I began the year quite terribly. At the end of December and the beginning of January, I dealt with several computer problems and was cast as the thrilling role of “Sad Sap” in the ongoing soap opera Depressions of Our Lives. It was such demanding performance that not much happened as far as gam mak goes, but I did drop a fairly respectable post to round out the end of the year.

February had a notable milestone: battles that didn’t crash! Skills that could be tested! Things I could mindlessly use in all sorts of conditions to determine whether or not they should exist in this world. I should never be allowed near humans with such an outlook.



March marked the beginning of my despotic purging of skills. To this day I find myself peeking around corners, searching for survivors, trying to contain urges to eliminate them all.

I also started becoming self-aware. I don’t dare go back to re-read all my blog posts and see how often I repeat myself.

At the end of March, I entered the Nugget Crash Course contest with Happy and psy_wombats. We made the game Adventure Ace. It was a stressful but fun experience! And a good one to have even if it meant sacrificing DS time. I briefly considered swapping battle views, but against sane judgment have stuck to my side-facing guns.



In April I shamed myself and all of my kin by lacking a witty title. Without wit, I am nothing. With wit, I am nothing. Nothing but a miserable little pile of secrets. April’s post admits to several layers of failings, but also some success. Even in April I knew I wouldn’t get very far “with a demo”, as well as an acknowledgement of ball dropping with Adventure Ace, but there’s some success sprinkled in there too! I changed up the stat adjusting, just like I’d wanted to in December. This was thanks to a budding friendship with TDS, with whom I haven’t spoken in months! Hopefully by the time of this posting I’ve fixed this.

April also marks A Long Goodbye. While noteworthy things happened in late April/early May, especially thanks to the aforementioned TDS and his help, I didn’t really talk about them!



Perhaps a saying I took too close to heart? Who knows. I had a pretty crazy summer! Lots of running around and surprising amounts of responsibility. I learned how to live in my van and cut off toxic relationships and did a whole lot of things that were not working on DS. Sure, I got some minor faffing about done, but nothing to write a blog post about. So I didn’t!

In August I was fairly optimistic about a return to fairly normal conditions, and boy was I wrong!

This almost happened in September – I even briefly talked about it – but nothing much came of it. I became cleaner, more organized, more efficient. While these are great things to be, in this month they helped me organize and clean up existing work, not create more.

And so October and November also became silent months. Although I did work on DS, I realize it’s much of the same. I tested battles. I refined skills. I drew things. How often should I echo this? There are a lot of things I’d like to show as much in-context as I can, as silly as that might seem. And yet, I still feel compelled to post about things out of some fear people might forget I’m around! Quite logical considering I’ve checked out of almost everyone’s lives more or less since April.

So what have I been up to with DS as of late?



Lots of time spent where my screen looks like this. Not nearly as much of a mess as it might look… I’ve condensed a lot of notes into beautiful formats written in a language I understand perfectly.



Other times, it looks like this. All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this endless testing. Is there even a game outside of these screens? Is this all DS is? Sometimes I wonder, until I remember that yes, I did indeed bother to make other things.



There’s some of the visual stuff I’ve done/have been doing/will forever be doing. Words that should surprise no one: this is what slows me down the most! I insist on drawing these things, and yet it takes me so long. Sometimes I wonder if I’m being stubborn about it, but then I just tell myself to draw more and look for more corners to cut.

Despite the tone of this post, I consider myself quite optimistic for the future! As of this writing, life is currently stable and in a nice, predictable schedule. This is conductive to sitting down and working after the holiday bump is out of the way! In January I’ll be returning to the costly tyrannies of higher education, with the addition of more courses than I’m used to, but I’ve built faith in my time-management skills. Hopefully that won’t blow up in my face! Ah… ha… ha…

To the untrained eye, this page might look frozen in time as updates become scarce and spaced apart, like a cruel relay race with longer and longer points between each baton pass. I am withholding manna from heaven, duping you all into waiting for a barren game-tree that can never bear fruit.

The untrained eye is more or less correct, at least about that first part! Some of you might have noticed that I fell into a deep, dark, internet-less pit that I still haven't managed to climb out of. I am stubbornly refusing to put Demon Slayer on hiatus because it is not, gosh-darned-tootin'. However I haven't sat down at a computer long enough to accomplish much in months, and there is only so much not-on-computer development one can do.

