i tried writing a reflecting-on-the-year post last night, and scrapped it because acute depression causing spirals of self-loathing
i think, uh, that things went ok. this year has been really weird but good. my personal situation is... well i'm alive and able to work Blade Sight, things could be a lot worse. The bright parts of this year has definitely been meeting and connecting with new people. I've been getting orders of magnitude more attention on my works, which is, well, emotionally wild. it feels really good seeing my work resonate with people, but also terrifying being perceived, especially with how much my work is pulled from, well, deeply personal wishes and wounds
as for blade sight, october was a big turn-around point. this whole year has been a lot of rebuilding systems in a sort of acknowledgment that blade sight is becoming A Project, something i'm becoming serious about. there was a point after the 0.4 2022 build that i could have moved forward with, but I ended up spending the year challenging myself to refine what I had. and a big motivator for that was wanting the girlfriends to be a part of the game's shape and feel without stripping them down into equipment too much. october was when a lot of the trouble with getting the characters to partner up and share movesets and work together and be able to act and do things in a more manageable way finally started to come into focus, and my awful spaghetti code became something i could start to wrap my head around. i'm really hoping to carry that into the new year and continue to grow
so, a few of the things i was really proud of figuring out this year* (kind of starting the year from after the November build), as catalogued in my twitter-dev-diary-of-sorts
- the accessory system, being able to pin little extra sprites onto the characters in a way that didn't add a ton of extra assets or work, for the most part
- the moon phases on the in-game moon, using a shader that crushes a gradient-height-map on a circle into black&white
- getting the combined scale&nineslice shader to allow for more involved environment 'painting', massive thanks to sushi who figured out the math for the shader
- deciding to remove the defense card sleeves (the sequence of high-low-mid that would protect the defense card in v0.4
- button identity remapping, being able to customize how the input notation appears on-screen
- really proud of myself for keeping composure through this rebuild, replacing the entirety of the environment and prop art with a newer system that was more consistent, less buggy, and way more optimized
- keeping true to one of the most important vibes of the game; hugging your girlfriend
- figuring out some really tricky hitstop stuff to allow hits to feel chunky again without having it make gameplay choppy if it doesn't directly involve the player, this opened the door to a lot of stuff that would come to follow
- sticking with the girlfriend system and always trying to push it further - this was when it finally evolved into it's current state with the girlfriends being mapped onto the third attack button (which meant Suu had a bunch of moves cut here), to allow them to mix their moveset in with their partner's
- i accepted that im weird
goodbye 2023
