A Peek at Progress [July, 8th, 2023]

Well, it's been a while since one of these. I've been feeling a bit anxious about writing them. So, I have mostly been communicating over Discord since it a more casual environment.

Honestly, year hasn't been going off too strong for me. Turns out recovering from near-total burn out is hard. Which is mostly an excuse for hardly getting anything (art, game, writing) done the past months. Staying focus has been hard lately. However, I do have some stuff to share.

Art

I've made a new short comic. The first four pages will be posted here after this post goes up. The folks in the Discord have already been receiving pages. Additionally, I'm going to be using PostyBirb again to manage cross posting.

Give the state of platforms in [CURRENT YEAR], I'm just going to be cross-posting more in general.

Chitinous Carnival

I'm still grinding a way at it. I severely underestimated the work I had planned for this new scene. Currently, I've over half way through all the art I've planned. There are seventeen more scene I need to work on plus finishing touches for the main interactive scene.

Green is done, Yellow is working on, Red is next in the pipeline, Grey is unstarted

Being one person working on all writing, art, and code. It's hard to make reliable prediction. There will be another update before summer ends, but I can't say when that will happen.

General Game Dev Related Studies

Outside of chitinous carnival, I've been studying techniques around video game AI. This mostly revolves around things like flocking behaviors and path finding. This work is so that I can better understand how to construct swarms for future projects. If your curious about what I've been using as a reference, it's a series of guides I found on steering.

Additionally, I am working on procedural animation. While I will always use hand-craft animations, dynamic scenes where animations are less predictable, are hard to manage.

You can take a look at some of the work I've done here. Additionally, I posted this video to the discord.  I still have more research to do around actually making this *usable* in a game setting. But, it's a start.

Wrap Up

To those that have stayed supportive of me, I want to say thank you and that it's deeply appreciated. It's been one of the few things keeping my mood up. 

Until next time,

Quan Zillan