Status Update, January 2024

Summary

• Shinmera: released random-sampling 
• Shinmera: fixed collision response behaviour via Xenocollide algorithm
• Shinmera: fixed forward kinematic physics animations
• Shinmera: implemented a spawner and general trigger system
• Shinmera: improved performance of random-state
• Shinmera: prepared a bunch of pitch documents
• |3b|: Contributed an implementation of the Tootbird algorithm

Some Details

It's a new year, wow! How's your start been? Mine has been.... mixed, to say the least. On the positive side the two issues I was fretting about a lot in the last entry got resolved in the first week of the year, so that's great. I can finally move on to all the other problems. And on the negative side I've been struggling a lot with motivation issues, which has made development hard.

The crux of my issue is something I've also had in university, which is that when I have things that I have to do, and things I want to do, I tend to clamp down on the things I want to do to make more time for what I have to do. But because what I have to do isn't motivating, I end up with no energy to do them, leading to neither getting done at all. Figuring out how to balance the things I want to do with the things I have to do has been a constant struggle. The only reason I managed to get through Kandria is that I always knew I'd have enough savings to finish it, even if I'd have to cut some corners. This isn't the case anymore for Weiss, so I'm constantly stressing out about "wasting time" and wasting a lot of time in the process.

What a dilemma!

Anyway, there has been some good progress. I've managed to create a bigger test level, make player movement quite a bit better, and have started on a basic placeholder enemy today. By the end of next month I should have a fully playable prototype ready for you as well (ooh!) For now, here's another quick gif to look at:

What's still missing is sprucing it up with particle effects and making the sword actually splash around ink that travels and paints things it hits. I'll get to that in February. But with those things in, I think it should already be quite fun to play around with.

Which is vital, as I'm also gearing up to submit for three grants in March. Two for Pro Helvetia calls (post production for Kandria to get funding for the Switch port, pre production for Weis) and one for the Migros Culture Fund. I'm not super hopeful I'll get any of those, unfortunately, but if I do it should at least provide the funding for Scymtym and Karlosz for a bit longer, whose help I could really use.

The grants all require pitch documents and a lot of extra material that I have to submit. I spent quite a bit of time this month getting all of that done, so it's now mostly prepared. I still need some better screenshots and a recorded trailer, but for that the demo first needs to look a lot better. I still got a full month to do it, but I won't say that the time pressure isn't also adding quite a bit of stress on top of everything.

I also got Kandria approved for distribution on the Humble Store and GOG, but especially GOG needs some extra finagling to integrate their GOG Galaxy API and whatnot, so I don't know if I'll get those launched in February or after.

And then I've also been dealing with some more Kandria support requests, apparently multi-monitor broke at some point along with other things... sigh. The journey never ends, does it?

Anyway, I hope you're looking forward to the prototype next month!

— Love, Shinmera ❤️

Ps: good fucking lord is Patreon's post editor shit. Not only will it lose your posts sometimes, it won't even let me paste stuff into its text box anymore, so I had to use a script to type the text back out again for me. I also still can't post videos or embed youtube, gif is the only option. Wow. Amazing tech for a multi-million dollar company. Truly astounding. The above gif is 21MB even after compressing it to shit, while the equivalent mp4 is 5MB while looking infinitely better. Anyway. TECH!