I can make no promises on when I will come out of my cryostasis, but I expect it to be fairly soon otherwise I would not be posting this blog! Perhaps the sheer act of posting this blog will force time to bend around my schedule, allowing me nothing but idyllic days of frantic pixels and furious code and fatiguing database entry.

Let's find out!

I’m entering this. DRAWING CRUNCH TIME GOGOGO LESS THAN TEN DAYS LEFT GOOGOOGOOGOO.

However before I got caught up in that, I was on a journey to cull DS’ skill list. Doing so has been quite fascinating! I’ve been spending time (probably too much, to be honest) thinking about the purpose of each skill and the underlying logic behind what they do. Which led to a very big pile of text about how I’ve been designing the skills for DS. Feel free to read it if you want to probe my innermost regions a bit, but that’s not why I am typing this up blog at all! I’m sticking it in a hide tag at the bottom because I actually have a LEGIT QUESTION I would indeed LOVE TO HEAR YOUR THOUGHTS about. But there are no pictures in this blog post so try not to let all the words rot your brain before you can think of an answer.

At the moment DS uses Melody’s sideview setting. By now I’ve mentioned that when I first started DS I wanted to learn as much as I could while making it. One of the things I want to get better at is pixel art, so I decided to go with sideview and a small amount of animated battlers. I even cut out certain poses so I’d have less to animate, since I knew that despite having a small amount of battlers it would still be a lot of work.

IT IS IN FACT A LOT OF WORK. A METRIC ASSTON.

A lot of this is because of my own inexperience – it isn’t hard for me to make a static sprite, (I am still super slow! This is also because of inexperience.) but animation is something I’m very new at. It takes me a long time to finish anything and I fumble and struggle and am generally a noob about it. This is okay! It comes with learning.

The problem here is that it’s something that gets in the way of making progress on the overall project. While my recent focus has been on scripting and un-breaking my own game/generally working on gameplay, I’ve still been chipping away at the graphical mountain. And animation just sucks up so much time that I could be focusing onto other areas. It wouldn’t be an issue if all I had to do was make sprites –I have to attend to everything else that goes into making a game, too. Surely I do not have to explain how daunting this thought is in a gam-making community.

The obvious solution is to get help from someone else. After all, even though I’m doing a lot of things on my own, DS is nowhere near 100% Penta! I use plenty of tiles and scripts and icons made by other people. I’ve considered doing this several times, but I can count the people I’d be comfortable asking on the stump of a severed hand. Even though I know at least one or two I could bug, they lead very busy lives and have their own things to work on! And to top it all off, I don’t think of myself as easy to work with. Getting someone else to do my animation work for me defeats the purpose of getting hands-on experience, too.

IN CASE YOU HADN’T GUESSED, this means I’m considering a switch to something frontview-based. I am nothing if not competent in drawing, and frontview battlers are something I just have more experience with. It’d be faster to get done and I could fuss about static images, then move on to something else. I’m confident I could even draw pictures that are prettier than my sprites, but my biggest concern about this is a loss of uh… communicating character nuances. There are a lot of silly things I can do with animations (the first boss, for example, attacks by flinging his drink at Ms.Slayer) that would be harder to communicate with static pictures. I really value the novelty of little things like a drink toss or a dancing idle animation, so it’s a tough choice for me to make!

Emmych has suggested something Phantasy-star like, which is an interesting thought and kinda-sorta doable. (Well the entire thing is doable, but could easily end up being just as much work as animated sideview.) I’m really unsure what’ll end up working best, so this is why I am typing up a lot of words asking for other people’s opinions.

OTL I WOULD APPRECIATE THE HELP IN SORTING OUT MY THOUGHTS.

Oh and if you want here is all the stuff about skill design.

Secretly DS is a menu-based micromanaging sim with a custom migraine-inducing system.

I'm doing fine! DS is quite fine. I hope no one mistakes the silence for a project circling the drain. But I've been helping a friend meet a deadline, so that has been where all my gam mak time goes. Not changing status to hiatus or anything since said deadline is in February.

If you want you can pretend the MC is using this time to refine her poetry-writing skills.

Not posted on the 31st since I will probably be busy! But I wanted to write something/give a tentative I AM DOING QUITE FINE NOW! Aside from IRL stuff, a lot of my attention has been going towards serious perspective/art study since if I’m going to be drawing for a visual novel … it would help.
Thankfully Demon Slayer won’t hit the one year mark for quite a few months! I’ll be embarrassed if I haven’t gotten past at least the first two levels after a whole year of development.

