Hello, again. How's it going? 

Winter's fallen on the southern hemisphere again, and I'm very cold. I never used to mind Winter, but now that I'm living in a building with such poor insulation, I've realized it's because I've never experienced the true cold. When the wind blows strongly enough outside, I can feel the air shift inside…

Major Developments

Scarred By Heaven's development has been going slow and steady, as always. I feel as if I write that exact sentence in every one of these posts lately, but it's the best way to describe it.

I'm well into making Chapter 5 now, with about 60% of the cutscenes done, and the boss mostly finished. Unfortunately, I can't share this boss at all for spoiler reasons… (^^;)

Most of the work I've done lately is cutscene coding, which is as grueling as ever. GMLive has been a godsend, and I have a lot of small in-game tools to help the 'directing' like camera and character movement debugging, but it still feels like it takes me much longer than it should. It tires me out so quickly that I don't usually get more than one or two scenes done per day… but maybe the slow process is for the best. I use this step to refine the script a lot.

Small Things

I've also made it so that you can now read the bulletin board in West Jadewater to learn some recent local rumors. I think 'urban legends' are a very fun form of worldbuilding. And who knows, maybe some of them have some truth to them...?

Unfortunately, I still don't have much else new I can show gameplay-wise… I've made a few new 'elite' variants of existing enemies who use new attacks. A classic, sneaky way to get around drawing more assets, but I still think it's a little cool.

I also added Friday as an Assist Partner for some story fights. She's a fair bit stronger than Livio in this role… but maybe it comes at a cost.

Right now, I feel pretty confident that I'll be able to get Part 1 fully finished and released by the end of the year. Admittedly, I've also been reconsidering if I want to try merging Part 1 and Part 2 into two acts of one single game again, now that GMLive has made compile times so much less of a problem... but that's something to worry about on another day.

Personal Notes

Tired… my job has been rather hard on me lately, and morale is poor over there. But I'm trying my best...

I've gotten really into iced coffee in the last month or so. I never really used to like coffee, but slowly got accustomed to it through borderline-dessert drinks at a nearby shop, and have since started making my own concoctions at home. Maybe it sounds a bit more mature if I say I enjoy it because of the conflicting mix of sweetness and bitterness. 

I've also tried to relax a little by writing some small, mostly non-SBH stories as a wind-down activity, since it's been a long while since I wrote anything that didn't involve Saki. None of them have really gone anywhere, but I like the characters I've been coming up with and have drawn them a little, so maybe they'll be used somewhere some day.

...Though I did end up making another duo of an abrasive and aloof tall one, and a meek but well-meaning short green one, so maybe I've just forgotten how to write anything else.

But regardless, thank you for reading!

- HSTopaz

(Cross-posted from my website!)