The bad being I had to deal with stressful irl personal shit again and that takes more of a mental toll on me than I realise. But also, in the biggest plot twist, it seems I've found someone who is willing to be my code monkey for free (well, I'm returning the favour by doing art for him).

It's been a process getting my project set up for someone else to work on it, and for him to understand my code and how everything is set out. And it's been a process for me to let my guard down and trust that someone will help me lol. I've been burned many times before by wannabe game dev dudes who start out super enthusiastic about helping me but then fizzle out when they realise how difficult it is, hence why I taught myself to program and did so much work by myself. I'm still really wary of this guy, but we'll see how it pans out.

Now that the programming side has been delegated to someone else, I'm free to do art things as much as I want. That has also been a struggle, one, because I don't trust my code monkey yet, and two, because I spent so much time staring at code, I'm back to feeling like I'm not much of an artist anymore. But I just gotta do a bit everyday and work my way back to it again

I managed to design some default farmers.

An original Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons game idea has been on the backburner of my brain for a long time, since like ~2011.

I was at university back then, studying animation and interactive media. The degree was much more animation focused than it was interactive media; we learnt a bit of game making stuff, not enough to do anything substantial, but enough to plant the seed that made me want to work on games someday (which I now know actually meant: I just want to draw characters and contribute to the story. lmao game design wtf is that)

The first iteration of my idea was as typical Bokumono as you can get, very anime inspired. I had a list of features that made up my "ideal" Bokumono: gameplay from AP, a plot that extends the gameplay but nothing as tedious as collecting x amount of Sprites/Sunstones/musical notes; heart events; dating from ToTT, and AP's marriage system; clothes and accessories but no player customisation for some reason. I remember I wanted the player characters to have different backgrounds, like the male player grew up in town and the female player was from the city. The bachelor/ette archetypes were similar to what I have now, my favourite kinds of love interests, but some have changed drastically (I used to have a pilot and a writer bachelors).

I never thought I could make a *real* farm sim game though, so I decided on trying to make a visual novel type thing, where you had 30 days to get a date to the Starry Night festival.

Obviously the most I got done was designing characters haha. Also randomly I pictured the feMC riding around on a vespa scooter so it tickled me when PoOT did that (the male MC drove a pick up truck)

I was able to make the barest minimum of interactivity in Flash but this is the only screenshot I have of it now. Then I gave up because I didn't understand how action script worked and making games is hard. But it didn't end there! A number of years later, like 2018 or so, I returned to the idea of making a visual novel type thing again, in Unity this time.

I used some of the same characters, and the premise was the same, getting a date to whatever festival at the end of 30 days, but the focus was more on navigating the different communication styles of the bachelors. I did get the dialogue system to work and I had a lot planned out in terms of gameplay structure. Even though I tried to play it smart, playing to my strengths and limiting the amount of dateable characters, making a visual novel was still harder than I thought so I eventually gave up on this idea too.