I’m most proud about having pretty much all the dicking with scripts and huge chunks of the database done. I haven’t put in all the AI patterns or battle events yet, but aside from animations/sound effects for skills, everything else in there is DONE.

I’m lacking in a lot of graphics, which I can’t say I’m happy about, but all I can really do is chip away! I’m a slow spriter and still very new to animation so each time it feels like a HUGE DEAL. OTL It gets exhausting, but I keep telling myself I’ll get faster with practice.



Speaking of sprites -- when I started working in April, I had a lot of help from Archeia! I was first learning how to sprite and not really sure where I was going with the project, since in the beginning it was mostly just a reason for sprite practice.

Over last spring break I ended up with almost everyone in some kind of basic battle pose, but the style and pretty much all the colors were Archeia’s! I’m glad she asked me change them, since the practice sprites look so terrible when compared to the ones I’m doing now. (AND ARCHEIA DOES HER STYLE WAY BETTER THAN ANYONE ELSE) Not that there’s much to compare with for now, at least until I get my act together and make more battle sprites, ah-hahaha! Even now, I still have her to thank for a lot of my own improvement. She’s always been super inspiring and helpful!

But it’s a shame this hyperactive twitching will never show up. … Unless I remake it.

There used to be a VX RTP styled chibi; it has since been lost to time!

The graphical style has shifted a lot with overworld sprites, too. Working from my own base doesn’t let me cut corners and franken anything. OTL At least until I have a big enough sprite pool. I’m still glad I did it, since it’s been easier for me to work with and pose.

And faces! The very first two were drawn by Jalen, (yup she most definitely helps with the project…even quieter than me) but she has a job and school and a LIFE, so I ended up taking care of portraits.

The basic gameplay is more or less the same. At its heart, DS has always revolved around punching demons in the face. Several of the finer details have changed due to my scripting (in)abilities. In fact, the entire flow of combat used to be different! I’d wanted battles to revolve around using certain skill combinations to perform other skills, (Pretty much exactly like this, actually!) but I only got it to work halfway so I ended up scrapping the idea and reusing all the fusion combos for learning new skills out of battle, instead of skills to be used in battle.

The first charts for fusion looked like this!

I also had a bunch of puzzle tomfoolery worked out for each dungeon, but I’ve tucked away most of those ideas for future projects. Although the game isn’t just walking your fist from point A to point B, I’m sticking to my mantra of “The stuff outside of battle should provide context/help for the upcoming fight, or relate to the overall plot”, and a lot of my ideas failed to do that, so! SNIP SNAP.

There are still a few things about gameplay I’d like to refine, if I get the time. Currently when you distribute stats it’s all evented and looks like this:

Rather ugly, I have to admit! Ideally I’d like to become fluent enough in Ruby to write my own scene and integrate it into the menu, but anything you guys play will probably have the awkward evented version for now. It gets the job done and has yet to explode everywhere on me/testers.

As for writing, I’ll let you in on a little secret… Pretty much all of the characters and setting were pre-existing ones Jalen and I decided to use for the project. The only things that have changed about them have been fleshing out details! Same for the overall plot. Even if the game itself is less than a year old, most of the writing-related shenanigans have been around since 2009. Much older in the case of specific characters! Once DS is an actual thing that can be downloaded and played by other people and not just piles of ware that emanates vapors, I’d love to talk more about it. I mean right now if I mentioned the main character’s HISTORY~, like two people have reasons to care.

I’m just gonna use this time to drop some thanks to emmych, too. She’s a fantastic source of inspiration and good at keeping me motivated!

Also the first source of FANART~, though wow I forgot to mention it. OTL It's all the way from September!

While I’m not satisfied with the amount of progress I’ve made, I’m excited about where I’m going and my resolve to get things finished. Ah-hahaha it’s exhausting to think about all the things I have to do/keep track of, but working on any project gets like that. KEEP CALM AND MAK GAM ON and whatnot.

And how...HOW DID I FORGET? Adding in an extra thanks to everyone who keeps up to date with my nonsense. I guess I'll draw some naughty pics for the subscribers they like that sort of thing right??? Okay I'm mostly kidding but you know, still tossing out a thanks!