To read this week's update correctly, I need you to imagine me covered in bug bites and looking like Robin William's entrance scene in the original Jumanji movie.

WILDERNESS SURVIVAL

I went camping with some Vtuber friends! It rained a LOT and I got ATE UP by bugs, but we did have a good time and ate a lot of fudge that a friend brought for everyone! :) I took plenty of pictures, but... I dropped my phone against the round outside of the fire pit and totally shattered it! Aaaa!! It landed perfectly so that the curvature of the pit dodged my phone case and directly contacted the screen... ain't that just the way. I was upset for a split second, but then I realized I hadn't bought a new phone in over a decade, so... maybe it was time for an upgrade anyway. Ended up getting a Galaxy S25 Ultra with a slick lil stylus to draw with!

I'm not sure I like the app Pixel Studio as much as Pixaki for my iPad, but it does juuuuust about everything I need. (Except I don't think you can crop an image after you create it??? Seems insane to me.) UPDATE: I found it! It's in the "Functions" sub-menu in the toolbar. Which... is still a LITTLE wild to me, lmfao.

KEYCHAIN ROMANCE

I took a lil time to completely start rewriting my Thumby dating sim, "Keychain Romance", from the ground up. I'm not putting aside Negative Reverie to work on this, but when I have a little time here or there I've been taking a stab at it. Keychain Romance was the first thing I ever tried coding from the ground up, so the code, as it was, was SUCH a mess and such a memory hog. I took a little time to set it up using an actual object-oriented model with a dedicated scene-loader and switcher and its a lot cleaner now.

For example... the original SET-UP for the game was 1000+ lines of code... now, even including a few scenes and functional sections, the whole thing is about 300. Images load faster and scenes take up less RAM too. Good stuff! I'd like to just take what I have once it's back in a playable state and upload it to itch.io so people can play with it, even though it's incomplete as far as content goes.

A WEBSITE???

I thought it might be nice to have my own website to showcase my portfolio and provide updates on my various projects, so I started coding one out. My original idea was to have it kinda look like an NES point-and-click adventure... but I wonder if the white and black UI might be a little TOO boring... I'm not sure! It's got some moveable parts tho, and I'm pretty happy with how it's working out. HTML, CSS and basic Javascript were pretty easy to deal with, too! TBH if I had more free time, I think I'd dive even further into JS and get REALLY good... but... there are other things to be done!

NEGATIVE REVERIE

I drew a couple more frames of Nerva and finished her down, left and right walk cycles. Only the upward facing one remains! After that, I might just put some placeholders in for the other characters in the first chapter and just start scripting it out.... I think I can get to that TODAY in fact!! The last few weeks have been SO BUSY and this one is no exception, what with TWO shows, so I'm hoping to REALLY REFOCUS on Negative Reverie ASAP. I have until Wednesday to basically crack into it 24/7, so I'm setting some goals for myself to really have some more material to show you next week!

YEP.

Well, I better get off here and start puttin' the pedal to the metal and getting some real game work done! I also have TWO shows this week in Philadelphia with ZAKU, so I gotta practice for those. Thanks for supporting me here and I'll see you next week!! Let's GOOOO!