Last month I skipped because half of it was making fanart. Same with this month too, so this combines the two.
May and June were mainly on asset creation and decoration for Chapter 2. All parallax backgrounds are completed, all decorations are placed, the exceptions to that being sub-areas: the toxic tunnels of the mines, and the hives belonging to rock roaches. More bugs were spotted and taken care of. The autotiler was refined further. Poppin and Jupa do less weird things when squished by blocks.
* WHAT’S NEXT?
What’s left for chapter 2 is placing remaining assets, fixing the rest of oversights. Testing and applying some changes to a couple of enemies (making them harder) and the boss (to give you more opportunities to hit him).
Dialogue still needs to shortened in a few spots, and I’m sure I’ll find more problems in my own test playthroughs.
* WHY DID THIS TAKE SO LONG?
Along with taking a break to work on Tiera from May 2022 to February 2023, this chapter was when I started working on additional glove types for the gadget box and fleshing out the functionality of the pause screen and elements within it, including the minimap and equippable items, and overall changes to the design, like differences between Poppin and Jupa.
Basically I worked on a lot of stuff that isn’t directly related to Chapter 2; that’s why it’s taking so long.
* NOTES ON DEMO
My rational back then was to figure out more of the overall structure so I can make save files more consistent, but at this point I feel like its too much content on top of chapter 1 for a public demo. There are levels where I feel that’s more appropriate, but I’m deciding to work on that later, after polishing this up and starting on chapter 3.
I do make some timelines for how long stuff would take. I think I’ve gotten more realistic with estimations… but it’s not realizing Chapter 3 would be nearly 50 weeks of straight work. The demo level I mentioned, which is a side area you can explore outside the main plot, would take 16 weeks to create
.* RAMBLING
I’ve become okay with how much I’m putting into this, since it’s just something I want to exist.I don’t have a lot of huge hopes of it taking off when I look at so much other work out there, that look great to me, and yet I barely hear about them. I kinda feel like that applies to just people and life in general. I think all we can do is spend the time we have on the things we care about and leaving something behind. Some people go with a kid, and my characters are like that to me.
This post has gone on too long, I think I’ll cap that here, thanks for reading.
