May '25 Newsletter

Hi guys! To replace the monthly devlogs, I've decided to start doing longer-form newsletters. Don't worry, I'll still be talking mostly about development and the game's progress, since I don't really have much else to talk about. These posts will be posted every month on or around the 15th, along with that month's build of the game. Unlike the monthly build though, newsletters will be available to all patrons to read. So, let's just get into it.

Despite it all, this month has been pretty productive, and I've gotten a lot more finished than I initially thought was possible. Inbetween depressive episodes, I suppose you could say I was taken by a fey mood in the initial weeks after deleting the discord and cutting myself off from everyone. The first thing I focused on this month was starting to actually implement the main focus area for the next zone build - the Sunken Chasm (otherwise known as the underwater chasm) Check this out.

Here's the process I go through for visually designing new areas in the game. I did something similar for the Kobold Village, but this time I went a little more in-depth with my planning and sketches. Of course, before the initial idea page (btw, don't bother reading any of the smalltext since a lot of it isn't true anymore) I had written out a sort of lore idea for the area, and how it fits into the rest of the world. Knowing that it was part of the ancient ruins of Xion, the civilization that discovered Magick which the Vexoi hail from, I knew I wanted to go for a sort of ruined city or Atlantis-ish aesthetic. However, I also wanted to both figuratively and literally tie it into the rest of the world - by including gigantic root structures, a hint that the flora above ground feeds off the risidual Magick in the ruins.

However, legendary ruins would be nothing at the hands of bandits and plunderers. Thus, something must have been guarding it all these years...

These are the Sentinels. Ancient magicked armor left behind by the inhabitants of Xion. As Vexoi aren't particularly strong, they deemed it best to create suits of armor to protect the realm as well as carry out the ruling class's will. To this day, despite Xion being nothing but a legend - and even a myth to some - these towering stone behemoths still carry out their mission to protect what's left of Xion. In a way, you could say they're inspired by my recent playthrough of Dark Souls, along with a bit of Gundam (their design reminds me a little bit of putting together a gunpla kit - especially the armored skirt around their waist.) Although, something as dynamic as a Dark Souls enemy didn't seem feasible, not until recently, at least...

Sentinels have been something I've been planning on introducing for a long time, I first had the idea for them right as I was releasing the first demo. The trouble, though, is that they're large. Much larger than any other monster or character in the game so far. Up until now, every character has been hand drawn and animated, pixel by pixel. This is why characters like Zarok and Simasix are somewhat stiff in terms of their animation. (Relying largely on key poses with very minor animation applied, mostly in the form of motion smears) For years now, I've known of a software called Spine2D, which GameMaker natively supports.

The idea behind Spine is that, similarly to a 3D model, sprites can be rigged with bones, which are then posed by the animator and interpolated between via the computer. What's more, is that these individual bones can be manipulated in the game engine itself, as well as animations smoothly interpolated between. (This means that transitionary animations between every animation, say, Idle to Walking, does not need to be manually animated and is instead handled by the software.) I've been somewhat iffy on such animation for years now, using a similar software (Spriter) very sparingly over the years. (Journey of Coins and Asylust used it) However, as far as I know Spriter isn't supported by GameMaker, or much else really, which means animations had to be exported as sprite sheets and lacked any of the real benefits of skeletal animation. (Such as literally anything I've listed so far in this paragraph - save for being easier to animate.) And besides that, Spine is paid, but I decided to finally bite the bullet and go through with buying it - not really knowing if it'd work out for Skantish.

To my surprise, it's worked out better than I could've imagined. While the Sentinel does animate noticably smoother than anything else in the game, it doesn't necessarily feel out of place. With the benefit of far easier animation, plus fluid transitions, I could program as many different states for him as I could think of. Backstepping, falling, differing attacks depending on if Naomi is above or below, even a special state where he falls over for a moment if you manage to sneak behind him and attack him off guard. His attack hitbox is also dynamically linked to the spear itself - despite it being part of his sprite. (Everything else in the game just checks a literal hit rectangle that's non dynamic)

I was somewhat afraid of using an entirely new (to me) animation workflow, but I'm glad I finally went through with it instead of procrastinating further. Hopefully, I can use it a lot more throughout the game on more enemies and characters. Speaking of which...

A burst of inspiration hit me after finalizing the Sentinel's sketch, and I went on to design a bunch of new enemies for the Sunken Chasm, with potential possibilities blown wide open. I'm unsure if all of these enemies will make it in, however I hope to include most of them. The first two areas of the game felt somewhat light in enemy variety, which could be excused by it largely being a tutorial area meant to get the player accustomed to the game, but in reality I was doing my best to stretch out enemy types as I had dreaded spriting them all. With Spine though, as well as some improvements to my workflow such as setting up Aseprite to take tablet input, I'm far more confident in my ability to pump out high quality enemy spritework.

