Ya boy spent 3 hours last night getting a PC Engine CD core to run on his Analogue Pocket and went to bed EXTREMELY LATE because of it.

BUT!!! He can now play insane VN/RPG games from the 90s.

Perhaps technology is good, after all....

ALSO, PC Engine CD had a resolution width of 239? I hate that it's an odd number. A PRIME odd number, no less. Insane.

Japanese practice is still going well. I can DEFINITELY tell that I'm improving and I can play most games without assistance now, even if I miss a lot of the finer points. For extra practice, I started Lunar: Silver Story on my PS1 and I'm really enjoying it. I think I'm gonna spend an hour every few days trying to work through it.

The English translation says his name is "Alex", but.... idk, I call him Ares or Alice, because I think it's fun. :)

LET'S TALK NEGATIVE REVERIE

Ok, I have a treat for you this week. In addition to my normal journal-like updates, I'm gonna start including GIT-COMMIT-MESSAGES so you can REALLY get in there and understand what I'm up to. :)

AUDIO

Holy crap, the NR composer, DonutShoes, sent me SO MUCH AUDIO this week. He's almost got the first area's music complete and sent me probably 30 sound effects. They're great. He understands the assignment 100%, baby! What a guy.

That being said, I figured it was finally time for me to start adding some audio code to the game and expanded the Audio Handler and added SFX to lots of different objects.

ART

I tried drawing over some of Maizilla's Vuota concepts to maybe make a different main portrait for her, but in the end I ended up just cleaning up my pixel trace of her original sketch after like 3 hours of work, hahaha. Enjoy my attempts:

Lookin' like an anime Let It Be.

I also added some new enemy art. Lots of the enemies in Negative Reverie are just normal ass people.

There's nothin' scarier than middle management types.

CONTROLLER COMPATIBILITY

OK, I'm pretty proud of this, but the game now changes button prompts instantly when you plug in or unplug a controller. Or, if you use the controller for one button and the keyboard for the next, it will change its prompts to reflect what you used most recently.

The keyboard inputs.

THE DEMO

OK!!! Here's the big thing right now. The Negative Reverie demo is THIS WEEK at Stage Clear III! I am a little bit stressed about it, but I think it's the good kind of stress that gives you a push to getting things done. Just in case you haven't read the last SEVERAL posts, here's the flyer:

You know it, you love it.

We're (ZAKU) showing off TWO new songs at this show too! So... I've got game work to get ready for it AND I've got musical practice to do for it.... it's a lot!

There's a whole demo scenario that I've coded into the game just for this event. It mentions the event and the artists and does a little fourth wall breaking... I think it'll be fun. :)

So true, Vuota.

MUSIC

I wrote a new Zaku song. It's pretty good, I think. I'm calling it "Extreme Heat Warning".
So...
That's something.

I was also thinking about recording a VGM EP soon. A lot of my friends have done that over the years and I think it would be cool to add guitar covers of some of my favorite tunes to the world. What songs would be on it? Well... I picked five... but they'll remain secret for now. >:)

GOODBYE, WISH ME LUCK!

OK! I gotta get off here and keep crackin' away at this game and practicing for this weekend!! There's actually EVEN MORE going on in my life right now, but it's not relevant here. Just sayin' that it's THE BUSY SEASON!

Y'all be good and take care and....

...as promised, here's the GIT NOTES!!!! Bye!!!

Also I drew this.

"Added a TON of sound effects, fixed Scaltra's skills, made several new enemy party formations, made a new color palette "Vampires", added "Compliance Staff" and "Lower Manager" enemies, deleted "Music Handler", added "Area Music" node and added it to the location template node, added Upper Riser Shaft location, added fades to the FIT Building's entrances and exits, Menu screen now can dynamically display any number of options and removes "DEBUG" when the game is in demo mode, added sfx to several nodes, increased the number of minimum steps before battle to 23, talking to sitting NPCs now sets a player to idle as it should, plugging in or using any controller should instantaneously change the button prompts on screen, added pausing music to the Audio Handler, added FIT TEMP as an interstitial FLOOR_60 to the select floor prompt, added an intro to the demo, updated Hara's and Vuota's portrait"