Bi-Weekly Report (#7) (Patreon)

I was off my meds for a bit and now I've been on my meds for a bit and I tell you what that's been something of an emotional rollercoaster so LET'S-A-GOOOOOOOOO

GAMEDEV

Kaz is pushing for dev on Peppermint Creams (MarkGame) on Kazzietimes days for now, so that's what I've been doing. Do you like monsters? I've implemented some things!

Most of these will be added into the next area of the game, which has been waiting multiple years to finally be worked on and set up for actual progression. It's a pretty big event, and we're excited to be back to it! The first map has undergone a significant overhaul from its initial draft, there's a bunch of silly little jumping puzzles to navigate, and the tileset's been checked over to avoid any nasty collision issues.

I also did a lot of work on the implementation of something a little more.... strange.

It's quite the spooky thing, innit? Kaz channeled some bad dream energy into this thing's design, and then after some feedback we wound up with a weird plan and notion. Upon getting him in the game, it got even weirder, and we're pretty happy with this sudden fright's unsettling implications with regards to our setting and world if you should decide to sit and listen to it.

Just be careful what else you do, lest there be consequences....

Setting up this guy's encounter was a whole affair, by the way. Turns out VX Ace doesn't allow you to alter an area's encounter tables during runtime, and you can't really set conditions for an individual entry's inclusion either, so I had to get pretty creative and actually learn some new tricks to get this to pop up the way it does. I'm pretty proud of the result!

COMMISSIONS

Not my most ambitious week.

• Vale on a bed, tempting me, personally, with her sexy sexy body. Or just the viewer in general. I guess. If I must share.

Present queues:

• Artistic Freedom: Another Vale, and a promising threesome.

• Less Freedom: Spritz's ode to a YT short film he likes a lot.

• Old junk: 10, but I'm running out of ways to avoid them. Oh no?

WRITING

Hare Moon's first chapter is done!

This is kind of it, but it feels significant. I also made a chapter cover and new logo for the project, just to really cement it as a proper "thing" (and prepare for a promotion I plan to run for this place here soon).

It's simple, but I think it does the job alright.

I need to get to writing chapter 2, but I'm tempted to run an intermission first. There's been a long, long wait for a certain contest to occur, and I've wanted to run with that concept for a bit, so maybe we'll do that first and finally knock it off my list. Two birds with one stone! It'll be a fun surprise, and probably start this week if I go for it.

ANIMATION

Rouge's second and third loops have been roughed out, and the clean-up, in-betweens and timing adjustments for the first are well on their way! I think I've decided on an alt for the first loop as well!

AND THAT ABOUT DOES IT

This one seems short, but looking back it seems that I've posted a fair bit the last couple weeks, so hopefully that all speaks for itself. Half of why I started doing these is to relay how things are going on long-term projects so I don't appear fucking dead. I suppose, if nothing else, my adherence to random whims the last week or two have helped prevent that in themselves around here. I hope.

I tend to talk about games I'm playing here, huh? Valheim. It's all Valheim. Valheim is giving me... thoughts. Game design thoughts. It's an absurdly punishing game by default, and it's really pushing me to analyze my feelings about certain popular trends in design like open worlds and corpse runs. Primarily, I keep thinking about how modern games just don't seem to respect their players' fucking time at all, though to be fair I can't blame them when people get mad any time a $60 doesn't have literally infinite potential content. Regardless, everything is grindy as shit now, be it mobile free-to-play games or more "hardcore" fodder on consoles and PC, and it's taking progression loops I used to find really satisfying and sucking the joy out of them via raw mind-numbing repetition. It kinda sucks. It's got me thinking about Orphan Wood again. Been a bit.

Until next time.