What are some things you've learned about game development, programming, art, music, sound, time management, writing, or personal goals in the last week?

I'll list mine:

I learned that my way of looking at things can be a bit rigid, and I'm working on that now. For example, I don't have to see art as "good" or "bad", there are many cases where two forms of art have quality or merit, but portray different styles or vibes. And there is also art which doesn't really seem like art form, but even it can portray a particular style sometimes and in some cases.

So, I think I need to "slow down", even if game development is a type of thing which encourages time-crunches sometimes. For example, I'm getting progress done at a pretty steady rate on my newest project, but I think it would benefit the game for me to take 2-3 days off from actual development to weigh the direction of it going forward and plan from there. Especially with a game like this with a pretty strong visual focus.

Another thing I "might" have picked up on, but I'm really still thinking about...

While there may be Visual Novels that read like an actual novel........ as I play more Visual Novel games, I spot a slight difference between the two sometimes. The Visual Novel games I play, often focus on characterization and getting the personality to the characters correct, even at the expense of tight grammatical correctness in script. This makes me think that the writing to my own Visual Novels is too "tight", as it focuses too much on grammatical correctness, without the normal and "messy" short chatterings of characters.

I'll think about this some more, but if I need to change some things, it really isn't that hard of a change. So I'll think about it.

Just a few days ago I figured out how to create and draw to custom created surfaces. This was added to my dialogue/cutscene system so that I could create any combination of eye and mouth sprites I want without having to make a different NPC sprite for each one.

I've learned these in the last week:

- Leaving scripts for some time then returning to review them was good idea to earn fresh look on the scripts. It opened my eyes to new solution which I've missed before.

- Replaying my game with alternate way is a good way to find bug. I discovered a bug couple days ago which was not seen cause I keep playing with the same way.

I have been looking at various character AI systems and looking at advantages of getting game publishers. From what I've seen AI systems is really hard to build from scratch but I am getting there.