DANG! Sorry about the wait!
I was busy going on a few trips and doing some other stuff, but now I'm back and its GAME TIME! NEGATIVE REVERIE DEVELOPMENT IS BACK ON!!!

UPDATES:

• THE INTRO - The intro cutscene is pretty much complete! It will certainly go through some reworking and retooling as development continues, but it works and it introduces the game successfully!

• GRAPHICS - I took some time to make sure all the scrolling and camera movements look good. The game is at such low resolution, that without some extra code, its easy for things to get choppy, but I think it's looking good now!

• BATTLES - Made some internal changes to how battles are done. On the technical end, the Player node is what creates battles, and it searches for a node in the location its in for a list of possible encounters. Blah blah, tech stuff.

• SMALL SCENES - There's now an encounter in the hallways to challenge the player's progress, and a few scenes where Vuota will turn to the camera and explain what the player should be doing.

• NPCs - I added NPCs! They're able to either run their own logic for walking around and speaking, OR they can be set to be directly controlled from any cutscene! That way all NPCs, whether plot relevant or not can just use one singular object class.

• QUESTS - Not really "quests" in a traditional sense, but NPCs and story events can now require you to have completed some other work or have in possession a certain item, before they'll run some of their logic. It's pretty open-ended.

• HIDDEN CHESTS AND ITEMS - Started adding chests and items to areas where you might not think to look! Big wins for anyone who checks out their environment thoroughly!

• ATTACK ITEMS - Added a class of items that can only be used in battle to cause damage or status effects to the enemy. They don't actually function yet, but they're there.

• CAMERA - The camera is now grabbed by the dialogue manager in certain situations to make it easy to script in things like wobbles and shakes. Now, instead of scripting them in code, I can just put something like "SHAKE" in the dialogue and the camera will shake.

THINGS TO DO

There are so many things to do, its ridiculous... BUT among them...

• CLIMBING - There is a section in the intro area that requires climbing... I'll need to draw new sprites for each of the characters to handle this.

• FIT BUILDING - About half of the FIT Building is complete. I need to draw and assemble the rest of it.

• BATTLE INTRO - I need to create some kind of intro animation for when a battle starts.

• ELEVATORS - I'd like to have an interesting interface for handling elevators. I'll need to design one up, draw it and code it.

WELP, THAT SURE IS A LOT

So yeah, at first I was thinking Negative Reverie might be done by the end of 2025... but now I'm honestly thinking the end of 2026 is far more likely. I really appreciate y'all coming along for the ride!!

OH AND SOME ART???

I got back into trying to improve my drawing skills the last couple weeks, so I added some of what I've been drawing into the images. Enjoy!

Also, I'll try not to let such a big gap in between updates happen again. It's time to LOCK IN!!! Peace!