Status Update, August 2025

Overview

• Shinmera: released docs-server

• Shinmera: released libmixed 2.4.0

• Shinmera: migrated everything to codeberg

• Shinmera: intro cutscene animatic

• Shinmera: performance improvements to libmixed

• Domolutz: animations for first blob midboss

• Karlosz: Trial/Alloy/Kandria/SBCL-NX performance improvements

Some Details

What a mess of a month, huh. Between the continued enshittification of everytihng all around us, the weather being etiher unbearably hot or cold, continued health issues, and my regular mental struggles, this sure was.... a month.

As announced in a previous post, all of my projects have been moved from GitHub to Codeberg due to Microsoft continuing its war against its own users. At this point I firmly believe that we need to cut out privately owned centralised platforms like it out of our lives actively. Codeberg is still centralised and brings with it the benefits of centralisation, but in the very least it is not a for-profit enterprise, but rather a public association. So yeah, another platform cut out from my life. After I de-googled some months ago, the only straggler remaining now is Discord. We'll see how long that one keeps breathing.

Anyway, in actual development news. There's been a bunch of work around bugfixing and performance improvements. The latter mostly driven by the currently ongoing Switch port of Kandria. We're now at a point where Kandria runs at up to 50FPS. Unfortunately it still dips down to 10FPS at times, and even if it didn't, 50FPS is not good enough yet. I need a stable 60 or I'm not going to release the game. The precision required in some of the sections is agony without a stable framerate, and I want to believe that we can get it there. I'll share some more news on that next month I think, since for now we're still not quite there.

Aside from all that work, much of which is far too detailed to really get into, I've also continued work on Weiss. A big change there is that we had the first recording session with Maddi, the voice actress we selected to play Weiss. It was really cool to do all the lines needed for Act 1 together with her, as well as a bunch of effort sounds to accentuate the movement.

Simultaneously Mikel, our composer, also delivered the first versions of the music tracks for the first act, and I excitedly put it all together in the game. It feels so, so much more real now! Unfortunately Patreon still won't let me embed videos of any kind, so.... you're going to have to bear with and click on a link to actually listen to it:

https://filebox.tymoon.eu/4B0TP06H6

In the video you can also hear the adaptive reverb in action. Depending on where you are the game will estimate the room size and adjust the reverb based on it. Large rooms get lots of reverb, small rooms don't. Helps a lot to make the voice lines especially feel like they're part of the world.

Next, since we recorded all the lines necessary for Act 1, I also drew up an animatic of the introduction cutscene. This is what plays right after the player loads into a new game and sets the general mood and narrative driving point behind the game. Again, audio is necessary to really sell this, so please click on through to the video:

https://filebox.tymoon.eu/4B2RQZTJE

Dominic also already started on turning that animatic into an actual, real animation. It's going to be real exciting to have that in-game! Most of the month though he was busy putting together all the animations necessary for the first midboss, which is a huge, erratic blob thing:

I'm a bit worried about implementing all the necessary game code to make the enemy work, but uh, I guess that's a problem for future me. Sorry!

Finally I also did a bunch of work to improve the game feel in various subtle ways, such as making the small blob enemies pop like that when they die, ensuring the camera movement is smooth, tweening the music in and out depending on game state, making Weiss look at important stuff in the game, etc etc etc.

That'll have to be about all for this update. On Monday I'm off to Japan for two weeks. I'm excited for that, but also quite anxious about it, mostly because the flight there is horrendous with a long layover in Bangkok. Once I'm back from the holiday I'll also immediately have to get ready for university to start. Oh dear. That's another thing I'm quite anxious about. I've never been a good student, and I don't expect that that'll have changed. I guess we'll see though. Hopefully I'll at least be able to make some new friends.

Aaaanyway, I'll let you know how things are going next month! And I suppose I'll share some holiday photos, too. If you know something cool to check out in Sapporo, I'd be very interested!

— Love, Shinmera ❤️