This was an interesting month for me and my fiancee! 

We spent most of this month talking to each other, and to healthcare professionals. The insights have helped our well-being more than I can describe. From better understanding how our past traumas affect our present selves and perceptions, to finding new approaches to parts of life that used to feel insurmountable, and more. Plus we've gained better access to healthcare we've been needing!

Every day seems to feel a little bit easier than the last, and the future is looking brighter and brighter.

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The talking has been really needed, and not just for our personal mental health. 

I'm transitioning from being primarily a solo dev on this game (with occasional commissioned art/assets), to being a full time, two-person team with my fiancee. That means a lot of meta-level work: communicating, setting up our environment to be able to collaborate while working, figuring out how to not step on each others' toes, and lots lots more. 

So, my new team member is focusing on things like:

That frees me up to spend my mental resources on the kinds of things I'm actually good at. 

This meta work has been our February. For March, we're excited to focus our combined power on moving this game forward.

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Ever since we started working together, our ideas and projects have been more grounded yet more exciting. But collaboration increases demands on our communication, and requires us to understand ourselves and each other well enough to be effective as a team. So far, it's going great!

We made progress on every aspect of life this month, which has helped make it easier to keep working on the game more sustainably. Somehow, without touching the game's code, this month was incredibly fruitful and productive.

Not to mention all the administrative work that we got done together with far less stress than was ever possible before. 

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All that being said, here's a recap of what we got done in this last month of February:

Also, I'm not ready to go into full details yet, but I'm too excited not to share:

And a summary of some of our next plans starting in this next month of March:

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Thanks again to everyone who has been so patient and supportive even during the phases of development that can feel stagnant at a glance. You make it possible to work on these passion projects without needing to get a separate job just to survive along the way. Given the scope of this project it wouldn't have even been feasible to be working on it for as long and often as it'd need in the first place. 

And now, except far less lonely and far more excited than before, back to the Critter Codin' Cave we go! 

Here's what I've been up to since we last talked about the game:

- Expression and reactions expanded.
- Advanced ability to swap groups of assets quickly.

This is a great thing for expressions, since there's a lot of asset swapping with the many layers of the mouth and eyes. Expressions are pretty streamlined on the tech side now! 

- Expand the UI structure.
- Improve UI and game events.

Hard to describe this one. I'm simplifying the signals being sent around the game to describe what the player is doing. The structure and code is more complex to support this, but as a result, the player can easily be simulated by the debugger... or by unicorn magic or machines in the future. 

For now though, this is driving us toward a usable expression designer, which is the first and most important (for release) part of the character creator. The character creator will start as a brain editor. The brain is harder to make manually since it's got a lot of pieces that are hard to test without tweaking the values live.

- Game "actions" design.

Big-picture, I see one final hole in the engine besides UI. It's a simple channel of information to describe events in the game. I touched on this idea above. I'm not gonna dig too deep right now since this still in the pen-and-paper phase, but... the cool things that come long-term from this is time control! Like, being able to set up automated machines on a pony, skip forward in time, and see how they're faring after hours or days. Short-term, this is an enormous help in debugging ^^;

- Make the engine more portable.

I'm also, on the side, working on the engine's portability. This engine will be used in most/all of my projects so it needs to be easy to maintain and update between games. Things like character data and UI designs might change, but under the hood everything else should be wired up to work cross-project. I'm about 90% there!

- Outsourcing help.

I'm also working on integrating my partner into helping with code tasks. Tedious things that I can't automate, don't need right away, but would help a lot if they were done. I don't want to spend my dev time on them when I could be working on bigger features, but really wish someone would do them. I'm excited about this part! Will report how it goes~

- so many bugs fixed.

Okay yep. That's it for now! I'll be posting monthly wrap-ups, which will usually describe whatever's in progress but not ready to show off yet. Whenever there's something visual or cool to show off, I'll post it as soon as it's show-offable!

My communication has been bad. I'm gonna try a new format. Two types of posts: random progress updates whenever something's ready, and monthly wrap-ups. My brain is happier with less rigid structure, but consistency is important, so this might strike the right balance.

