Aoi Route Released

To be fair, Aoi Route is coming together quicker than I imagined. Yet it doesn't mean these past 1.5 months was a breeze for me. At one point I was staring at LMMS with an empty head because all the experiments on audio has yielded nothing. Frustrating, but at least I am happier with the "surviving" art direction — if there's any artistic elements in it.

Aoi route's direction

On the first glance, Aoi is always bright and uplifting, sometimes pulling a little trick with lots of explosions for fun. Personally, though, I think her behavior hints that her coping mechanism is unhealthy. She will run from things she can't stand with. Her effort in keeping the team together reflects that she's afraid of fighting alone. These don't make Aoi a horrible person, but one: she's building a house of cards as fundament for her fragile mind; and two: speaking from a place of genuine concern, if she crashes and burns...... you have seen what would happen to her.

So you might ask: oh! Is this why you chose two grim topics for Aoi's route? Because you want to show a different side of her?

Um... No! I chose heavy topics because Aoi doesn't use emoticons for those. As this project is loosely based on Gameboy's resolution, emoticons/kaomojis which look fine on mobile phones and pcs will look twisted and  W I D E if I use them as constantly as Aoi does. It's quite a challenge to write this dark side of Aoi that is never shown in the game, but there are hints enough for me to make a wild guess.

Aoi as a character

Before we dive into this topic, I must emphasize that I don't want to frame either Arthur or Aoi as the "bad guy" in their relationship. However, there are many things that make me believe Aoi didn't fully move on from their breakup. Here are a few:

1. Aoi is more deflective when asked about her past with Arthur (Assuming the Drifter's initial question as "Hook up", will use her warframe ability to attack people who asked, etc). 
2. When Lettie said "They were shit for each other" and she thinks Aoi will blow up someday (non-verbatim), it seems like Arthur was not the only trouble maker in their relationship, but Aoi has never mentioned anything she's done to Arthur. Including the part where presumably, Arthur tried to talk to her and she did something painful to him.

1 is debatable because even now, people react less positively against a lady who interacts with her ex compared to a man. Yet another thing that makes me think Aoi is a little twisted in mind is that her romance dialogue hints she is into bondage. A possible way to read into this is her parents were too busy to spend quality time with her, and this is her acting out on what she lacked in her childhood.

Then again, a "stable" lifestyle like Arthur wants probably also reminds her of that "stable" home with no love. I fear that she wants to be freed from the burden of a stable relationship, but she also wants to keep her partner close so they will spend as much time with her as she pleases. Even if Aoi didn't cut her ties with her parents completely, there's no denying that she felt neglected by her parents, which greatly affected her personality as she grew up.

Perhaps the AO3 fics where Arthur is possessive will be even more fitting if we change them into Aoi tying the Drifter up and bite them. When I wrote this darker route for Aoi, I hoped she wouldn't crash hard from these heavy topics and she would feel relieved afterwards.

The dreaded circular reference

Before people start judging me, please let me explain. I started learning Godot back when it was in Godot 3.x, and at that time I remembered it was "okay" for beginners to use export var to reference a PackedScene; yet it is risky, and today is the day I encounter issues with this elementary method; due to circular referencing, I cannot send the players back to main menu.

After doing some research, I found out this method will fail after Godot4.3, which is not recommended anyways because circular reference can cause a lot of problems in most programming circumstances. So I don't have any excuses regarding this issue.

From what I've learned, it safer to use export_file and change_scene_to_file() for referencing scenes to avoid circular referencing.

#set up scene path:
@export_file("*.tscn") var main_menu_path := "Scene path"
#("*.tscn") is the file filter
#call the scene:
get_tree().change_scene_to_file(main_menu_path)

Next step

I. am. going. to. sleep. Countless days spent grinding Duviri and working on this game seem a little too much for me.

After getting enough sleep, I think I'll do some practice project in the meantime. I haven't decided on which protoframe to update next; News about the next update will probably come after October, to say the least. This is my first long-term project and I'm still trying to pace myself, but it's managable.

See you then!