Hi everyone! Did you miss me? Well, I'm back & right now, I wanna talk about exactly when I think Nick may have started to care for Judy!
If you remember, for at least half the film, Nick had been treating Judy & her investigation as just a big joke.
But then she did something he never wouldāve expected--Ā She stood up to Zootopiaās most feared crime boss without flinching or backing down, & through the act of simply caring, she had unknowingly saved Mr. Big's daughter & thus earned his favor in return.
After hearing Mr. Big's account of what happened, Nick finally recognizes the severity of the situation-- They're dealing with something way bigger than just a simple missing mammal case. It's no longer just a "pretend investigation". It's real.
From this point on the jokes & insults stop, & he starts to take both Judy & the investigation much more seriously (e.g. convincing Manchas to open the door & locating the van on the traffic cameras in Bellwetherās office).
The actual turning point was during the scene between Judy, Nick, & Chief Bogo.Ā He learns that Judyās determination to solve the case was never about seeking praise or promotion.Ā Sheād been given an ultimatum, staking her career on solving the case, & had been set up to fail.
Nick sees himself in Judy at this moment.Ā Her dreams are about to be crushed by someone who wrote her off before even knowing her.Ā It didnāt matter how hard she worked or how much she proved herself to be capable of during her time at the academy.Ā No matter what she did, sheād never be good enough.Ā Sheād never be anything more than what the rest of society had already determined her to be.Ā Small.Ā Weak.Ā Helpless.
Itās not just the realization that Judy is much like himself--Ā Nick is now also realizing that heād been essentially treating Judy the same way the rest of the world treated him. He chose to live up to their expectations, but in doing so, became the type of person he couldn't stand, & he doesn't want that.
So he does the one thing he wishes someone else had done for him when he faced a similar challenge as a child.Ā He stands up for Judy.Ā He chooses to believe in her.
The key difference with Nick compared to everyone else in Judyās life is that he initially didnāt believe in her, just like her family.Ā But once he saw her determination, he chose to believe in her.Ā And theyād only known each other for less than 48 hours!Ā Judy's parents were with her through every stage of her life--Ā They saw how badly she wanted it & how hard she worked to get there, & they still didnāt fully believe in her.Ā Nick is the first person to choose to believe in her.Ā And heāll choose her every time!
...Now, as for the exact moment I think Nick fell for Judy? Well, I guess that's a theory for another time! Thank you for coming to my ted talk.
A gaping sinkhole called the Crypt has opened up and swallowed the heart of the land of Felcress. The slumber of the dead buried underground has been disturbed by irritable monsters, scheming alchemists, opportunistic interlopers... ...and, most recently, two unlucky outsiders endeavoring to get to the bottom of it all.
Fell Crypt is a turn-based RPG featuring magic and monsters in a weird purgatorial underworld.
In this post: uhhhh environments rambling
What did I actually work on this past month?
I set out to do a lot of environment art and generally clean up some of the art in-game mostly for the purpose of having presentable looking screenshots because I really want to get the process of "create assets to represent game on public storefronts" over with
...but like...
...i didnt really feel like it...
which is to say, I did do a lot of environment art and sprites and concepts and experimenting and whatnot, but I also got distracted and did other things. Oh well, thankfully I'm not beholden to any expectations of timeliness besides my own :P
But anyway, since I did some environment art this month, I can talk about what the process for that looks like!!
The way I've ended up laying out tilesets is to separate the floors and walls (and in this instance, more detailed architecture in the walls) of an area, so when I build the map in-engine, I can draw them to separate layers and pretty easily lay out dynamic layouts.
It's also fun to combine this varied template for laying out areas with more specific "setpiece" location art~
Because the characters have 8-directional movement, it felt like a no-brainer to have more varied perspective in the environment.
Something I learned through experimentation, though, was that for as much as I love the look of the sprites at the more dynamic 33-degree angle, with the 8-directional movement the characters would bump into walls in areas like stairwells that they were supposed to be able to smoothly traverse. So I compensated by tweaking the movement code so now the player has TECHNICALLY 16-directional smooth movement (but limited to 8 unique sprite directions because im not THAT crazy) and ALSO making templates for stairs and inclines in a ton of different directions that I can re-use...
Nothing too exciting yet, but that's the downside of making custom tilesets (and jumping around to more spoilery areas of the game.) Hopefully the process only becomes faster and faster the more I do it and the more templates I have available to re-use.
Besides that and implementing some more story cutscenes into the game, I did get distracted partially doing something really exciting which is adding controller support! Thanks to an extra kinda-bogus controller my partner and I got to pair with our steam deck's very suspect bluetooth connection I've been able to start adding in code and test playing with a controller and it feels very good and nice and like playing a video game so far waow
But that's all for this time I think. Over the next month I'm pretty much gonna keep doing more of the same, fleshing out the world through its environments, as well as connecting more of the rooms and story beats to test the progression of the story and game.