Aja and Linia will likely be the only two new NPCs in the area. As it's an underground ruin, I reckon there won't be many people mucking about down there. Linia will be the player's first look at the Vexoi race - voted on by you guys, of course - while Aja will be a special shopkeeper from a lesser seen race of avian-like manids. I've decided that to flesh out the world, I'd include side-races that don't have their own entire area. Otherwise, the world would feel pretty barren as I only plan on including two more territories past the Vexoi's.

Besides that, I've added a couple of new items for restoring Naomi's condition (these will be useful for more than that, though.) There's also a new system allowing for entire rooms to be submerged underwater - which makes it possible for entire background layers to be drawn with the water distortion shader. Something that's been bothering me has been Naomi's character, or lack of character rather, so I sat down and spent some time writing out her personality more definitively, and spent a couple days drawing up new dialogue portraits for her to use. I'll likely add more as development progresses.

In the next month, I plan to have the level layout for the Sunken Chasm roughed out and the rest of the enemies implemented. I'd like to get as far as beginning work on the next boss fight, but we'll have to wait and see.

I've been reading quite a bit lately. This month I finished The Two Towers and started on The Return of the King, but I'm only a couple of chapters in. I also read Eat by Nagabe, which was a cute little manga, I liked the art style most of all. Though, I wish it didn't end so abruptly, I was hoping to see more. Truth be told, last month I had read a lot more, but I suppose I've been busier with other things this month. I also started listening to an audiobook comprising of Lovecraft's short stories, and finishing a similar audiobook of the Conan stories. I guess I've sort of been in a pulp-y mood, heh. Though, it is really cool to learn that Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard were friends (or at least acquaintances) who were both published in Weird Tales, I never knew that before listening to this Lovecraft audiobook. Besides all that, I've also been reading a couple self-help books to hopefully try getting over my constant depressive moods, and help me be more sociable.

Earlier this month I did a commission sale, the point of that was so that I could buy this - a Yamaha PSR-EW425. I think I mentioned in an earlier devlog that I was planning on taking up music, and I wasn't joking around. To be honest, I do have an Arturia Keystep that I had bought used way back when I first started working on Asylust, as I wanted to compose my own music for that as well. The issue is that the Keystep is only 32 keys, which isn't really possible to learn piano on. (For those who don't know, a real piano has 88 keys - plus the Keystep only has mini keys.) I spent a lot of time researching different keyboards, and it ultimately came down between the PSR and the Roland Go-Keys 3. I ended up choosing the PSR, as it was 76 keys instead of 61, and also came bundled with a music stand. (Also, to be honest I just prefer the more 'keyboard synth' sounding patches that come on the PSR rather than Roland's new sound engine - if I want realistic instruments, I'll just plug into a DAW.)

I'm still not really any further into actually composing music, unfortunately. Over the past couple of days since finishing the Sentinel, I've spent some time trying out different DAWs, but right now I think I'll just stick to FL Studio. I like the piano roll it has, which seems important for composing music from scratch. The other DAWs I tried out (Cubase and Reaper) seemed focused on recording, and while it was nice that I could directly record my Keystep into them... It was annoying I couldn't really open up a blank piano roll without a lot of trial and error, and I can also just record into FL as well, anyway. My friend who knows a thing or two about composing told me that he likes FL the best too, since its UI is pretty tity and it's very intuitive, compared to most other DAWs.

The Super Audio Cart VST seems interesting to me, especially since it was worked on by people involved with Overclocked Remixes - which I was obsessed with back when I was a kid. The price tag on it seems a little steep, but it seems like a powerful tool that I could likely compose Skantish's entire OST in - while easily keeping to the aesthetic limitations that I want to keep for the OST. It's something I definitely gotta look into more however, but I do like that they recorded their own original SNES samples rather than shrimply ripping soundfonts from games. (That's somewhat legally dubious, plus tbh you can already find those online for free.)

I am, however, much more proficient at actually playing piano than I had been a month ago. Every day I've managed to practice for at least 15 minutes, regularly spending around 30 minutes to an hour noodling around on the Yamaha. I've mostly been teaching myself out of a book (Faber Adult Piano Adventures, for those curious) but I feel like I learn better from video guidance. To be fair, Faber does have video resources, but its all on their website and not very intuitive to use on an iPad web browser. Two interactive courses in particular I was interested in were Pianote and Piano For All. I tried the Pianote trial for about a week when I first decided to start learning, on my little 32 key Arturia, but I recognized two things very quickly. For one, my keyboard was too small. But beside that, I noticed the Pianote lessons were excruciatingly slow. That wouldn't be much of a problem, however for a course that's billed as a $35+ monthly subscription, I wasn't thrilled with the pace. So, I opted for book learning after getting my Yamaha.

