Saturday Update! (Patreon)

Hello again folks! I'm gonna skip the sprite completion bar since I didn't add any new completed sprites last week ^^;

I switched to sound design to take a break and reduce burnout, but unfortunately that wasn't really how things went down. It was a pretty rough week.

Also, I apologize if there's mistakes in this update, I didn't sleep much last night and I'm feeling pretty tired. I went to a showing for an apartment yesterday and I've been feeling nervous.

For the past couple weeks, I've actually been getting really serious about finding a bigger place to live so I can have room for an office and merch and stuff. But it's taking a lot out of me. This stuff is more stressful and difficult than I expected. Last week I lost a bidding war and now I have a new challenge with this apartment I saw yesterday.

Basically, the size and location are perfect and it's way under budget. The catch is that it's a foreclosure and it's really really run down. I'm trying to decide if I can handle hiring a contractor to fix the floors and broken window and other stuff on top of all my other work.

Plus the reality of actually moving is really stressful to me. I have trouble with change and the last couple times I moved were pretty traumatic 😩

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On top of all that, the sound design stuff I worked on last week end up being really challenging too. I thought that making gameplay loops would be easier than making songs, but I ran into a lot of troubles there too.

I started by doing more of my free youtube lessons, which taught me a lot. I learned about using a simple waveform generator to make custom sounds by changing the 'attack' 'decay' 'sustain' and 'release'.

 Those four things change the blue line on the right there. That stuff affects how quickly a sound reaches max volume, how long it takes to reach it's 'held' volume, and how it behaves when the note ends.

Learning this stuff makes me feel a lot more control over using the sounds I have access to. For instance, if there's a guitar note I like, but I want it to start more softly, I can make the 'attack' longer. It's pretty useful and opens a lot more ways for me to get creative with sounds.

So, I took what I learned and tried to make some gameplay loops for the game- something scary that ramps up with intensity.

See how that highlighted chunk there covers a quarter of the colorful lines? That's one of the loops. I made four related chunks of [ fairly simple ] music that are each 34 seconds long. It can play like one song, but it's meant to be cut into four loops.

My reasoning for this is that I wanted each loop to feel like a variant of the same music, and so that I can ultimately have one loop playing in the backgrounds, and if for instance strade does something scary, I can play a more intense version of the loop on the next bit of dialogue where it gets scary.

But there were some pretty serious problems with my plan.

The first problem is that the loops I was exporting where getting these loud click/pops at the start and end of the files. I couldn't just cut the clicks off because they were meant to be smooth loops.

It actually took like 12 hours of research and banging my head against the issue to finally reduce the problem to manageable levels. It turned out that the 'wavetable' instrument I was using was causing the clicks on the export, so I hate to rewrite the bassline for all the loops.

Then I thought it was still clicking for a couple hours when it turned out that my computer finder preview was just doing that.... it wasn't in the file.

Then, there's Renpy who also introduced faint clicks at the loop end. I researched this too and exported my music as .ogg files which is supposed to be the best file, but there still a very faint click. As of now, I can't seem to fix it. I'm not even sure if my own computer's processing or Renpy. I think it's an acceptable quality... but I'll still keep looking into it. It would be nice if it was 100% perfect.

Then there was a whole different new problem to deal with- coding the loops into Renpy. I thought there was a built in way to do what I want, but not really. The problem is that when a player is listening to loop #1 for instance, and they click next and loop #2 starts playing, they wont match up by default. Loop #2 would start at the beginning when Loop #1 was probably 10 seconds in or something. It would sound like an obvious change in music, which isn't what I'm going for.

The good news is that I do seem to have fully solved this problem. I've written some code that asks what time has elapsed in the current music, puts that time into a variable, and uses that variable to start the next loop. Since my loops are all made to resemble each other, it makes it sound seamless, like the music has ramped up naturally.

I'm really happy with this at least!

It seems that Patreon won't let me embed a video so I guess you'll just have to take my word for it for now ^^; Sorry! I think I can post a video as a separate post so I'll do that sometime in the future when maybe I have more to work with. [ honestly I think it might be too early for such a thing to be leaked too, which it definitely would since a bunch of people are reposting my patreon stuff now ]

I can at least upload a file with all four 34 second loops to the attachments so you can sort of imagine what the ramp-up might sound like :D It's really pretty similar to how Dead By Daylight handles their heartbeat songs for the killers [ for anyone who doesn't know the game, there's a music track for each killer that gets more intense the closer they are to the player ]. My version is obviously simpler and just changes when the story advances in Renpy but the general idea is similar.

I won't lie, the music might end up changing still. I've been so stressed and tired I honestly can't really tell if what I'm making is any good 😂

But at least what I'm learning and the coding/structure done is solid. I can at least say that.

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Ah, I also made some very minor sprite changes. I altered two Ren sprites to change the context of one of the endings since writing all that stuff about him last week made me rethink his behaviour. I think the sprites make more sense now. I'll keep those to myself though, they're a bit too spoilery.

I also changed the 'Strade turned around' sprite- I won't lie, it's because I was reading my manga in bed and I saw a character drawn from behind and loved how the shoulders were highlighted, so I went back and did the same for Strade:

[ the manga was Kowloon Generic Romance Issue 7, near the end, if you're curious LMAO it's really getting juicy now ]

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Oh! One last thing actually! I got my next set of business cards in the mail. It happened to be the same day as my blood donation appointment and I got so excited about them that I got winded and breathless 😂

I changed my approach and made the back picture the logo of the game, which I realize I don't think I've actually shown you guys yet. I also got a special printing technique done- instead of describing it I'll just make a gif here.

❗❗❗ I wont be putting these in orders right away! I still have 2/3 a box of the Fox picture ones to send out, so these ones probably wont be going into etsy orders for a month or two.

But that'll be the logo for YKMET:Strade :) I intend to use the same logo for all 3 eventual YKMET games, but blue for lawrence and red for ren.

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Lastly, I think I might need to take a couple days off next week. I'm sorry, I know I wasn't the most productive this week already but I can tell I'm really breaking down. I feel awful today and lately I've been making all kinds of crazy mistakes. Dropping stuff, missing turns when driving, using conditioner instead of shampoo, forgetting to make breakfast for the next day- basically I'm a mess. My brain is fried. I need some recovery time I think ^^; And some time to really think about if I'm gonna make an offer on the run down apartment or not...

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Thank you all so much for your support!! I'm sorry it wasn't the most awesome update this week ^^; and that next week's might be a little sparse too depending on how much time I take off. But I promise I really am trying my best! For now I just need to rest and recover a bit so I can get back on my feet.

PS: Please don't worry about the people leaking my patreon content. I've still been getting multiple DMs a week about it, but I really can't do anything about it. I know it's kind of unfair to you guys who are paying to see this stuff... but if you want, you can always drop your pledge and just get the content for free. I promise I don't mind, I know the economy is rough out there. I'm going to keep doing my best no matter what!