Bi-Weekly Report #38

Okay, listen.

These last two weeks? This shit's sucked. Every day has been something, bar the occasional day where I just collapse and don't wake up until 5 PM. I feel another one of those coming on, so here we are, doing this on a Sunday again.

It's been chaos. I was down a tablet cord for a chunk of time. Kaz is still in the hospital and I'm trying to make sure she doesn't feel forgotten up there while we wait on insurance shit. I am behind on bills and just doing my best while eating cheap as hell.

I forgot how good I am at eating cheap as hell, dawgs. I'm so good at it. It is not healthy.

So here's how this is gonna go down.

First, I'm gonna show you how I've been a good girl this week since getting back into artistic action with my resuscitated tools (thank you so very much, Bird! kisses!) It's the part most of you are gonna be here for anyway, right? "Sera, where's our shit?" I hear you. I'm on it. I'll show you.

But then we're going on a little self-indulgent adventure into the realm of how I've been coping with the maddening lack of consistent or controllable schedule or resources. That's the trade. You're gonna see me go off for a sec about my handmade delusions, and you're gonna like it.

I'm making that sound like a threat, but honestly it's fun. You probably will like it. First things first, though:

COMMISSIONS

Sometimes Sera gets work done. As a treat.

Seven days. Seven delightfully functional days. What did we get done?

Completed:

• Surprise Box x 6

• Sketch-A-Thon piece for Hobo

Dude's that's averaging like a thing a day. That's not terrible, all things considered. I'm not upset.

In Progress:

• Haunted House YCH (I am dragging so much ass. this thing is coming up on its anniversary. It needs a better time. Sundays keep being when the exhaustion wins. I don't know.)

Upcoming:

• Sketch-A-Thon x 1

• Adopt Reward for Spritz

• Surprise Box x I don't know the queue keeps being full and I keep emptying it and then it gets full again. It's a good problem to have when you're trying to keep the lights on, at least.

• Vale Trading Card

Commission Me Here | Check the Queue

Okay. We did it. We talked about the business part. Now comes the coping part.

SLIME FOREST

Homies, I have been so busy with Slime Forest. Let's go through this one piece at a time.

First off, the online boards are finally implemented to a functional extent, though there's a fair bit of quality of life polish to get on with still. These work across all score types and both implemented modes presently, so that's a huge hang-up I finally worked through in a spot of fuss and fuck-its.

And I did not misspeak. Frenzy Mode is now fully implemented alongside Endurance, with a refined and cemented ruleset that emphasizes fast fingers and extremely rapid decision-making over its alternative's more measured and slow-paced approach. It damn near feels like two different games, and that's great. And what's a new mode without a new track?

That alone sounds pretty sick, right? Wow, Sera! What a great jump in progress.

I don't think you quite registered what I said earlier, then. I said I've been coping. Honey. There's so much more.

Having the floodgates opened by just making some damn functional progress, I sat and put in some solid polish work as well. First off, I've improved the set bonus pop-up with some lovely star particles that shoot out and around and become the many colors. Oh yes.

I also learned how to export GIFs in Resolve but wound up using an online tool anyway because the result was 100 megabytes. Lordy!

I also got some feedback from LM about how he wished Rainbow Slimes gave some sort of score boost or something so they wouldn't feel to useless if they piled up on the bottom of the board. I enjoy having more layers to my scoring system and player decision-making, so I went with it; now, every Rainbow Slime popped in your chain will add to a total multiplier for the entire move, which is both satisfying and leaves room for players to figure out if they want to go for a big chain now or save up for one fat honkin' score bonus later. To top it all off, I added a variant animation to the score pop-ups to highlight this aspect!

For some extra refinement, I've also adjusted when game overs and rainbow transformations are triggered so it all feels better, and squashed a few new bugs in the process, including at least one old niche outlier. Nice!

Since the house has been quiet as all get-out anyway, I've even been extra annoying, by which I mean I've sat here replaying the same sub-second-long audio clips ad nauseum to slowly refine and implement a number of new sound effects. Multiplier went up? Has a sound cue now! Low and critical energy levels? Also have sounds now! And so do some other things! New things!

Freaky things...

See, the thing that kicked this all off actually wasn't some secret desire to make the project move. It was the desire to add something to it. Anything. And I've had something really specific on my mind lately.

Dungeon crawls.

I have a real love-hate relationship with dungeon crawlers. They tend to focus on the most hardcore of the RPG audience in terms of base difficulty, and while my wanderlust is strong, I often find them to be rather disorienting and hard to navigate.

I also tend to find a lot of color matching games to be really shallow and one-note, and look how that one's going. But I can't just ditch my present project for some lark. That'd be absurd this far into it. After all, I haven't even decided how I'm gonna properly motivate people to engage with the glorified statistics screen that is the Slime Gard-ohhhh?!?!?!

Anyway some loose threads are stitching together in my head, and the domino that started this entire dev sprint was, in fact, me prototyping navigating a first-person mage a la dungeon crawl RPGs.

It's very green.

This actually also had me in Blender making a simple low-poly model (basically five sides of a cube and a couple cross-planes inside to make the forest look thick for cheap) and doing some rough texture painting to get the trees going (though I did wind up pulling the result into Clip Studio to make look at all leafy. I was still sans tablet at the time, which did not for versatile texture painting experiences make!). On GODOT's side, I was figuring out subviewports and implementing multiple cameras to make the improvised dungeon "map" and windowed view style you see above. All in all, it left me feeling pretty fancy!

It's just extremely basic navigation and collision for now, but the hope is to make something where the girls you're working to regenerate in the game's narrative can use their newfound strength gained via puzzlework to traverse and overcome the environment around them, because that sounds like a pretty fun alternative to my original plan of just outright stealing Chao Races or something. With any luck, I can work my own philosophies regarding what makes for fun turn-based combat into something y'all will enjoy, even if it's relatively rudimentary compared to the big boys in the genre.

So yeah. One or two things done there.

AND THAT ABOUT DOES IT

The political environment in the US continues to be terrifying to me, while the online environment continues to make me wonder how long my work will even have a place to exist anymore. It's all pretty stressful, honestly, but I'm trying to keep my head down and not stop moving in spite of it all.

I miss Kaz. Hopefully we hear back from the insurance soon. We have some plans on how to reward her bravery, but first I gotta get these damn bills paid.

Thank you for your ever-patient support!

• Sera