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Weekly Update - Mostly Unremarkable

1 year ago573 words

Not every week can have something worth talking about, I suppose! I started playing a Pokemon Crystal romhack, though.

I've been working away at Dreamons again, though I don't really feel I have much to show in a post! I'm writing this short one mostly for the sake of not missing a week, really.

It's not that I've not done anything, it's that a lot of game dev work just isn't all that exciting to write or read about. For example, I spent hours today changing bits of code so that it's possible for models' body parts (ears, noses, horns, etc) to be different colours, and earlier in the week I revised how equipped skills are encoded into the save data. Wow.

I also spent several hours composing a piece of music for the game which I couldn't get right despite a bunch of fiddling and revising, so that's a bit frustrating. It's just something that happens sometimes.

I'm working towards having a short playable area so that testers can experience the mechanics first-hand, but I don't know when I'll actually get to that point; things take time.



I had another counselling session! It was also mostly unremarkable. I talked a lot about how I feel like I'm pulled in a bunch of different directions, and whenever I try to focus on anything, I just feel bad about not focusing on all the other things I should be. Stuff I've written about in this blog before.

And even though I'm still working my way through Tomb Raider III (almost done now!!), this thing YouTube recommended this to me for some reason piqued my interest:



I've been wondering a lot lately about gameplay-related stuff for Dreamons, like how exactly to design areas, skills, etc, and playing other games for inspiration should help with that. Newer games would be better things to play, but I'd have to decide on one, likely buy it, and I'd likely have to shut all my other programs down and devote my attention to a play session whenever I wanted to play it. Plus I'd be constantly comparing my work to it. It's much easier to get some ROM of a familiar game for free and play it in some little window for five minutes whenever my energy wanes. Less of an investment all round, but still hopefully valuable.

I've also never played a romhack, and normally wouldn't, but decided to give this one a go since the relatively minor changes they've made to a game I'm deeply familiar with should give me some idea of what other players might want, gameplay-wise. Or something like that.

I've not had much time and it's a long game, though, so I've only got a couple of badges since starting a few days ago.

I've been surprised how nostalgic it isn't for me, though. I recognise everything, but it feels almost as unremarkable as something I played last week rather than something where every detail summons up fluffy memories of a lifetime ago. Not sure why that is. Maybe I've seen other videos of playthroughs relatively recently or something? A shame, though, since I would have preferred replaying Crystal so many years since I last did to have felt nicer than this.

Or maybe it's just depression! Who knows.

(My idea of a 'short' update is still way longer than posts I've seen others apologise for the lengthiness of!)