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!