Happy 4/20! 420, as we know, is a funny number because it is the sum of four consecutive primes.

Did you know a new Mars Volta album came out? I had no idea til literally minutes ago, so I'm probably gonna listen to that tonight at some point.

I've been hopping back on the Japanese language study pretty hard this week too. My reading skills are OK, but my conversational skills are non-existent, so I'm considering signing up for italki and getting some private tutoring and conversation practice. I'd like to visit Japan for the first time in 2026, maybe.

Also, I took some hours to revisit the Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario Bros. The Lost Levels warpless speedruns. I can do all the techniques... just not 100% of the time. Maybe I'll stream some attempts on twitch.tv/twirlincurtis soon.

I saw the movie Possum. Great film by the writer/star of Garth Marenghi's Darkplace. It's one of those movies that give you juuuust enough clues to piece together a very concrete story, despite being told very abstractly. I could imagine some people saying it's just a guy walking around for 2 hours... and ok, sort of... but it's a guy walking around with MEANING for 2 hours. It's great. I recommend.

WEAPONS AND FIXATIONS

Recently, I've been thinking about how I don't personally like the idea of changing weapons through the course of an RPG... at least, I don't think it works for Negative Reverie. I kind of want the characters to have an "iconic" method of fighting and to not change what they use throughout the adventure. Also, I forget if I've mentioned this before, but I have a personal rule that no main character of mine can ever use a sword as a weapon, lmao. So, I've spent a little time thinking about alternatives, and you might notice in some of the images/video this week, that "Weapon" has been replaced by "Fixation". Got some cool stuff cooking there.

BATTLES

I made lots of additions and changes to the battle system this week! I think I have now adequately abstracted the process of player and enemy actions to where if I think of something super weird in the future to add, it should just slot right in... but, I guess we'll know that when I get to creating some of the later boss battles.

Items and skills that affect the party instead of the enemies now work! Also, there was a bug where the Level Up screen wouldn't display for the character in slot 1 if you killed multiple enemies at once and triggered the victory screen... fixed that.

Also, I haven't spoken about this before... but I have added mechanics for something called a Desperation Level into the battles... what IS this mysterious mechanic... how can you activate it and what does it do... and how will it affect speedruns... >:3c

ART ART ART

I'm SO STOKED that our character artist Mai (check out her website https://maizilla.com/ or bluesky @maizilla.bsky.social ) has completed THREE MORE CHARACTER DESIGNS for the VILLAINS of the game! You can see the sprite work for one of them above. Every single time Mai sends me any artwork, I pound my desk and weep; She is SO talented and professional. Between us, she told me part of how she visualizes the villains in her head is to take my descriptions of them and then imagine how they would look as a sexy Ace Attorney villain. Makes sense to me.

Also, she did some updates to Vuota's portrait! Specifically for the purposes of making her look like a sneaky stinker. >:)

That being said.... making art takes FOREVER holy frijole. I think by the end of this project, I'm going to quite literally have thousands of hours into just drawing on my iPad. It's a lot.

THINGS I'VE NOTICED ABOUT MAKING AND PROMOTING A VIDEO GAME

Negative Reverie is my first video game and I've noticed some... probably not-so-interesting-and-quite-obvious things about it.

One is that TikTok as a platform is made up of 99% incredibly nice people who are very supportive and 1% individuals who hate you for making something that doesn't cater to their exact tastes. Fair enough. Whoms't amongst us hasn't gotten a lil spicy online before. A few people on Reddit and YouTube have gone so far as to say it visually looks awful... Oh well! The composer, DonutShoes, warned me before I even started that I needed to just get over being critiqued 24/7 by strangers before I even started, hahaha. Something I respect a lot in artists who I look up to is their ability to just "be above it all" and be unfazed by stuff like that and dedicated to their vision.

Another is that on days I don't ACTIVELY POST about Negative Reverie, the wishlists go up by exactly 0 and on days I do post about it.... it increases without fail! I guess you really are the best spokesperson for your own projects that you'll ever have, haha! (Also, I did get HELLA LUCKY and the incredibly talented artist Verti reposted art of our shopkeeper and we got 100+ wishlists that day :0 )

The last thing I have noticed... is how much I enjoy the coding aspect of making a game! When I started, I would be caught saying how, to me, a game is just an excuse to draw lots of art and see anime babes on screen... but now, I kinda wish I had just hired a friend to do sprites and backgrounds so I could just code the whole time! I love getting in there and messing with the systems and structures! GDscript is so easy to just hop in with and get creating! (For those not in the know, GDscript is basically Python. The syntax and memory management are very similar.)

DAMN, HOW ABOUT THAT.

Dang, is that the longest Patreon update I've ever done? Maybe! Probably even!

Anyway, I'm gonna keep working on sprites and various art this week... and add some more functionality to those "Fixations" I mentioned earlier... >:3c

As always, thank you so much for supporting me here!! It means a lot that people are interested in my stupid little idea about a sci-fi rpg where aliens are plants and anime women dismember tech billionaires with hacksaws. :)

See you next week! <3