Last week was pretty good! I got to go on vacation AND got a lot of work done on Negative Reverie!!! But, before we get into that, allow me to just journal a little bit!

SHOGI

I taught myself to play Shogi last week! I got interested in it after watching a YouTube video on chess cheating, haha. I think it's kinda cool that a lot of younger people have gotten into chess over the last several years, but being a contrarian and a weeb... I decided to get real into it's Japanese cousin, instead.

I've only played a few games, at time of post... but I did win my first match against the computer! I just copied the computer's opening moves at first... and lost my bishop literally as soon as you feasibly COULD lose it, hahaha.

The site lishogi.org is pretty awesome... you can see all your past games and ask the computer what the optimal move you should have taken at any one point would have been. I like doing the tsume puzzles on there, too.

If you're so inclined... you can actually see a playback of my whole first match HERE!

MUSIC

On the band side of things, last night we finally had a full band practice and played through my most recent contribution to the group. It sounded really good! After the first or second run-through, I was already ready to move onto the next tune though, hahaha. I've spent so long playing this tune by myself that I'm already bored with it. Oop!

When it comes to listening... I've been preparing to see Ado live in August by CONSTANTLY listening to her greatest hits album. I'm so stoked about it, holy cow.

I'm also back on my classical music grind. As I'm writing this, I'm listening to Mahler's Symphony No. 5 and it's wild. It's about as bombastic and massive as you can get, IMO. Good stuff. Classical music always inspires me to take my own music practice seriously, in a way that "guitar music" doesn't quite do.

MINI GOLF

I got to play mini-golf this weekend. :)

NEGATIVE REVERIE UPDATES START HERE

ITEMS

Treasure chests (sealed cardboard boxes) can now contain money, instead of items! How about THAT.

MIRRORS

I've always heard that creating a bathroom mirror in a video game is more difficult than you'd think... and in my case... it was a puzzle to solve, sure... but it wasn't THAT bad! Maybe.... 40 lines of code.

TILEMAPS

More tilemap madness! The good thing, though... is I got SEVERAL areas done for chapter 2! I want the game to be KINDA short, so I'm trying to only put maybe 5 or 6 screens per area... so only one more to go before this whole chapter is complete!

ASSORTED JUNK

Certain dialogue interactions will now display the name and character portrait of whoever is leading the party at the time, to give more role-playing options to the player. In the future, I would like to even add functionality in the dialogue handler to only say certain lines depending on who the party leader is.

I also added several key items that you'll need to get around and even a few optional ones that allow you access to hidden areas. There were also several minor coding adjustments and optimizations, not the least of which was going back and "strongly-typing" several variables that I hadn't typed before earlier on in development.

WHAT'S NEXT

Next up will be finishing up the Chapter 2 locations and moving on to chapter 3. I've gotten a LITTLE ahead of myself and started making tilesets for chapters 3 and 4 already... but progress is progress! If jumping around and working on different assets from different parts of the game is what it takes to keep me working on it, I'll gladly do it.

That's it for me this week! Remember to check my band ZAKU out in Baltimore on Aug 23rd at the Ottobar!! We'll have TWO brand new songs to share with you! We go on at..... I think 8PM? I appreciate your support very much, thank you! I hope you have a good week and I'll see you next time!!! muah!