Progress Report: February 2025

February has come and gone, and what have I accomplished? Honestly, not a whole lot. I began work on one of the major story areas but kept getting distracted with other things. I suppose that says a lot about what can happen when you work alone, though it could just me trying to avoid burn-out. The main source of frustration was this:

I've brought up on social media that on this mountain trail, there was a 'sleeping giant' whose body laid atop the mountain its on. Wanting to take advantage of the world map tileset, I wanted to try replicating it in a standard map. I wanted to incorporate part of it by having the arm be walked on. Admittedly, it's more a transition from one area to one that will appear more foggy with how high you get, but the idea is more than what I'm used to. The arm was especially a pain to work out and I'll likely be coming back to this at a later point in development. But with feedback, I was able to make this more convincing, especially with the grass that had grown over where it seemingly merged with the earth. Otherwise, I started on the next map that will take you back inside the mountain before reaching the head, but having struggles there that I hope to resolve this month...along with the last map I need.

I also did some streams where I would put together a pirate ship for the Bluebeard pirates, as well as create a dynamic sprite of pirates in a body pile, after having been mass-teleported back to their ship. It's for a scene that I wanted to include in the demo, but lacked the tilesets for it. The scene itself is mostly done, and I can start connecting scenes together for a later patch. I still need to finish the scene before it where Fuya uses her hand to get onto the train, and the fight with Krista.

Last thing to bring up actually started yesterday, but might as well mention now as it'll be integral for the battle system.

I've decided to convert the turn-based system into an Active Turn-Based system. In which characters act when it's their turn and will perform actions right away. This is done mostly to better use the input-based actions, as it's honestly unintuitive to predict when your character acts and you can't use your abilities right away without a second action. That is something I'll have to consider when working on this, as well as in-battle events and when they happen. It also has an affect on the Auto-Attack, because it constantly uses Force Action and jumps the line, so that will need fixing. But in general, this shouldn't take long to address and I can get back to the main task at hand.

Overall, I need to do better at managing my work, even if I am at least still obtaining resources to be able to make stuff happen. I could do better, even if you want to say that I did enough.