New year, new dev diary entry. This one is a week late again but that’s because I ended up deciding to take a bit of a break around the holidays. I will keep things short this time around as I do have a change of plans in mind for this new year which I’ll explain later on in today’s entry. Before that though, the usual progress report.

Despite all the time I spent at family gatherings and the like, I did manage to set some time aside to work but that time ended up being spent mainly on a second pass on the stair climbing animations I was previously working on – it turns out that switching your brain off while compositing almost 400 frames of animation by hand can result in some mistakes. More specifically, a bunch of the animations have Vanny start going down the stairs with the wrong foot. That makes the beginning of the animation a bit unnecessarily jerky, which I could maybe have let slide if it didn’t also require me to do extra sound design work later down the line when implementing the animation in the game for the extra half-step taken. The animation also ends up having to go on for longer than usual as Vanny needs extra movement to return smoothly back to her idle animation and that extra movement will probably also add more to my workload when it comes time to actually program the stairs. In short, I should’ve paid more attention but it’s good that I dealt with the issue now rather than having to commit to work around it later.

In somewhat brighter news, my partner PolyDoe gifted me Aseprite for Christmas. I gave it a go working on an unrelated animation and after about a dozen hours with it I can say it’s certainly much better suited for my needs and I’ll probably make an effort to switch to it going forward. It took a while to figure out some customization options like having the right click button act as an eyedropper instead of painting with the secondary colour but I’ve now set up the program to match my preferences as close as possible. There are still a few things I’m going to need to unlearn – scrolling up zooms in instead of out like I’m used to it doing in FireAlpaca – but it’s definitely an improvement and I want to really thank my girlfriend for getting it for me!

I’ve also gotten back into producing music for the game but there’s not much to discuss on that front yet. Instead, I want to talk a bit about this dev diary and my plans for it going forward. The original point of it was to motivate me to get back into actively working on the game and for the most part it has served its purpose. I do also find it pretty stimulating to be putting my thoughts on the game and my process down in writing. Unfortunately “Vanessa” is a pretty big project and progress on it is pretty incremental, which often times leaves me with very little to report on every entry. That’s why I usually end up talking more about the broader game design concepts instead but there’s only so much I can say about that before I start repeating myself. Another issue which I talked about previously is that the dev diary itself takes a bit of effort to write every other week and I feel like this is time and energy that could  be better spent on the game itself. There have been some weeks where, due to me having to deal with real life obligations and with the writing of the dev diary itself, the dev diary has ended up taking more time and effort than the progress I’ve made on the game for that week.

 With all that said, here’s what my plan going forward is – obviously neither the game nor the dev diary will be cancelled, I enjoy working on both. Instead the dev diary’s release schedule will be changed, going from every 2 weeks to every month. That way I’ll have at least 4 weeks to work on the game before writing a new entry and with the extra time to work on the game I’ll have more things to write about in the entry itself. As for the game itself, obviously I still don’t have a solid release date or anything of the sort yet but I would like to get that figured out soon. Ideally I would like to finish the game this year, but in order to figure out if that’s even possible I’ll need to put together a more detailed schedule and development plan. Hopefully by the start of next month I’ll have figured that out. For now though, this is where I’ll end today’s entry. I’m looking forward to next month when I plan to have a lot more progress to report on.

Thank you for reading this far, if you have any questions or comments I’m always happy see them and respond.