#dev blogging

Hey-o! I'm back, once again confirming I'm not dead.

It's been a bit, huh? 2020 has been... well. I don't want to go into details, but it's been a tough year for me. A lot has happened, and I haven't had the time, energy, or motivation to work on CheeryBot or ukagakas in general. CheeryBot in particular has been sitting nearly finished for ages, but I haven't been in the right headspace to finish her up.

I want to get back into ghost development, but in a more serious, sustainable way than I've done in the past. My normal patterns of progress are that I'll pick up a new project, work on it near-exclusively for a while, burn out or get bored of it, and drop it and move onto the next thing. While I'm not 100% sure I'll be able to break that cycle completely (I'm pretty sure I'm neurodivergent, and that cycle seems to be common among people with ASD/ADHD), I'd like to figure out ways to mitigate it: to keep myself from overworking myself when I'm invested and to keep myself doing something small when I'm not. If I'm able to do that, I should be able to Finish CheeryBot by her release anniversary!

Additionally, if I'm able to start working on CheeryBot or other ghosts more reliably, I'd like to start taking my Patreon more seriously. I know I'd like to get to a point where I could pay for a proper website to host my ghosts on, instead of having to host them on the current one - which I think is down again, ugh. Having at least enough patrons to support that would be perfect. And maybe I'll start posting updates weekly instead of monthly (or "monthly", as it were), to motivate myself to get something done to share? Who knows. I have a lot to think about.

Making new years resolutions feels a bit cheesy, especially since most people don't keep them, but mine are "start doing things I enjoy again" and "make more money". I hope they'll be a bit more doable this time!

I say we’re still alive but I’m a one woman team here so I have that as an excuse. 

Man, my first few drafts of the Invader ZiM game were way too ambitious. I hate that I lost a lot of the good dialogue and minigames from my first draft (the dialogue I lost after that first big crash, which I’m STILL upset about!) but I think considering I don’t have so much experience making dating sims, and the rpgmaker isnt even BUILT to make dating sims, that it’s ultimately the right decision for me to scale back the scope of the game.

I AM still working on it. God I am. I swear. I know it’s been so fucking long and I keep shooting for Feb 14 release dates and blowing past them. Work on this is slow but it’s definitely happening. I’m trying a new structure with some old surprises, and am working on wrapping up a full branch of Dib’s route right now, which means from start to finish Dib will be playable. 

I have most of it mapped (that circle halfway down the tree needs some work.) and have to make some decisions about a weird chunk of game play towards the end.

Here’s what Dib’s map looks like so far.

ZiM is still under HEAVY construction and is currently not operating properly, because I left four dialogue branches on simultaneously and the program can’t figure out which it’s supposed to run. 

I can fix that. 

I ALSO originally planned a few mini games for this sim - Miserable Manor and the one very special minigame I’m going to try to rework into the new version - so I’m hoping to revisit those again soon. 

Some map wips!