Recently, I've floated back around to the idea of video courses. Instead of doing Pianote again, I decided to check out Piano for All, and luckily it was only $15 on Udemy. (On the Piano for All site, I believe it's around $50.) I'm only about an hour into its lessons right now, but so far I'm liking it a lot more than Pianote. It feels a lot less infantilizing, however I can imagine the pace might be a little quick for someone completely new to piano. I'm glad I've spent the past few weeks working through a book, as having a basis for reading notation as well as a little confidence in the piano's layout has gone a long way. (The Udemy app + being able to read the PDFs all on my iPad has been great, too.) I've heard that Piano For All is great if you're looking to write your own songs, which coincidentally enough is my only reason for learning piano, so I'm hoping to see some good results from it. And if not, at least playing piano is pretty fun on its own.

Like most people, I ended up buying the Oblivion Remaster, as believe it or not I'd consider myself something of an Elder Scrolls fan. Unlike most others though, I had actually played (and dumped dozens of hundreds of hours into) Oblivion when I was a kid. My forgetfulness that the average person on Twitter is either a 14 year old, or just has the brain of one, was my detriment in this case. So, I guess I shouldn't be surprised that all the hype from Oblivion is unironically just people playing it for the first time and being enamored with it, which is great! But I can't really stomach yet another Oblivion playthrough, but with my mind on RPGs, I was reminded that I had never finished Persona 5.

With my refund, I got P5R as well as Balatro (though, I haven't played the latter yet.) To be honest? I'm having a blast with it. I don't know why, but the Persona games have always really appealed to me, SMT in general always has but I'm not good enough at RPGs for mainline SMT tbh. (I'd like to give 4 another shot sometime soon, though.) Back when I was 17, I had saved up enough money doing commissions to buy myself a PS4 specifically to play Persona 5, but I only got to Futaba's palace before getting bored and playing through the entirety of Persona 4 instead. (I also didn't understand the Social Link or Demon Fusion in P5)

In my Atlus-wrought mood, I decided to also download a fan translation for Persona 2: Innocent Sin, since I had read somewhere that the PS1 version is better than the PSP remake. I'm enjoying that a whole lot, and would urge any Persona or SMT fan to check it out. I don't know if many people recall this, but the Thirstchasm NPC conversation mechanic was practically lifted from Persona 2 (moreso inspired by the PSP version) which I was obsessed with at the time. (Also, in Tailbound: Classic, for the credits screen I drew Alex wearing a Seven Sister's uniform - which I might do again, honestly.) So, lately I've just been playing Persona 5 and Persona 2. It's fun playing two games so far apart in the same series, though of course I think I like 2's ambience and writing more, it's so much more fun to think of Personas and demons existing in the real world rather than being limited to the 'Metaverse' or behind the TV. I wish they'd bring that idea back, like how they brought back guns and demon negotiation in 5. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's weird that SMT: If..., P1, and P2 are all still canon to P3/P4/P5, since the rules for Personas and Demons seem to be completely different. And, if devil summoners just exist, you'd think they'd be more well known.

Tangentally related to Atlus, I've also been playing a little bit of Vanillaware's games lately. Mostly just Odin Sphere and Unicorn Overlord. (For those who recall, I did doodle Cornelius once, I might draw him again sometime.) I don't have a ton to say about them, though I do like their animation style, and they've been on my mind for a few weeks due to it. Very similarly to how I animated the Sentinel with Spine, Vanillaware games are notable for using 2D skeletal animation as well - ever since the director's first game Princess Crown. (Or at least, they use something close to skeletal animation.) Take this with a grain of salt, but I think for my next game after Skantish, I'd like to experiment with making a HD 2D game using skeletal animation for practically everything. Part of the reason I chose to purchase Spine2D is because not only is it compatible with Game Maker, it works with Godot, Unity, Monogame, HaxeFlixel (ugh), and tons of other frameworks. Even if I don't go 3D, I'd like to swap to using Godot after Skantish is done, since I feel like it has more potential (and is likely already far more powerful) than Game Maker... I hate to say it, but GM just feels dead, and maybe a little dated. It's great for pixel games, but anything beyond that feels like a stretch. Maybe things would be different if YoYoGames didn't give up on making the engine 3D capable. Oh well.

Anyway, that's all I've got for you this month. Thank you for your continued support, despite my near-regular depressive moods. I do feel bad that I don't have a lot of time to do finished art, but I hope you can understand that development has pretty much become my main focus. Thanks again, and I hope to see you again next month!