Hello! It’s been a few months since I… wait. Over half a year?! You’re probably wondering: where have I been and why haven’t I been posting on tumblr? I don’t have a lot of posts here, but I said I would post here more! So… what happened?
Honestly, I can’t say for sure: I don’t have much of a reason for not posting here, at least for my art. (More on that in a sec) I always post my finished drawings on instagram, it’s been a habit since I was like, 12. I kinda just, forgot that I could post things here aswell. It’s also a little discouraging not getting any traction here: but at the same time I KNOW that it’s because I don’t post and this blog could basically be considered new if it weren’t for the huge time differences. It seems silly to worry about how many people want to follow my work because as long as one person enjoys what I do: I don’t want to stop. My general goal is to inspire others with my art and game projects. I’m getting a little off track.
Now, the main reason why I haven’t posted any game updates: there’s been a couple of factors. First and foremost, I’m not exactly happy with the amount of progress I have made for Apple of My Eye. In fact, the game has turned 1 year old on the 20th!! I’m extremely happy that I’ve been sticking to this game, but despite being a year into development: I’m still at the beginning of the game: chapter 1. To be clear, this isn’t necessarily my fault because I had a lot of technical issues. A while ago, my pc decided to stop working. For some reason it started to believe that there was an Ethernet connection, aswell as refusing to connect to any wifi, as if wifi didn’t even exist. At first, I thought it was an issue with the wifi stick. Nope. Every single troubleshooting led to a dead end for a while. My pc became unusable but luckily I was able to move Apple of my Eye onto my new laptop: which I got in February! However… this new laptop was a bit odd. No matter what I tried, RPG Maker MV kept crashing every 5 minutes. I’m not exaggerating, I quite literally timed it to prove that I wasn’t going crazy. This led to slow progress and a lot of demotivation. For some strange reason, RPG Maker MZ works fine on the laptop, however I cannot port AOME into MZ unfortunately due to plugin issues. Anyways, a couple weeks ago: I finally was able to get my pc to work again! I had to reinstall windows and update the drivers. Everything is working smoothly now (fingers crossed) so I hope to be back into the swing of things soon !!
For a while, I was focusing on small features and details for the game, instead of the story. A lot of new ideas came up and I wanted to add them! However I’m a little burntout because I haven’t worked on the story; but since it’s been a while since I’ve worked on the story: it feels a little intimidating to go back to that part. Sounds kinda contradictory eh? As far as game changes go, I couldn’t really tell you what’s been added or not since my last dev log, except for two major things. I want to deeply apologize for this. Since I’m unsure, I figured “hey, yall deserve an update anyway in some shape or form!”
Before I get into the change that was pretty time consuming, I want to show off the projects new title screen! Or… at least the FIRST title screen. I was toying around with the idea of having different title screens whenever the player would boot up the game. Originally, I wanted the title screens to reflect whichever chapter the player was on! However, I couldn’t get this specific idea to work due to how RPG Makers engine works; but we found a compromise! With a script call, I could check if the player has any save data: if the player boots up the game for the first time or doesn’t have any data… they will see this title screen!
…Otherwise, if there IS save data, there will be a randomized title screen! I really wanted to change the title regardless as the last one felt outdated and rough; with this very first title I wanted to make an animation that reflects the logo! I really hope I did it justice because it took a bit. Animation can stress me out if I’m being honest, oh well! I plan on making more title screens of course, I have a couple ideas in mind but they’ll be more simple and I’ll work on them at a slower pace. I don’t think having 10 different title screens is a priority right now, it feels like something I can chip away at slowly.
The biggest game change that I can really think of, has to do with the sprites for the game! A while ago, I discovered that I could add a pixelated effect to my sprites. I thought that this looked cool for a bit, but over time I realized that it didn’t fit with the other art for the game. So, I had to remove the pixelated filter to every single sprite. This took some time and was pretty taxing on me, I actually ended up changing how the sprites worked regardless! Originally, I used a plugin where you use images to create a sequence; it basically turned a couple of images into “frames” for a sprite animation. This worked fine, but I realized that there was a better way to do this, aswell as a way to give me more variety! For the image sequences, I only had 5 unique frames per sprite animation, but if I were to turn the sprites into a video file… I could do much more with them! I was able to add a blinking effect to each and every sprite, which I think makes it look more lively and complex! For example, I’ll show you the difference with Sylver’s first sprite, vs one of her current ones! Notice the blink and how much better it looks overall without the pixel effect? As I said, it took some work to change every single sprite and it was honestly one of those things that I dreaded: I wanted to work on other aspects of the game. Luckily, since I was still early on in development it didn’t take TOO long!
I’m happy with the sprite changes, but it took me a while to figure out because my laptop kept crashing: which led to my motivation… to start dying in certain areas. Due to the constant crashes I genuinely couldn’t do much with the game. I shouldn’t feel guilty for it tanking my motivation; but as they say, you are your worst critic. I feel bad that there isn’t really much “news” after all these months, but I have a bad memory and can’t think of anything else to report on: a lot of it is due to the technical problems to be honest.
So, going forward, I’d like to make more updates and general blogs. I want to show my art here! The next couple of posts will likely be art: that way I can catch up on that. I really appreciate your support and the fact that you’re reading this far, I plan on giving better updates that include more information when possible! This blog and dev logs will continue! However I am unsure how often, originally I wanted to make some dev logs every 2 weeks, but I think giving myself a deadline might feel stressful, especially with unproductive weeks. I’ll try my best of course and I’ll write down every change and addition for every new update: but for now I’ll leave you all with this! I feel like this has been a lot of text without much to really report on. One last thing however… since last year, I’ve been into candle making as a hobby, and I’d love to show you these 3 candles I made; inspired by 3 of the main characters for Apple of my Eye! Appril’s is my favorite but they all smell REALLY good!
Thank you so much for your time and support: I can’t wait to update you all again!! I’ll see you shortly!