Hi there everyone! 

This month's fun playlist: 

We made it through another month. ITS SO HOT where I am right now. I absolutely melted this past month. BOOO. BOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! WHERE IS MY CRISP FALL WEATHER??? Just two more months until things get spooky. 

Anyway. 

Am I writing this on itch again? Didn't I say I was going to pivot to writing it on tumblr??? I did and then I realized that tumblr has their own ways of blocking readers who aren't logged in and it was just too much of a hassle. I'm sorry mobile readers you'll only be able to read about half this post. (And judging based on the length of this sentence, you probably won't even see this part of the post! *screaming*) 

Related but if anyone knows an easy way to implement text wrapping on my itch.io post, please go ahead and yell at me in the comments. 

This past month I was able to switch fully over from working on Lisa Frank farmsim to my Gay Pokemon Yaoijam game! And again I'll take this opportunity to mention there's no way I'm going to be finishing on time for September 1st. I'd like to make this Mokemon game longer than I usually do and I want it to feel like a full RPG. I've been working trying to gain enough gamedev muscle to feel confident in being able to pull it off and I think I'm at a point where I'm ready to take a chance. 

So I've decided on the following for this game: 

64 different Mokemon to wrangle, collect and evolve! 

6 different Mokemon 'types', each with their own strengths and weaknesses

Overworld puzzles (think Golden Sun) 

Four different towns you can visit, each with their own side quests and quirky NPCs to talk to. 

Random mokemon encounters. 

Wrangler battles! Enemy AI HERE I COME!!!!

And a cheesy story about not giving up on your dreams even if you feel a little old. :) 

So let's get an itemized breakdown of what I was able to do this month: 

• Starting with what was surprisingly the hardest: emotionally I was able to switch my brain from FARMSIMFARMSIMFARMSIM mode to POKEMONPOKEMONPOKEMON mode. I'd sit down to work and keep hitting mental blocks. Didn't I say 2024 was going to be my farmsim year? Am I making a mistake by switching to another project?? And honestly there was a part in there where I felt like I wasn't 'allowed' to make RPGs. Does that sound weird? Yes. But also totally understandable for a lot of reasons I don't want to get into in this fun monthly devlog~ I'll be back to my Farmsim eventually and honestly I think I need the experience making 3D models and building up more scenes in this Mokemon game before jumping back into that game. It'll be fun!
• I've named, decided on typing, and spawn points for each of my 64 mokemon! I even managed to write all 64 mokecyclepedia (pokedex) entries for them! Get ready for some bad jokes.  
• I've finished the art designs for about half of my mokemon, I still need to design their evolutions but I wanted to get their names and stats first. 
• I finalized the designs for both Gray (protagonist) and Rian (wrangler champion/LI) as well as for Fuchsia (Gray's older sister). 
• Finished the walking sprite animations for both Gray and Rian! This took forever and walk cycles are so hard to draw apsoidfjasoidfjasodif. Getting faster at them but always striving to get better. 
• Decided on a color scheme for the GUI and the different towns in the game. This has been helping to keep my scenes and characters looking much more cohesive and I've been quite happy with the results!
• I designed a written alphabet for Mienese (this game takes place in Mien) that I can use to write all my signs in so I don't have to worry about having to translate them into other languages if that's ever an issue down the line. Also its just fun to design your own languages~
• I've laid out how I want my different scenes to intersect and made a world map. I took some inspiration from Octopath Traveler with how the world is essentially a circle and you can move from one biome to another. 

And... that's about it. I feel like I didn't get as much done this month as June but that's probably because I took a short vacation in the beginning of the year, had a boothing event (the first in over a year!), had a lot of back end emails I had to write (any day I have to respond to emails is a day where I won't be able to work on the actual project that much), and started writing up lots of tumblr posts to try to practice actually being active on social media. I find the social media posts fun to write and a nice way to sit down and really appreciate all the hard work I've been doing!

This upcoming month I'll be working on this Mokemon game in earnest, but I'd also like to try to find a way to draw more. I feel like all I've been drawing lately is art assets for my games. We'll see how that goes. :) 

See you next month!

- Heiden 

(So back in ye olden days on Deviant Art they had this thing where in any of your blog posts you could say what you were drinking, reading, watching, etc. and I always found that really charming so I'd like to implement it here too. ) 

Mood: Caffeinated
Eating: Apricot
Drinking: Coffee
Reading: Turtles All The Way Down - John Green 

(I've never actually read anything by John Green despite being on tumblr in it's heyday. And I enjoyed this book!  It felt like a very kind and personal portrayal of OCD and I liked the subtle way the plot sets up the idea of "recovering from trauma means having to let go of the people who are no longer with us".  I get the hype, haha.)