What's the state of things?
This year was low in visible progress and lacking posts. It's because of a major life upheaval. I thought the feelings of chaos would eventually  calm down and let me work, but instead I've just become accustomed to operating within it. As 2024 ends, I'm left with feelings of satisfaction and embarrassment.

I'm very excited and satisfied with the state of the engine. It's a little daunting in size when looking at the whole thing: a lewd-focused sandbox game engine needs a lot of custom, hand-built things. But despite its growing size, I think each system (fluid dynamics, sensations, emotions, reactions, overlapping animation management, modular body parts, etc etc there are a bunch) is in a workable enough state to be impressive on its own, if it were the focal point of a game. Not only that, but my programming skill is so much better after all the effort to remove stress from my life. I'm even better at making this stuff than ever.

But here's where I'm embarrassed. I'll be blunt. I'm heavily neuro-spicy. I have had a tendency to lose perspective in ways that might seem silly to others. I've got this ridiculously powerful engine already. But I've left out a couple relatively simple pieces that it needs to actually... run a game. Thus I'm stuck just methodically trying to fill those missing holes in the engine while my audience waits with straining patience. That wouldn't have happened if I'd just built things rougher and more big-picture instead of being all meticulous about doing it piece by piece.

My work has gotten less rigidly focused over the course of this year. I'm just hopping between interconnected things. Right now it's a much-needed UI code upgrade that's helping me test and finish off the reactions code, and will also finally give me a simple UI to do everything else with.

In hindsight I would've opted for simpler systems for everything at the start, enough to run something very basic. Then released a whole little game with it. Then built the engine more. Repeat.

I regret that I didn't do it that way. Back when I started remaking this engine, I was so frustrated with how the old engine felt like it was at its limit before I even got half of my ideas into it. And I knew the reason it was so limited was because of my past mistakes. My early choices as a less-experienced programmer had led to a tangled and unstable foundation. So I tried to write this new engine the way I wished the old one had been made. I was too afraid of being limited by my new engine, and that led me to focus on too much depth first. 

In the long run, it's fine. I'll finish up the core pieces needed, and I'll show stuff off as it's ready. The depth I put in isn't wasted, but it's very inconveniently timed. Sometime in the relatively near future, I'll have the missing pieces filled in and ready to play with.

Those of my supporters who decide to keep funding this process, thank you. Those who don't want to, thanks so much for your support in the past. Genuinely. Even if this project ended up losing most of its funding, I'd finish making it, albeit much slower since I'd need other work. It's just too cool. I gotta see it through.

My next post will contain more specifics about what's being built n stuff. Thanks for hanging around throughout all of this <3

Whoops, last two posts weren't set to public. Substar makes it very easy to accidentally make posts paid-only. All posts here should be public except subscriber-only releases.

Quick update since I'm only partway through this.

To showcase how powerful and modular this thing is, I've given each eye a different reaction to the same emotional data in the following example, with 3 layers of reactions balancing with each other at once.

Observe:

It's balancing between 3 expressions- the base layer (neutral), and primary expressions to represent the 2 emotions I'm playing with. It can balance as many expressions as needed for each individual piece of the face and body. Also, when there are lots of layered emotions, it'll combine the weakest emotions into one simpler basic emotion to display. That's the hard part, done! 

I'm still debugging the latest addition: quick-swapping groups of assets using the reactions system. You can see it in action a little here with the mouth and eyebrows, but there's some more to do. 

Plus, I'm partway through a GUI to edit expressions, which'll speed things up a lot~

That's all for now! This month was weird, but the progress is actually looking pretty great. Each step in the game's todo list becomes easier than the last, thanks to all the engine work. Pretty soon I'll be able to add in a ton of expressions and body animations without touching any code. Looking forward to that ^^

Major breakthrough! Simple and complex reactions finally work! I'm inconveniently sick right now though, so gimme a minute to put together a visual presentation of it.

The system functions exactly how I thought it would, minus a few bugs. It's a modular chain of brain, body, and animation logic that can be as complex and nuanced as you need it. So, for things like blushing, it's very simplistic. For expressions, it's a monster of brain inputs and face configurations.

But... I was using stress-testing animations while making it, so it kind looks like a FNaF horror creature right now. When I'm less sick, I can swap in some real animations and show you why this system was worth the effort~

<3