STARBAGE

it is kind of late right now but i've been telling myself i need to write ablog post for a bit so here we are ^_^ first post of the year too.. i think we are past saying "wow, a lot of things have happened between entries!"

currently, i am working on some projects... I have posted about both of them on social media, but not on this website.. one of them is a collab with my dear friend mala and peer basicbean, in which i got to do the music and UI for a visual novel. oh i did some drawings too but i was not the main artist.

i can't say i have ever gotten to do a real collab before. Every attempt i ever got close to fizzled out pretty quickly, or it was just classwork if you count that brief period i was making games in college. I wouldn't, though. Being able to depend on other people is nice. I would love to do more collaborations, i think. the idea of working with other people intrigues me. unfortunately, my control freak-isms and anxiety make it pretty hard.. but i dream about it often, so working on this project is nice. It's also great to not have to draw everything myself for once, admittedly. I think being a singular indie dev is overrated and people shouldn't do it, no matter how much passion they have.

i say that, and yet here i am indie devving my next project...

Noise Jam 2 and Mixed Media Jam ended up overlapping, so I decided I would try to make a project for both.

I decided to try out the MV3D plugin again, since I still don't feel like I've reached my limits with it. It's fun! It is jank as fuck but I like it.

You may remember that my larger project, Beneath the Teal Symphony, is made in this plugin... you might also wonder why I am not working on that instead. Well, I got stuck. Admittedly, I wonder if BtTS will ever get made at this point. But it has a story I want to tell, so I think it will happen eventually. Maybe not in this form, though...

Back to the jam game though, I decided to do something unthinkable and try to add battle mechanics to a game of mine.

the title is SUBTRACTIVE RUNEMIXER. I say it has battles, but I'm thinking they'll be more like simple puzzles... Um. you'll see. hehe. I'm a little worried they won't be fun, but it's a jam game so maybe I shouldn't worry too much.. Plus a lot of RPGMaker games have simple battles used to convey story beats so... yeah.

I've been playing 3D exploration games lately, which inspired me a lot. Specifically, Automaton Lung really inspired the look of the protagonist (and other characters you'll see later). I love big wire going into someone's arm

Another aspect of these games I am taking to heart (since I'm making an rpgmaker game and not, you know, a platformer) is trying to convey a feeling in a 3D space and not worrying too much about the narrative... Basically just trying to make cool vibes. LOL. I do have a story though, and it involves some robot girls being evil towards each other... I hope you enjoy it.

I thought I had more to say, but i guess a lot of this will end up being a "just wait and see" type thing. 

On a similar note of projects and stuff, I replayed my first VN Saturn's Rising Temperature some weeks ago. Wow, it is Decidedly Not Good. I still love it as work from past me, but I think it adds to my anxiety as a creator that only gets larger and larger... I feel like a lot of my current portfolio isn't actually representative of the current me or what I can do. But at what point does my work stop being "me"? perhaps with every piece of art I make, a version of myself is frozen within it, and the real me will never match up.. I think about this type of thing way too much since I released HalOPE, lol. I don't want to fade away into obscurity just yet... That's silly, right?

Well, that's my brief update for February. zzzz