Progress update- ponies, furries, and finite state machines (Patreon)

Question!

Y'all have thoughts on a gradual shift toward more furry-ish content? It'd be heavily pony-inspired designs, along the lines of Them's Fightin Herds rather than typical anthro furry. Personally, I'd prefer a scenario where my efforts are put into satisfying a middle ground between pony and pokemon styles of cuteness, while not stepping on the toes of any actual franchise.

There would still be ponies accessible, especially in this game, since that's an important piece of why many people have supported the project. Even if it was the worst case scenario for pony fans and I needed to remove them for IP-related reasons, I'd include a very pony-capable character creator, and the ability to share community creations/character packs. 

This angle would also people to make and share different interpretations of characters that pony fans inevitably develop different headcanons for (Fluttershy as a closet domme vs a wholesome and sweet gal, for example). Plus it'd remove any lingering concerns about intellectual property.

I haven't been slapped with any C&D requests, and am not gonna suddenly cut out the pony or anything btw. I'm just curious about what the lovely people funding this project think right now about an eventual shift like this. 

What's being worked on right now?

Made great progress with the hierarchical finite state machines I've talked about the past couple of weeks. It's a relatively simple concept to implement on paper, but it's taken some cleverness to fit it into the exact needs of the game. I could go on about the way I'm handling queued tiered transition logic (simpler than it sounds, but not that simple), which I'm personally excited about, but it's a dry topic. I'll just show you the results when done. 

Let me instead give you a sense of how progress is going overall:

Things are moving in big, unpredictable chunks right now. Some days, or even entire weeks, it's an absolute crawl. Other days, like yesterday, I take a massive step forward and crash through a bunch of coding issues (and stored-up stress). 

The pace is overall much slower than I feel comfortable with for the generous amount of support I'm getting. This is mostly thanks to an incredible amount of IRL stress. Much of it self-inflicted.

I've been trying to find a work-life balance and it's a challenge. And, while I've been needing to step away from programming more often over the past couple of months to stay sane, I'm now finding that not programming is driving me crazy. 

Work-life balance, or balancing where my energy is spent, is such a recurring pain point. I keep having to re-learn the lesson that the balance itself isn't something I can "solve". It's upkeep. Mindfully taking care of it is a basic part of life maintenance. It's there every day, baked into a thousand minor decisions that don't feel impactful in the moment. Everything from saying no to others, to personal care, to recognizing the often invisible differences between underwork and overwork, all build up to enormous results.

All this to say, I've allotted significantly more time to working on the game in my daily life now. I'm excited! I hope this'll be immediately visible in the next couple of weeks. 

That's all for now, y'all. Thank you so much for supporting this thing. I'm absolutely hyped about seeing the next steps come together and can't wait to show off what this state machine work will enable in the game.

<3