Development update (Jan 2025)

Happy 2025 to all!

Wanted to post a quick development update to keep everyone in the loop as to what's going on. This month has unfortunately been rather slow for development - as I'm technically a business owner, I had to complete a bunch of tax work this month rather than later on when it's due for most people. Additionally, my computer has been on life support for a bit over a year now - it would get the most random freeze and hard crashes, get stuck in boot loops, and a plethora of other issues. This month it's gotten to be the worst it's ever been to the point where I no longer felt safe opening the project file for the game, as these random crashes could cause file corruption.

Luckily, this was a problem I've been planning for - I'd been accumulating the parts to build a new computer for a good while now, and so I've spent a good portion of the month getting the last of the required parts together and assembled, then the last week has been setting up programs and getting all the data transferred.

Rather poetically, as soon as I finished transferring the files off of my main drive onto my new PC, upon plugging the drive back in to the old PC, it officially kicked the bucket. OS is corrupted in a way I've never seen before such that Windows says I can't even attempt to reinstall the operating system due to partitions having duplicate ID's that it can't tell apart.

Luckily, my auxiliary drives seem intact, and I've done a quick test build of the game project on the new computer and it did not throw any major alarms, so I think we made it by the skin of our teeth.

Today is the last day I'll be spending making sure everything in the new PC is in working order (moving auxiliary drives, updating GameMaker, confirming that the project isn't having issues after the move, etc), and then back to business as normal with development! I'm really going to be pushing to get the next beta build uploaded during February - it should be pretty doable, but I haven't actually taken a careful accounting of everything that still needs done, so don't shoot me if I'm wrong. If I recall, I've got a few more animations to wrap up with the half fullness size for the new scientist enemies Volt Jolt has been working on, plus the accompanying code to get it to work as it should (it'll require a bit of finagling to accommodate half size prey into the current prey system, but I've already written the framework). Volt Jolt has also been working on another enemy as well which will be making it into this update or very shortly after, depending on how long the rest of it takes!

Thank you all for your patience, and happy 2025!