This Week in the Forest! #197

AYO! Hope y'all have been well :>!

Here's what we've been up to the past lil bit, starting with A Word from Vixel!

9/23 update:

Happy new week floofs! <3 Last week I knocked out a couple dozen bugfix todos for our upcoming Itch.io builds. Noteworthy bug-squashes include some long due Linux and Android bugs where settings like sound volume and fullscreen window were not being saved even with the setting enabled in the Options menu; and some obscure softlocks that would leave Rascal frozen in place.

This week I'm focused on code optimizations! I'm running some Unity performance tools to find inefficient code, to help make the game run smoother on hardware with limited CPU. Have a lovely week! ^^

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On my end, i've been up to a couple different thing... But I guess I'll talk about the image above.

Kinda obvious, but Dustin's Arena will be another feature of the game! Haha, we will be updating it with more levels, more mechanics, more shenanigans, at some point in the future. It was obvious, but I never shared the art for it, so there it is!

Anyways. I've recently found CANVA. I had some graphic design friends talk about this (or figma? figma-balls??) and I fucked with it before, and it didn't feel that great... But more recently I've been wanting something for mobile, and desktop.

AND YO. CANVA. FUCKIN YUM.

This has been taking my game-design-game to the next level. My writing tool, Obsidian, has been absolutely great for capturing ideas, but at the end of the day, it's still long documents. But canva has this "white board" section which is just like, a limitless board. I've been using it to present game mechanics/systems, and have a place for assets all in an easily accessible spot!

It's also been great for quickly mocking up UI and iterating them!

I'm not gonna lie, this is like, literally and figuratively a game changer xD If anyone wanted to get into game dev, making shit like this would put you ahead of the curve for sure. On the design side of things at least! Obviously documents alone don't make a game, but clear communication is so important!

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Aside from that I've been working on the last sequence animation for the past week! I think I mentioned I was done with 1 of them? I did the background for it, and imported it to aseprite, so it's ready for fluids and finalizing!

THEN I started working on the 2nd one! i had about 15 frames of it kinda done before I started this week, now I'm at 68! I mean, there's still a bit more to do in the last 10 or so, but pushing this far ahead has been awesome :>

BUT YET, I can't share the stuff since big spoiler hours.

HOWEVER. It occurred to me recently that this is kinda the last big "spoilery" thing I care about :O! So once things are a bit more bite-sized, I plan to start streaming again. Should be fun!

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Ok, that's it!

We'll see ya guys next time!