A gaping sinkhole called the Crypt has opened up and swallowed the heart of the land of Felcress.
The slumber of the dead buried underground has been disturbed by irritable monsters, scheming alchemists, opportunistic interlopers...
...and, most recently, two unlucky outsiders endeavoring to get to the bottom of it all.
Fell Crypt is a turn-based RPG featuring magic and monsters in a weird purgatorial underworld.
Time for my first ever public devlog !! I'm very scared but very excited to share more about this game with the world this year as I inch closer and closer toward its completion!
In this superlong overview post, I'm just covering how development has been going so far, what the game's sorta whole "deal" is, what the next steps are...!
As noted above, this is a turn-based RPG, currently being exclusively developed for PC in Gamemaker. I'm a first time indie dev who's been experimenting on and off for several years at this point, I feel like this game has a chance to be something pretty cool so I'm putting my weight fully behind it!!
I'm going for a sort of "saturday morning cartoon for adults" vibe with the game world and writing - trying to strike a balance between lighthearted earnest goofiness and character drama and a dash of genuine creepiness. For reference my inspirations for the game include other RPGs (Trails in the Sky, Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter, Pokemon,) 80s-90s pop media, the sword and sorcery genre...
But I'll save information about the characters and world for a later post.
To start, here's an abridged version of the development timeline so far (likely to be expanded in a future devlog as I buy myself precious time:)
November-December 2022: initial character and story concepts
2023: prototyping, first attempts at character sprites, wrote a lot of music. Figuring out the tone, aesthetics, and genre of the game. More on that in another post because the journey to get to this point is pretty funny!!
2024: slowly refining things...letting everything sort of gestate...by which i mean I didn't work on this much this year. There's a big gap in my internal devlog entries for this year, I think a lot of progress I made on it was incremental besides the thinking big picture stuff.
2025: did a little bit more experimentation and refining of the concepts, gameplay, a lot more figuring out of the art process, a lot of development with the intention of finishing a demo of the first part of the story, meanwhile the rest of the story, characters, themes, ideas, etc have been more or less solidified by this point.
Because of job and life stuff, the past half year has given me the best conditions to work on this game since 2023. Hopefully things stay more or less stable this year.
My ultimate goal would be to take a few months off work to focus on really pushing progress on this game in the latter half of the year, but we'll see how things go. Whether or not that happens, I'm hoping to have the game finished or like 95% finished by the end of this year.
Which finally brings us to now!!! 2026!
All that said, what does the game actually look like right now...?
Kind of a total mess since my focus has been on testing features and writing before implementing things into the engine! I'm embarrassed to share it, but I think people like seeing messy first drafts and behind-the-scenes of things (I know I do,) so I might as well rip off the bandage and post my wips.
A ton of time has been spent experimenting with finding the "best" way to tackle each part of the process...gamedev is a lot of moving parts. Only very recently do I feel like I've gotten a confident enough grasp on how I should be going about everything. So there's a lot to fix, revise, and finish, but I don't imagine any major roadblocks along the way...just a lot of work, especially artwork and mapmaking.
Here's an overview of some of the gameplay stuff that I've worked out while fiddling with everything else-
Battles- they're tactical, turn-based. Chosen actions are executed one after another based on speed stats (more based on Pokemon-inspired priority moves than a character-based turn order if that makes sense?) Movement is loose rather than grid-based (characters can move anywhere within a set range) so positioning can be kinda cheated to attack opponents in different types of ranges... I like the sort of haphazard chaos a looser battle system affords - ideally this game will strike a decent balance between a linear story and fun somewhat-emergent experiences in both major and minor battle encounters.
Transformation - characters can shapeshift in this game due to weird magical bullshit baked into the world! This takes the place of what would otherwise be a standard equipment system. Raw materials found in the world can be stacked onto a character's "graft slots" to adjust their body composition and thus change their stats, allow them to use new skills, and even change their form. So it's sort of a hybrid between crafting and something like FF7's materia slots? But also extremely weird and silly.
(Voila! You are now a slime guy!! I hope you wanted this!)
Traps and overworld effects - skills can be used in the overworld to interact with enemies before combat starts; traps and other effect tiles can be placed to be triggered by monsters and change the nature of encounters (or vice versa, you can wander into traps in the world.)
You can even summon friend(ly meat shield)s.
So that's about it for the overview of the game. I hope it piques and satisfies the interests of people hungry for more character-driven RPGs like me!
Some of my goals for January are-
Mapmaking for "chapter 2"
More base animations for more of the characters/monsters
Squashing a lot of little bugs
Get screenshots for steam page that don't look like absolute toilet water so I can make a pretty steam page
If you stuck around this far, thanks for reading, and I hope I'm able to share more very soon!!!
