Weekly blog 2/11/13

Doing the blog a little earlier today, but I figured I'd knock this out while I'm feeling up to it.

Feeling pretty good today as the wrist issues I was having previous weeks is nowhere as bad as it was. Some days I barely even notice anymore which is great considering I had days I was afraid I wasn't recovering. During all that drama I hardly even noticed that the random stomach issues I was having last year have hardly been noticeable so past few weeks have probably been the best I've physically felt in ages so I really don't want to take any of that for granted.

As for work itself, it's mostly been Sweet Training with a bit of mingling in Dawn of Djinn when I need a break from the prior. I know I haven't been giving videos and streams too much attention lately but I feel so close to having Sweet Training ready to release that I just want the gratification of releasing it sooner rather than later. But more on that below.

Streams and videos...

Doing blog early this week so I don't have much streaming wise to talk about. Especially cause I took a couple weeks off for a combination of focusing on Sweet Expedition and resting my wrists. Wrists are feeling quite better so I'm thinking this might be a good weekend to get back into streaming. Especially because I want to do at least one casual stream before jumping into the next stream series.

Did a little bit of video editing in-between though I've been really itching to play more Pokemon XG probably been about a month since I've lasted played it, but I wasn't in a rush to record more since I had so much recorded already. So I think there's enough of a backlog of all that that the upload schedule shouldn't be changing much for now.

Paper Mario/ Golden Sun

As my wrists have been getting better and better, I've been easing myself into working on Sweet Training. It's so close to done and I really want to have it done by the end of the month. In fact, I was hoping to have it ready to share this weekend, but I think it's gonna need at least another weekend of testing and tweeking. So I'm not sure if it's really worth taking the time to take screen shots or videos to share when you all will just get to see it for yourselves soon.

Will mention that one of the bigger time sinks was tied to tweaking one of the hard modes since with the weird way danger works, it actually ended up being easier than the normal modes, despite how it was supposed to be one of the hardest modes in the entire mod. It did require breaking my promise of "not making any more attacks" in order to make a good balance between challenging but not impossible for the new game mode... I wonder if anyone will even notice due to how niche the scenario has to be to see it, but at this point it would be more work to remove it than it would be to just leave it despite the fact no one will probably see it.

...so yeah, enemies now not only have new attack patterns if you play the mod on one of the "hard mode challenges" but they now have unique behaviors specifically for this one challenge mode on top of that. Hey, at least that's more content for you all. Definitely am a pro at this point of putting way too much effort into "small projects" but hopefully all of this will make replaying it very fun to make up for it's otherwise length... technically short length. But I'm going to just tell you now, if you only play Sweet Training once, you're really missing out. It'll make perfect since once you see it all in action.

Actually, you know what? Sure there's a little clip previewing a few upcoming things with Sweet Training. On top of the fights already being modified to behave differently than the vanilla dojo, some attacks will behave differently depending on the type of challenge you do. You may even see completely new attacks in harder game modes. In addition on top of the status changes you've already seen in the Game Jam release of Sweet Expedition I've gotten additional Dark Star features working in Sweet Expedition/Sweet Training as well, such as badges like Happy Heart no longer being random and instead healing every other turn. Plus as a bonus, Ooze Wack has been slightly buff as an attempt to make it slightly relevant... I still think it gets overshadowed by every other badge but at least now I think it'll have it's advantages in more defensive builds, especially with it's very cheap cost.

Oh, got so caught up in rambling I forgot to mention I've also spent more time with Dawn of Djinn. Most of the work was with updating V2 enemies up to the Mercury Lighthouse. Was going to play it on my own time and release a draft of the progress so far on Discord. But I quickly realized it needs more time before I'm ready to do that. I think I'll make getting the mod done up to that point my main focus once Sweet Training is done. After all, I'll want to take some time after finishing Sweet Training before resuming work on Sweet Expedition to fix the inevitable bugs people find regardless of the amount of time playtesting, and I think resuming Dawn of Djinn would be the perfect thing to do in-between. Especially since work on Sweet Training made my Golden Sun work take much more time on the backburner than I was expecting.

I guess I got one thing I could show. Even in V1 I wanted to make a reoccurring NPC exclusive to Dawn of Djinn for explaining differences from vanilla in mechanics and lore so I did spend a little time the other day going through the list of NPCs trying to find one of the least used ones possible use as that sort of character... Found a cute set of sprites that I don't recall seeing in the game that I think I'm gonna use. Not sure how much editing the sprite GS1 will let me get away with, but I did give her a cute flower.... ( It's so small that it's hard to see, but trust me, it's there....)

Probably going to do a lot more now that I'm pretty sure it's not going to mess-up anything but yet another thing I should probably wait until after finishing Sweet Training to focus on.

Mis

Well, I did just get back from a real nice walk. Even had fun with Pokémon Go while doing so. A really refreshing change of pace. I've been in a bit of a bad mood lately and I'm wondering how much of it was just because I needed to get outside. It feels "more productive" to walk on the treadmill than it does to get out so I wasn't as incentivized to do so.

Opened a couple more packs of trading cards, though I still have quite a few packs left to go before I go through this whole box.... I don't feel like going through the trouble of uploading the pictures. But I did make some unlisted videos of my "new gen card collection" so far so let me get those up real quick...