TA-DA! BACK TO GAMEDEV

Ok, I have finally been spending a good amount of time working on NR again this week. It feels good! I probably should still be focusing on creating tile maps, but I was feelin' real hungry for CODING, so I spent most of the week working on in-game menues and fixing bugs.

GODOT 4.5

Upgraded to Godot 4.5! Gonna be entirely honest with you.... I don't know how many of the 4.5 updates really affect Negative Reverie, but I do love the Godot engine and enjoy keeping up with it.
I'll watch some videos about new functionality and changes this week and see what I think. Maybe I'll even put in some opinions here!

HERE'S A SMALL COMIC FOR PATRONS ONLY

Wow how exciting!

RADICAL GRAPHICS

I made a status screen for the main menu and drew some character name art for each of the main characters, like so:

How fun.

But, the big thing is that I made the full status screen! I tried to give it a little SAUCE:

The background is a close up of a Yamaha mixer I had lying around. Also... notice anything different about Scaltra's design there?? That's right... I've implemented...

SCALTRA MODE SWITCHING

In Negative Reverie, Scaltra functions as the main healing party member, but also inflicts necessary statuses to clear some bosses. The caveat is... she can't do both at once. So, instead you will have to utilize "Mode Shifting" to go from her supportive "Sedate" mode to her more offensive "Cytotoxic" mode. I might also add certain weaknesses to be associated with each to make it riskier to have her in one form or another for various battles.

OTHER, SMALLER JUNK

I added the possibility for some skills to only be able to target their own user (like in the case of Scaltra's Mode Shift), fixed a bunch of float -> int conversions in the code so Godot would stop yelling at me, added various "getting" functions to multiple scenes to get information from them without accessing properties directly (this is my BIGGEST advice for new gamedevs to add to their games, maybe hahaha), created a text management scene for non-dialogue based text and added an Information Screen!!

...and then deleted the Information Screen! Because... I decided that instead of going in the main menu, the area to access information about various characters, items and enemies should instead be on the FamilyTech Network Terminal. Which... maybe is one of the next things to work on for me.

NON-GAME RELATED

I got a show coming up! This Saturday! (I totally forgot about it until 2 days ago lmfao)

What else... what else....

I started a rewatch of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure in preparation for Part 7 coming out next year. I'm trying to watch it entirely in Japanese without subtitles and pick up as much as I can. I still think Phantom Blood is a lil slow, BUT... man, the potential that was in that series when it first started... there would have been no way to know what it was going to turn into, huh? It's actually pretty inspiring. You don't know WHERE your projects are gonna go when you first start them.

SUPER SECRET ANNOUNCEMENT (at this moment)

I'll announce it here before I do anywhere else....

THERE WILL BE A LIVE DEMO OF NEGATIVE REVERIE ON NOVEMBER 22nd!!!
I'll probably announce this elsewhere soon enough, but yeah! On November 22nd at the Stage Clear event at Milkboy in Philadelphia, I'll have a table and be letting people actually get their hands on the game! YOU could come give the game a play and let me know how much you HATE it!!!! Or enjoy it. Whichever.

Anyway, I'm having fun coding and not drawing tilemaps or anime characters for once... I think I'll get back to it now.

Thank you so much for your support and I hope you have a safe and fun week!!!