Itās been almost 10 years since I had soft launched an AU for Zootopia but Iām less of a coward than I was in 2017 about it. Have been considering properly writing and posting the fic for it even though I would still call myself a pretty bad writer. Been trying to work on the major stuff so if I lost steam, I could still give a finished story this time. Itās been nice to get into some older works (and new stuff!) to get in the mood and I think seeing my old stuff reblogged on what I was reading gave me the spark. Iāve been in a art slump for a while since my cintiq broke, my art has definitely changed a lot, but I really wanna give it a second chance!
My favorite auditory part of this scene is that before Judy launches herself into the red tube like a rat into a fast food deep fryer, Nick doesnāt say weāre gonna run of air, he says YOUāRE gonna run out of air
His own life does not matter if Judyās life is at just as much risk as his
due to the popularity of my last post, i thought iād follow it up with my SECOND favourite scene in zootopia, because i fear this scene does NOT get enough attention due to the fact itās only about 2 seconds long. Thus, it needs some more love!
i call this one, āthe adorable Wildehopps concert scene!ā but officially it is known as āGazelleās Concert/Credits Scene.ā
we open up with this beautiful shot of Nick and Judy at said concert. front row seats ofc. again, the lighting is impeccable.
i LOVE the contest in angles: we go from live footage of gazelle that is shown on the screens at a tall mammal height, straight down to the smaller fox and bunny height. it really shows just how MASSIVE this concert really is, as well as how intimate it is for them.
Judy is just ADORABLE here, sheās clearly having a good time. the camera actually focuses the slightest bit more on this interaction so we can see their expressions more clearly.
judging from her reaction, and Nickās lack of reaction, she seems to be:
a. proving to Nick that she in fact is loving it and
b. waiting for a sign of his emotional state,
which makes me wonder if the tickets were a surprise from Nick or something, because she really seems to want to outwardly show her excitement.
her smile widens and sheās clearly waiting for Nickās response.
her little bounces up and down are just so ADORABLE and ughh i love her sm.
Nick turns to look and her, slightly amused.
and HERE IT IS!
itās so clear sheās waiting for Nickās approval to confirm to her āyes Judy, it is really wonderful isnāt it? and i am having a good time, everything is okay.ā
AHHH.
and then Nickās little smile back to her is just EVERYTHING. he seems to be saying āyouāre having a good time, arenāt you?ā
i hope u liked my analysis! lmk by leaving a comment or shoot me a message id love mutuals.
unfortunately the scene is only so short and therefore, this post is only this short. :(
Judy's Z3 character arc will involve her "allowing herself to be CAUGHT".
It's pretty clear from the first two movies that Judy has been forcing Nick to chase her around. But what she doesn't seem to know yet (on a real conscious level, anyway) is whether she actually wants to be caught.
She proves in the first movie that she isn't afraid of Nick. She then goes to great lengths in the second movie to establish how much she wants their partnership. But she never slows down enough to genuinely attune with Nick or get on the same page as him emotionally. She assumes Nick's primary motivation for joining the ZPD aligns perfectly with her own pursuit of justice. (After all, what else is there?) Never once does she stop to consider that what Nick might actually be pursuing, indeed what he might value above anything else, is her.
It's clear from Jared Bush's script that Judy doesn't have a lot of romantic/sexual experience ("Judy has NO IDEA how to react to someone flirting with her"), not to mention her discomfort with nudity in the more progressive spaces of Zootopia (Marsh Market, the Naturalist Club). Additionally, her tendency to PUNCH Nick could indicate some awkwardness with physical touch. He has to physically pull her into their embrace the first time they hug, and she looks so confused the first time they hold hands, lol.
In spite of Judy's openness, she seems to have a real fear of vulnerability. She told Nick at the end of Z2 that she's afraid of "looking weak", and it's likely she doesn't have a habit of being introspective or even honest with herself about the true nature of her feelings (unresolved childhood trauma, insecurity, a desire for commitment and emotional support, attraction to Nick). In addition to fearing intimacy, Judy is afraid of examining herself too closely - hence the FLIGHT RESPONSE. Judy's always been her own worst enemy, and she demonstrates this constantly by managing to outrun herself, and therefore Nick, in every movie.
The third movie is going to involve Judy's greatest emotional journey yet, one in which she'll have to override all of her natural instincts and finally allow Nick to "catch" her. I believe Judy wants to be caught. I believe this is what will allow her to be her happiest, most actualized self. Nick definitely wants to catch her. But in order for him to succeed, Judy ultimately has to trust that Nick won't let her fall.
*****
P.S. - WATCH MY FANVID ON YOUTUBE! It's a fun, lighthearted video that aligns with how I personally interpret Judy. (Basically, she's not as smart as she thinks she is. š)
