It's been a week already, huh?

Hmm... somehow I feel like I got less done this week, BUT it was still hella busy with projects!

PIXEL ART

I figured I oughta keep my drawing skills at least somewhat sharp and made a point to draw a lil this week! I came up with the Tohru fanart above and this pic of Penny from Endless Monday:

I think I went a week or two without doing any art, so it was good to get back in and create a few more.

KEYCHAIN ROMANCE

That's RIGHT! I spend a good amount of time working on my Thumby dating game this week! I haven't done much python coding in a while, so it was a shock to get back into it and really start cranking out some good functions and effects!

I had a mostly functional version of the game before, but I didn't understand anything about classes or structuring a program, so I've completely recreated it from the ground up utilizing a scene manager and only calling 2 or 3 things per main game loop. It's a different way of thinking, for sure, but it's much more similar to what I've been doing in Godot for Negative Reverie!

At this point, I THINK I have all the graphics re-added to the new project, at least. In the original, the graphics were stored as long bit-arrays in the main project itself, but now they're all stored separately, in their own folder and are only called once the game wants to utilize them! I also wrote a small python script to strip out all the unnecessary brackets and various syntax from the dialogue I had already written, so it fits in much nicer now.

Next up for this project will be re-writing the dialogue parser and building a text-display engine, which.... while I know how it's supposed to work now... is gonna be a pain in the butt, haha! I don't want to start it! Maybe I'll be so put off by the prospect of working on it, that I'll work more on Negative Reverie instead...

ZAKU ALBUM

Our audio has been sent to the people mixing and mastering it! I know I've said this before, but this time all the guitar is really, actually, finally recorded for REAL this time! It's no longer in our hands, so even if I wanted to go in and change things.... its too late now!! Look forward to hearing our first full-length album sometime in late-summer/early-fall!

Our next show is July 5th at Kung-Fu Necktie in Philadelphia!

JAVASCRIPT

Oh right!!! I literally almost forgot about this!!! (I had actually already written the rest of this post before coming back and adding this, lmao) The reason I felt like I hadn't accomplished as much this week.... was because I spent 20+ hours going through an online Javascript course!! For about 5 days I was CONVINCED I wanted to get a different job doing full-stack web development... and idk, maybe I still do... but I do like my job... so man, idk. ANYWAY, I do feel pretty accomplished about it and I just now made myself feel a lot better by remembering how much effort I put into it!

OTHER THAN THAT....

Other than that, I've been cramming my Japanese-study in wherever I can. I think I'll be leveling up in wanikani tonight and finally get some new kanji in my deck to learn! I also feel like I'm FINALLY being able to at least keep up with the subject of a conversation when I hear it being spoken in games, shows, streams.... Maybe after I post this, I'll boot up my Japanese copy of FFIX and see how much I can understand of that... or Breath of Fire III or... whatever.

I started watching a little of Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid... that show just a lil bit horny, haha. All the characters are very cute tho :) and I think I understand a decent portion of what's going on. I like that Fenrir is bad at the in-universe Dark Souls.

One more month of night shift... I do enjoy having all the free time that it provides, but I do think I'm getting a little burnt out on it. Kinda stoked to go back to days, soon. Night shift work IS good for catching Japanese vtubers on YouTube, though. I've been getting a lot of listening practice that way, at least.

Anyway, time continues it's brutal march forward. Time to play a lil PS1 and relax for 30 min before the guilt of not being productive kicks in and I go back to working on my games, haha. See y'all next week! Thank you so much for continuing to support me!!!