"Biweekly" Update - 7-23-2023 (Tilesets and depression) (Patreon)

Hey everyone. So, in the interest of full transparency here, I don't have much CPE stuff to talk about in this update, so it's going to be mostly personal stuff. That's not to say we don't have ANY CPE work to talk about, though, and we'll get into that after the personal stuff.

My depression has been flaring up pretty badly the past few months, and I've been really struggling to pick myself up out of it. The doctor that handles my medications apparently had too much work on her plate, so she stopped seeing me a while ago, and I haven't found a replacement doctor yet, so my medication situation.. isn't great. I'm still able to get most of my prescriptions thankfully, but my ADHD medication requires seeing a doctor in person to keep the prescription going, so I've been off that for a while now - and unfortunately, I think my antidepressant isn't really doing the trick anymore, and it hasn't been for a while. I really want to try out some new kinds, or even just a higher dosage of my current one, but I need to find a new doctor to make that happen, which.. is much harder to do when you're depressed. I'm sure any of you who have ever dealt with depression know exactly how this cyclical song and dance goes. The GOOD news, though, is that the process is in motion now; last time I saw my therapist, I talked to him about all of this, and how I've been struggling to even get help with the medication issues. He told me their office also has medication management staff on hand, so he's writing me a referral to one of those people and I'll be able to start handling medications at the same place I have therapy. With any luck, I'll have a new medicine doctor very soon, and I can get back on ADHD medication and start trying out new antidepressants to get my mental health under control again.

I know I've mentioned before that my therapist thinks I might have OCD too, and if that is true, then new medication should help a lot - right now my antidepressant is Wellbutrin, which we started with because it often helps people with depression and ADHD, but it has no impact at all on OCD, so if OCD is a thing I'm dealing with then it's currently totally unmedicated. Could certainly explain a lot.

In any case, I'm really sorry that my mental health issues keep impacting CPE so heavily. This has been a life-long issue for me, and I wish I could just work through it, but.. well, that's not how mental health works. Still, I promise that I'm doing my best to figure it out, even if my best isn't very good sometimes. I can't overstate how grateful I am that you've all stuck by us - and especially me - even when this keeps happening. I feel terrible about it every time, but I'm trying to let that guilt go and just focus on making things better for tomorrow, so I can repay all of the patience and kindness you've all shown me.

Not everything is doom and gloom, though. CPE work is still getting done, just not nearly as fast as I'd like. These past few weeks I continued working on the level designing tool - specifically, I started on one of the biggest reasons I wanted to make the tool in the first place, which is an auto-tiling system. It's been a while since I streamed any level design work, but if you've ever seen me working on one of those, you might know that tiling a single level with GMS's built-in level editor can take literal HOURS. It's always been a huge pain point for me, especially in the context of making a Metroidvania, which naturally requires a lot of areas to explore. I did some research on auto-tiling algorithms and decided to utilize bitmasking; I won't go in-depth on the technical side of things, but it's essentially a way of auto-generating numbers for specific tiles based on how it should connect to nearby tiles, while ensuring there's never any overlap. It also happens to be the system Godot uses for auto-tiling, and since I plan on moving to Godot after Crisis Point is finished, it makes a lot of sense to learn how to use them now. Anyway, the auto-tiling implementation is near finished, now it's mostly just a matter of updating our tilesets to have all of the tiles required for bitmasking; it's a total of 255 tiles, which is a lot, but thankfully the vast majority of those tiles are just combinations of existing tiles, so it won't be too hard to do - and once it's done, designing levels will be SO much quicker it's not even funny.

Aside from me, Orex is continuing work on cutscene animations, and we also have an update on Puffernutter's work situation. The company she was working with contacted her again to try and convince her to come back, and after contemplating it for a while, she decided to say yes - but with some MAJOR changes to their work contract. For starters, they're going to be using a retainer instead of per-project payments, which means she'll be getting a consistent amount of income on a consistent schedule, which will totally fix the payment issues that made her quit in the first place. Additionally, the retainer is only for 30 hours a month, which severely limits the amount of time she needs to spend on them, and should help her avoid the burnout she's been dealing with. It's less than a week of full-time work, which leaves her with WAY more free time than before, which can go towards other things - like Crisis Point! So even though she's decided to work with them again, all of the things I talked about in the last update are still true, and you can expect to see a lot more CPE work coming from Puffernutter in future updates.

I think that about does it for this update. Again, I'm sorry I don't have a better one, but at the very least I'll keep everyone up to date on how things are going with me - and I can promise that I'm doing the best I can to get my mental health under control again. I know my posting schedule has been really inconsistent lately too, with mostly updates every 3 weeks instead of every 2 weeks, and I'll be making a concerted effort to stop doing that, even when I don't have much to write about - you all deserve that, at the very least.

Thank you all for reading, and for continuing to support us, even through all of my depression and inconsistency. It means the world to us, and especially to me personally. We'll see you again in the next biweekly update.