DANG!!! I missed last week's post and this one is coming out late??? What is happening over here at TwirlinCurtis Inc.?

I've been hellaciously busy working on things for going to California this weekend and the ZAKU show at DNA Lounge. I've never had to get on a plane with instruments and other gear before and it's kind of a pain, tbh. Still, I'm looking forward to it, though!! I'm leaving Wednesday morning suuuuper early, so my plan is to roll up at like 4 AM and then just sleep in the terminal or do some Japanese Anki reviews while I wait.

JAPANESE STUDY

Did you know the US doesn't have the JLPT in the summer? It's the only country that offers the JLPT that doesn't do one in July! How LAME! I think I'll just cram for 9 months and shoot for the N3 in December... but... I won't lie and say I'm not nervous about that idea. I BARELY passed the N5, as it is.

I do have a better system for studying now, though. I started actually using my Bunpro app for studying grammar points, which has been huge. I went in SUPER HARD on Kanji and Vocab for the last few years and didn't really study any grammar at all, but now that I'm doing some real study of it I'm finding things coming along much faster. I've also been reading a few manga at once for practice.

oops, Sleepy Princess in the Demon Castle is upside down....

I also wanna get back to playing Lunar for practice. I COULD get the collection on Switch so I could play it at work... BUT... I have the Japanese PS1 disc and it seems morally wrong to not play that one.

UPDATES FOR NEGATIVE REVERIE

I exported a new version of the demo for POW in San Francisco (ah, I just remembered I gotta pick up new business cards for it tomorrow). It's got a lot of bug fixes from the last version of the demo, but it's not too different overall.

I did get a few things added, though. Liiiiike.... new icons for letting the player know when they can speak to an npc or open a door.

I also added data portraits and information for the rest of the main cast.

Smug!

The main work I did was doing a little bit of refactoring to the system that controls characters and npcs during cutscenes. That was a multi-day project, but now it's way easier to position characters where I need them for the sake of drama.

THAT OL' GIT COMMIT

Added lots of dialogue, fixed Gisele's height, added door and talk icons, dimmed "new game" when in demo mode, fixed a wall in the showcase room, fixed Y-sorting in Riser Shaft, added a shop to the temp floor, fixed network information buttons, added data art for muscles and gisele, made fade out and fade in short again, added demo mode text to shop, MIGHT have added steam deck controller icon support, fixed some typos
Added a new class called "Actor" that the player, npc and map_character class are now children of, centralized move_to_position() logic within actor.gd, added "animation overrides" so that characters can do things like walk backwards

UP NEXT

OK! It's almost time for me to go to CA for this show! Obviously, I won't be able to get a lot of work done while I'm traveling, but when I get back my schedule will be freed up almost entirely!! From then on until the summer, I'm gonna be hunkering down and working on my game (and trying to save money by not eating mcdonalds fish sandwiches ugh).

I'll be back on Sunday so.... who knows maybe I'll be able to write a Patreon post on the ride back! If not, I'll try to get one out on Sunday or Monday. I'll see ya then!! BYE BYE BYE!