Hello everyone, happy September!

What did I do this month?

This month, I primarily focused on coding The Perfect Woman. TPW is fairly different from my other games so I had to refactor my code quite a bit for it (including basic systems such as saving and loading). I also tried to polish it quite a bit, so hopefully it feels good to play! I won't go into too much detail, since I don't want to spoil any of the experience, but I incorporated a few fun effects that are hopefully interesting to experience! 

Near the end of the month, I considered eliminating the Live2D style animations from my projects. You can read more about my decision here, but essentially I've heard that such animations are polarizing and some people find them uncanny/distracting. Eliminating the animations would also allow me to simplify my art workflow. After receiving some feedback (thank you to everyone who answered my query!) I decided to go ahead with nixing animations from my future projects, but I'll keep them for my past projects. On a positive note, this means that I'll be able to release Android builds for my games again (and possibly Web builds, if Godot ever decides to make C# HTML compatible!)

After making the decision, I spent some time redoing The Perfect Woman's assets (since they were already all animated, haha!) and used it to test out programming my games without animations. I learned how to use spritesheets for facial expression changes to reduce draw calls, and I also learned how to do frame-by-frame animations as well (for blinks and such). 

In addition, I completed a few Actala CGs and BGs. 

I also started outlining and writing scripts for two new projects! They've yet to be announced (I'll probably announce them once the scripts are complete), but you can find details about them here! I wrote ~30k words across my current writing WIPs, primarily these two projects. I decided on a title for one of them, started sketching concepts, and commissioned a logo. 

Plans for next month!

I made a summary of the projects that I currently have in progress, as well as my plans for the rest of the year. You can find it here! 

For September, I plan to focus on finishing The Perfect Woman to start with. I plan to release it on September 13th. After that, I've gotta get started working on art assets 😂 so I'll be doing a lot of backgrounds 👍 I'll be traveling during the latter half of the month, so I'll try to do some sketches that I can work on on the road! (And hopefully I'll be able to take some good reference photos!) 

Thank you to everyone who's following along, and see you next month!

Chattercap