October Devlog 1

Phew! I'm finally situated at the new house!

I'm sure you're confused by the collection of images with this post, so let me explain. Patreon pauses in 1 month increments, but I only needed 2 weeks to do all the moving. This meant I had 2 weeks of "free" time to do non-project work. First, I adjusted the Saunia game engine to make a runnable VIsionary one. The engine is 80% done, but there's a lot of writing to do, so no guarantees on when that will be playable. The other thing I did was begin to experiment with Saunia's visual style. I've been doing solo dev work on this game for about a year now, and I've come to realize that the process feels something like this:

Programming: Yay!

Writing: Yay!

Background/Environmental Images: Yay!

Publicity/Communication: Scary, but ok!

Character Designs: Yay!

Character Art: Constant dread!

Essentially I've come to realize that I thoroughly don't enjoy 2D character drawing. For a while, I thought it was the discomfort of needing to replicate Enro/Nera's art style while she was actively harassing me. Now that I'm (hopefully) out of those woods, I'm beginning to understand that it's just the act itself. I've already been using Blender for background and scenery work, so I've started to teach myself how to use it for character models. The first picture above is my first go at an actual character. (His name's Quackworth and he'll be in the game!) The second shows a rough mockup of what I intend to do with the models once they're done. The game will still use 2d splashes, but I'll be posing the 3d models and drawing over them with expressions and other details. I hope this sheds more light on what's been going on across this dev process. While I've been working my ass off, the most visually sharable part has been a big pain point.

I'm going to spend the rest of October working on more 3d modelling. I'm thinking Kavara will be a good place to start! Thank you all so much for coming with me on this journey. I didn't expect it to include so much self-discovery, but I'm getting happier and happier with it every day!