (especially with the weirdness of the past week), but I'm seriously considering trying to stream again soon - maybe not on a schedule, but just a stream or two here and there - so keep an eye out for that if you're interested. We'll see you again next week with another update!